As a poet, essayist, blogger, and independent researcher, Tsering Woeser has long been among the most prominent, thoughtful, and courageous Tibetan public intellectuals working inside China. Thanks to editor Robert Barnett and translator Susan Chen, Woeser's groundbreaking work on the Cultural Revolution in Tibet, Forbidden Memory, in now available in English. Featuring roughly three hundred photographs taken between 1964 and 1976 by the author's father, Tsering Dorje, and based in part on extensive interviews, Forbidden Memory is a unique visual record of “an era of Tibet that had been erased” (p. xii). It is also a deeply personal rumination on victimhood and culpability, violence and loss, and culture, language, and identity. Beautifully designed, it should be read by anyone interested in recent Tibetan history and Maoist China.

First published in 2006 in Taiwan, Woeser explains that the original Chinese title, Shajie, “killing and looting,” is how Chinese speakers might hear the Tibetan neologism sarjé (gsar brje), “the Tibetan term for what could be said to be the most important word in this book and the driving force behind its photographs: ‘revolution’” (p. xv).Footnote ¹ The only comparable collection of published photographs are those taken by Li Zhengsheng in China's northeast province of Heilongjiang.Footnote ² In addition to the obvious ethnocultural component, what differentiates Woeser's book is that she is not the photographer. She is an outside observer who rediscovered the photographs only after the death of her father, an officer in the People's Liberation Army. As a Sinophone Tibetan writer raised largely in Chinese literary circles, the rediscovery helped set her on a path to search out her own displaced cultural and religious roots. In part Woeser's attempt to come to terms with her father and his connections to the Chinese state, Forbidden Memory is also a powerful reminder of how communal memory continues to hamper that state's efforts to integrate Tibetans and other non-Han communities into the Chinese nation.

Forbidden Memory begins with a forward by Woeser's husband, the Chinese dissident intellectual Wang Lixiong, who after first seeing the photographs told her “they belonged to the yet-to-be-rediscovered memory of Tibet” (p. xii). After short comments by the author, Barnett adds an insightful introduction that provides background both on recent Tibetan history and the author as well as the complicated relationship between the two. The heart of the book, however, is the eleven thematically organized galleries of annotated photographs, each followed by topical essays. The galleries bound to grab the most attention are those that already dominate discussion of the Cultural Revolution: the campaigns to “smash the Four Olds” (Gallery 2) and to denounce counterrevolutionary “ox-demon-snake-spirits” (Gallery 3), which in Lhasa primarily referred to Buddhist hierarchs and members of the pre-1949 Tibetan nobility and government. These galleries contain some of the most dynamic and demanding photographs, such as a series depicting the torture of the “the most famous female reincarnated lama in Tibet” (p. 98), Dorje Phagmo and her family (figures 68–75). Other sections, however, deserve equal attention, including the opening gallery, which likely contains some of the last images of “traditional” Lhasa. Of importance as well are the chapters documenting factional violence (Gallery 5) and the harsh periods of regime consolidation (Gallery 6) and communization (Gallery 9) that followed the violence.

Far from offering a formulaic condemnation of the Chinese state's violence against Tibetan people and culture, Woeser allows her father's subjects the same complex agencies and ambivalences we now expect to see in work on the Maoist period in Han regions. For instance, after wondering whether Tibetan participants in mass violence were “driven by strong idealistic fervor and the wish to build a new world,” or felt forced to participate “by the atmosphere of red fear created by the authoritarian regime,” Woeser asks, “Were these two tendencies exclusive to each other? Or did they coexist?” (p. 59).

Likewise, rather than falling into the trap preferred by the post-Mao leadership that has sought to deindividualize Cultural Revolution violence, Woeser attempts to recover as many individual stories as possible, such as a Tibetan Red Guard and daughter of wealthy trading family, who is seen helping to destroy the Jokhang temple and was rumored to have become a devout Buddhist later in life (figures 36–38). The purpose is neither to condemn or absolve Tibetan perpetrators nor to lessen the regime's culpability. Woeser makes clear that she considers the human, cultural, and epistemological destruction in Tibet exceptional, even by the extreme standards of the Cultural Revolution. However, as Barnett remarks, Woeser wishes to challenge all of us, “to understand the ideological constructions of the time that made such actions seem natural and even necessary to so many participants, both the rulers and the ruled” (p. xxxv).

On occasion, Woeser gives in to familiar tropes that imagine Tibet as an idealized Buddhist society before the coming of the Chinese Communists (e.g., pp. 151–52). And despite her interviews and research, this is not an academic book. Still, Forbidden Memory indirectly engages wider scholarship on the Cultural Revolution, particularly the increasing recognition of regional variation. Perhaps most striking in this regard, the Cultural Revolution reflected through Tsering Dorje's lens and Woeser's interviews is not one marked by chaos as much as organized disorder. Especially evident is the importance of neighborhood committees and work units in directing the violence. As a result, Barnett writes, “All of Tsering Dorje's photographs have this bivocal quality, telling two stories at the same time, and leaving Woeser unable to resolve her fundamental question about how her father viewed the events that he turned into lyrical images of socialist achievement” (p. xxxiv).

In a postscript written for the English edition, Woeser describes returning to Lhasa with her father's old camera in 2013. Hoping to recreate his photographs, she instead encounters the “residual nature” of the Cultural Revolution buried beneath the “colonized consumerism of the present” (p. 328). Like her father's photographs, for Woeser these are reminders that “those who are conscientious are obliged to use memory to fight against forgetting” (p. xii).