Ama the Oracle
The opening line of the novel asserts that Ama had become an oracle by the spring of 1960. At least, that is how Ama views itself. The villagers around her are not entirely in agreement. “They said there was a crack in her mind that left her open to spirits who would consume her.” Mental illness, deviant behavior, and outright insanity are a playground for metaphorical imagery. A crack in the mind is likely a cultural concept, but it is the same as “bats in the belfry” and “lost her marbles.”
Darkness
Though the movement started in the late 19th century, and the middle of the 20th century, darkness had become the defining metaphor of the modern age. It is now omnipresent and used within an almost limitless connotative expanse. Darkness is metaphorically engaged several times in this book, but one particular use illustrates how it came to define the modern world. “Without them [Americans], we Tibetans would be long forgotten in the world, plunged into darkness, wiped from all history books.” It was the Holocaust and the attendant atrocity exhibitions of Nazi Germany that kicked the metaphorical usage of darkness into overdrive. Ever since darkness has become a codeword for the genocidal impulses of particularly motivated and powerful psychopaths. In this case, the psychopaths in question were not fascists but Chinese communists under the leadership of Mao.
The Tibetan Narrative
The Tibetan narrative is the term Dolma applies during narrative duties to a story that has grown tiring because it has been repeated for so long by so many. “It is the story of a good and just people who have fallen into a period of darkness, a people who must struggle as one body, for as long as it takes to regain our home. This story echoes in the cave of our misery.” Notice the recurrence of the darkness metaphor here as well. That imagery connects directly to the metaphor of a cave housing the emotional turmoil of the Chinese occupation for longer than anyone could have imagined at the time of the initial invasion.
Agency and Autonomy
Dolma gets unsolicited advice which is an interesting use of metaphor. The advice comes in the middle of a conversation about a very specific object that was sold and then accidentally found and retrieved back into the family’s possession. “Dolma, when you get to be my age, you see that the world doesn’t run on charity…You have to get a hold of something valuable, something others want. That’s how you survive.” Over the course of those three sentences, the subject transforms from the literal into the metaphorical. What begins as a statement specifically about a statue becomes wisdom about creating agency in one’s life that allows for at least a modicum of control over one’s destiny. The “something” considerable valuable need not be financially so because the key to its value is that it is desired by someone else.
