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.
***
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)
***
(@ohiostatepress, 3 December 2021, ebook, 184 pages, #ARC from the publisher via @edelweiss_squad and voluntarily reviewed)
***
GET A COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER
***
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.
The Book Lover's Boudoir 