Dark Tourist
Essays
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- £15.99
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- £15.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2022 LAMBDA literary award in bisexual nonfiction
Winner of the 2021 Gournay Prize
“Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection.” —Kirkus
“Sirisena explores how stories can become a ‘talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another’s pain’ in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut … [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into.” —Publishers Weekly
Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena’s stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.
Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language’s ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sirisena explores how stories can become a "talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another's pain" in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut (after The Other One: Stories). Recounting her family's struggle to adapt to the American South from their native Sri Lanka, a car accident at age 16 that damaged her eye, a "meaningless" affair with a friend's husband, and other events, Sirisena probes the role of luck in life: "I feel like so much of my trajectory—career, cultural, sexual," she writes, "has been the result not of choice or decision but of evasions, near misses, stumbles." In "Broken Arrow," she reflects on the 1961 crash of a B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs near Goldsboro, N.C., and reflects on her father's life in the same town when she was a child; "In the Presence of God I Make This Vow" considers the 16th-century marriage of a maid of honor to Queen Elizabeth and the son of a wealthy landowner; and "Lady" draws connections between her mother's illness and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windemere's Fan. While the early essays work together well, the second part, where the pieces are largely on the art world, feels a bit less cohesive. Still, Sirisena's searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into.
