In a poignant letter to his sister from Mianyang prison in southwestern China, Tibetan poet Tashi Rabten, popularly known as Theurang, asks: "Are there any people more unfortunate than the Tibetans who have their pens snatched away and smashed? I was persecuted for the crime of 'wrong pen-bearing' and 'improper speech.'" He then expresses his unflinching resolve to resist and write against authoritarianism by affirming that radical freedom resides in the realm of the mind, unbreakable by iron fetters.
Released after four years of imprisonment in 2014, Theurang's letter echoes Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn's powerful statement on the persecution of literature. Solzhenitsyn, who remains a powerful influence on Tibetan writers and intellectuals, declared in his 1970 Nobel lecture that it is "the sealing up of a nation's heart, the excision of its memory" when the literature of that nation is "cut short by the intrusion of force." Theurang recognises literature and the Tibetan language as the lifeline of the nation's existence and the source of his strength to confront the brutal conditions of life in prison. Much like Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Russia, Theurang describes the everyday trials and tribulations inside China's prison industrial complex through his poems scribbled on the backs of cigarette packets and toilet paper. Avalanche (2017) is a collection of over a hundred free-verse poems he penned in the infamous Mianyang prison. He reveals in the afterword, "These poems were conceived and crafted while I was in that unique locale of fear and ferocity, where food tasted insipid and clothes long lost their warmth."