Dark Tourist: Essays

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.