this and that

Last Thursday (May 5), bestselling writer Broughton Coburn came to Carleton to give a very popular picture-accompanied lecture on his book Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart. The book is about how Mr. Coburn brought an 84-year-old Gurung woman (”Aama”) to America in 1992 as what she called a “pilgrimage”—a woman that he had met and befriended as a Peace Corps volunteer in the hills of Nepal in the 1970s. In the lecture, he showed pictures from various parts of this journey, that he called an “odyssey,” and recounted events reflecting “Aama”’s view of America.

I thoroughly enjoyed the lecture, though it had a different theme from what I had expected it to have. I had thought the lecture would be about the woman who came to America, but it was more about America. Mr. Coburn’s main point was how “Aama” saw spiritual significance in almost everything in America—from Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park to a Mickey Mouse figure at Disneyland—things that American seem to take for granted. Various anecdotes and the beautiful pictures from both Nepal and America kept the mostly American audience amused and entertained.

Although it is always heart-warming for me to see foreigners passionately involved with Nepal—in this Nepali Times article, he says “[t]his is where I belong, Nepal is where I feel most at home”—I did feel a little uneasy at the whole presentation. It had a significant commercial flavor to it, as if in the many years in lecture circuit that Mr. Coburn has spent with this lecture, it had lost some of the personal significance it had for him. Not once did the lecturer, for example, mention the old woman’s name: she was the easy, typical “Aama” or “mother.” (Her name was Vishu Maya Gurung, as I found out later online, and she passed away some time after she went back to Nepal). And the tone was the superficial myth-like tone that well-meaning Western discourses on Nepal often end up using. In a way, such a picture is useful in kindling interest in Nepal and in helping the ailing tourism industry, but probably isn’t entirely honest.

All in all though, I was enthralled to see the hills of Nepal and familiar scenes from Kathmandu on a big screen at Carleton, and I am thankful to Mr. Coburn for doing all he has done for Nepal. And, I couldn’t help weeping a little inside when an audio piece of Mrs. Gurung singing a bhajan was played: it took me back home in one fell swoop.

More links:

• Broughton Coburn’s official website
• Other books by Broughton Coburn at Amazon.com, including Nepali Aama: Life Lessons of a Himalayan Woman, his first book on Aama
• Broughton Coburn as a speaker, and reviews of his lectures

This entry was posted on Monday, May 9th, 2005 at 8:35 am and is filed under general, carleton, nepal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.