“I Am a Writer on the Nomadic Journey”: Interview with Dashondog Jamba

I was raised in a felt ger (tent) of a nomadic family. We had always been on the move. Every new place we moved to was so incredible and beautiful that I experienced everything including grass, water, and wind as new. So as the nomadic boy, I have been and am still moving from one style to a new style of writing by seeking a new melody and also a deeper meaning of words throughout my entire life as a children’s writer.

My First Move: From Snow to Paper

I wrote my first poem on snow. I was around four years old. I did not have any paper and I had not yet learned the alphabet. So I drew my thoughts on the snow. What did I draw? I drew a horse on which I had just learned to ride. Thinking back on that time now, it was like an ancient painting on rocks.

Later on, after I learned the alphabet at a local school, my horse drawings on the snow transformed to a poem on paper. Soon, the state publishing house published my first book. A major national daily newspaper wrote about me that I was a children’s author. I was seventeen at the time.

Somehow, melodies have always played in my mind. I put those melodies on paper—thus my poems were written. When I read my poem about a horse, children become cheerful, and their eyes shine as if they had grown up on horse back. Sounds of pouring rain resonate from my poem about rain. Sounds of wind can be heard from my poem about snow storms. A poem about a reindeer can resonate like the sound of riding a reindeer on a snow path.

The greatest part of my life was spent playing with words over and over again to write the fine lines of a poem.

My Second Move: From Poem to Story

In 1990, Mongolia started its transition from a single-party and planned-economy system into a multi-party and market-economy system. So I moved on from the flowery mountain hill of the poem to the green grass steppe of the story. In this new place, I carried on my melodic rhythms, but I also tried to put big ideas into a small space. Tales on Horseback was my first book in the green grass steppe.

My grandma used to tell me beautiful fairy tales when I was a child. She called them fairy tales on a walk. One day I asked her, “Grandma, why are they called fairy tales on a walk? Could they not be fairy tales on horseback?” She smiled and replied, “If they were fairy tales on horse-back, we could not catch up to them.”

I had been thinking of how to make fairy tales on horseback for many years. As my country became a democratic country, I started to write books freely without any external censorship. My stories, which were based on oriental wisdom and thinking, could finally be able to entertain and also support the imaginary thinking of children. That was not the case during the previous system in Mongolia before the 90s.

Travelling by horse could reach much further than travelling on your own feet. Tales on Horseback has reached readers beyond Mongolian children. Its stories were published in English, French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, etc.

In the mountain areas of Mongolia, there are many rocks which look like animals. From such rocks, I developed and wrote stories about animals with kind hearts. Some animals came closer to people and asked for help when they were facing difficulties. Some animals wanted to help people who were about to be in danger. However, people did not understand them. In many cases, unfortunately, they killed the animals. I used my book Stone Legends to tell stories about nature and speak on behalf of the animals to our young generation. The stories make children compassionate minded by loving animals and nature.