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.
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On January 22, along the coast of North Carolina, the eight-man crew of a B-52 realises their plane is losing fuel too fast. BROKEN ARROW (1961)
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(@ohiostatepress, 3 December 2021, ebook, 184 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @edelweiss_squad and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is a new author for me. I don't often read essays but have enjoyed them in the past so thought I'd give Dark Tourist a try. The blurb appealed to me. There are only half a dozen essays in this book but each one is quite long. I enjoyed all of them. I liked the way the essays focus on a particular memory or moment in the author's life and link these to culture and history. I'd recommend these essays.
