Dark tourist Essays

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. (Dec.)

In her nonfiction debut, a Sri Lankan American writer and artist ranges across a variety of topics, from disability to queerness to grief to war. In several essays, Sirisena explores her relationship to her father, a Sri Lankan doctor who, just before surviving a stroke, secretly married his dead wife's cousin--and then lied "to his three daughters and to both families." Another essay revisits the grief she felt at her mother's untimely death, especially acute because "I'm obsessed with female toughness." In "Confessions of a Dark Tourist," the essay that lends the book its title, the author describes the experience of touring former battlefields of Sri Lanka's decadeslong civil war. Later, Sirisena writes about her bisexuality ("I've never really located my sex life around an identity, and I've typically thought of myself simply as very fluid") and her relationship with her "lazy eye." The book concludes with two essays on visual art: The first is about South African artist William Kentridge and "his level of technical ability and also the breadth of his craftsmanship"; and the second is an epistolary essay about the concept of punctum as applied to the Beatle's song "A Day in the Life." Sirisena makes good use of research throughout her personal narratives, incorporating information about the mysterious Lady Windermere syndrome into a chapter about her mother's illness, musing about an Elizabethan marriage that purportedly inspired Romeo and Juliet in a chapter about her father's secret marriage, and describing a plane crash in the chapter about her father's career trajectory. Several of the essays are formally inventive, most notably "Abecedarian for the Abeyance of Loss," which is designed as a child's beginning alphabet book. At its best, the book shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection, and the experimental essays are both visually and textually fascinating. Taken together, however, the essays lack a common thread, making the narrative feel disjointed at times. A solid collection about identity, art, disability, and grief, best read an essay or two per sitting. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Excerpted from Dark Tourist: Essays by Hasanthika Sirisena All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.