Dark Tourist: Essays (21st Century Essays) - Softcover

Sirisena, Hasanthika

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814258123 ISBN 13: 9780814258125

Publisher: Mad Creek Books, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Hasanthika Sirisena’s essays and prose have appeared in The Georgia Review, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Story Quarterly, Narrative and other magazines. Their work has been anthologized in Best New American Voices and named a notable story by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. They have received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. They are also the author of the short story collection The Other One and the essay collection Dark Tourist which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Prize. Hasanthika has also throughout their career developed extensive connections in the writing community. They for example, currently a prose editor at Tupelo Press. They have been a Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference and Sewanee Writers Conference and been on the jury for the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Asian American Journalist Association Arts & Culture prize with New York Times Arts & Leisure editor Andrew Lavallee. They currently teach workshops for Writer’s Digest and have contacts at Poets & Writers. They have also forged strong relationships with the Asian American Writer’s Workshop and the Asian American Arts Alliance both in New York, both of whom have actively supported her debut collection. In addition, Hasanthika has been teaching on the university level for over twelve years. They first taught at the City College of New York and still has a strong relationship with the faculty there. They’ve taught at Columbia University and are currently an associate professor at Susquehanna University and also teach at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From "Confessions of a Dark Tourist"

One evening, colleagues of my cousin drove us to a remote beach in Jaffna for a picnic dinner in the moonlight. Our escorts were all Tamil and had lived in Jaffna for the entirety of the war. The beach was pristine, left largely untouched by humans. There aren't many pristine beaches left in Sri Lanka, but the civil war retarded economic development in Jaffna, especially along the beachfront, and as a result the local flora and fauna had been allowed to thrive. There were also a large number of wild dogs that prowled the perimeter of our picnic site. If we noticed their courage building and if they begin to act boldly, we threw pebbles at them to make sure they knew to keep away.

During our war tour, the Jaffna sun had shimmered above us, exuding a relentless heat, but by sunset the air had grown cooler. The sand, though, was still warm. I spread out my beach towel and buried my toes to enjoy the sensation of heat. The spray from the ocean coated us so that our skin, our hair, our clothes gleamed.

Our hosts set up, in a cabana, a camping stove. I picked up my beach towel and sat in the shelter with a friend and a group of Tamils-two men and a young woman with a child-that had accompanied the host. They spoke to each other in Tamil and one of the men spoke to my friend in Sinhala. As we started to eat, I raved to my friend in English about the food. I noticed the woman with the child smiling and realized she spoke English. I smiled at her and asked her a question directly. She laughed and in near-perfect English answered our questions and told us a bit more about herself. She had worked as an English teacher before she married.

The crab curry was so spicy my fingers, tongue, my sinuses burned, and my eyes watered. But I couldn't stop eating. Towards the end of our meal, as my friend and I shoveled bits of crabmeat into our mouths a young man seated across from us explained that just across the road, a few hundred yards from where we were seated, existed a mass grave. The LTTE had massacred perceived traitors there. I nodded solemnly at his story. I'd heard by then a lot of stories like his. The woman across from us shifted the baby in her arms, and adjusted the cloth the child was wrapped in. I wanted to talk to the woman more, and I tried to catch her eye. But she fussed over her baby and never looked in my direction again.

The beach had become completely, spookily dark. There was no illumination other than a few flashlights and the pinhole moon hovering above the horizon. My cousin and some of my friends decided to take a sea bath. I remained on the shore. Beside me, one of the hosts turned off his flashlight and nudged me. He whispered, "Look." In the seconds that I had turned away, the sea had transformed. The surface sizzled, thousands of brilliant, tiny sparks, like the sputtering of firecrackers. "Fish," my host exclaimed. Trillions of tiny bioluminescent fish. It came to me in that moment, staring at all that untouched beauty, an understanding that had until then eluded me. The war wasn't only a collection of horrors, a catalogue of crimes. The war with its continual churning destruction, its impeding of progress, had frozen us all in time, and that's what I had added to by joining this war tour, a sense that none of us would ever move on from this time and place.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814258123
• ISBN 13: 9780814258125
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190