Living Embodiments of Place and Power: The Transformational Poetics and Politics of Alai’s The Song of King Gesar, the Three Sisters Mountain myth, and the avatars of New York City in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

In Tibetan religious traditions, sacred landscapes are not only places of spiritual power but also shared spaces where different religious traditions, nonhuman entities, and cultural beliefs coexist, interact, and generate the potential for transformation. This paper brings three narratives of sacred landscape and place-based personhood into conversation, exploring how the poetics and politics of imagination work to engage human and more-than-human powers of cultural memory and resistance. Evoking anthropologist James C. Scott’s idea of the “hidden transcript,” this paper explores how the genres of speculative fiction and place-based chronicles of more-than-human relationship engage multiple registers of being, meaning-making, and truth telling.  

In Alai’s novel A Song for King Gesar, the author blends the events of the epic, well-known to Tibetan and Himalayan readers, with the present-day story of a young man struggling to find his place in the world in a time of cultural erasure. At times invoking the poetic texture of the epic in prose replete with culturally resonant images of Tibetan mountains, grasslands, and living beings, Alai’s novel switches between registers to address the experiences of a present day protagonist who may or may not be a contemporary embodiment of Gesar himself. As the novel’s hero(es) confront forces of cultural and ecological destruction, Alai’s own anti-colonial literary practice creates varying experiences of intimacy for Tibetan and non-Tibetan readers. The novel refuses monolithic claims about rationalism, magic realism, or any authority’s ability to delimit the possible meanings of the Gesar text, which as a living tradition exceeds all readings that would try to enclose it.  

Three Sisters Mountain of the East (shar gyi bu mo spun gsum) stands as a unique example of gendered sacred geography, where local belief holds that the three nonhuman sisters influence the physical beauty of women in the region.  Oral literature describing the Three Sisters Mountain of the East depict the gendered body of this mountain in relationship with the nearby masculine bodies of other mountains in Eastern Tibet, as well as with the ongoing presence of Padmasambhava and Gesar. Shaping the gendered and generative possibilities for women and men living with the mountain, the oral myth of Three Sisters Mountain engages with the mountain’s multiple dimensions as place, as relation, and as the presence of power. Also drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis of the local Mountain Chronicle (gnas bshad / dkar chag), this section of the paper examines how sacred territorial boundaries are narrated, negotiated, and maintained through rituals, taboos, and oral traditions. Certain trees, pathways, and lands are ritually designated as belonging to mountain deities or nonhuman entities, requiring specific offerings or observances to maintain spiritual harmony. These localized practices and stories reflect broader cross-cultural patterns of sacred geography, religious coexistence, and human-nonhuman relationality.

In N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, each borough of New York City takes embodied form as avatar,  a more-than-human person filled with the city’s energies and tasked with protecting it against annihilation. Pitted against destructive forces embodied by a figure called the Woman in White, the city’s avatars fight monstrous manifestations of racism and gentrification, using their superpowers to reshape the city’s own landscapes of streets, buildings, and mass transit. The novel attends to histories of trauma and the necessity of memory, on scales ranging from communal to deeply personal. Indigenous dispossession and racist violence; the wrenching displacements of refugee flight, immigration, and assimilation; and the personal and psychological costs of family abuse, complicity, and moral failure – all these, the novel suggests, remain present in the city’s physical topography and in minds and bodies of people. Yet the novel suggests that when people take up these histories within an ethic of relationship, the intersecting stories that make up the city’s living culture become a resource of creative power.

Drawing together a wide range of human and more-than-human actors through literary and imaginal practices of relationship, all three narratives speak directly to concerns about environmental wholeness and cultural survival. At the same time, all three narratives also use culturally specific modes of expression to signify different meanings to different audiences, practicing a multivocality of language and imagination that eludes surveillance while cultivating intimacy. This paper will attend to these multiple registers, exploring intersections of literary craft and cultural  knowledge in narrative practices of belonging.

Primary Sources

Karma rgyal mtshan. 2005.  mDo khams gnas yig phyogs bsgrigs dad bskul lha dbang rnga sgra. Par gzhi dang po, Mi rigs dpe skrun khang. [BDRC bdr:MW29295] 

Nyag bla padma bdud ʼdul.  “gTer srung dge bsnyen kha ba lung riʼi mchod gsol.” Nyag bla padma bdud ʼdul gyi gter chos skor, vol. 4, pp. 697–704. [BDRC bdr:MW23695_8A1A18]