Dark Tourist: Essays

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“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. Dark Tourist: Essays, by Hasanthika Sirisena Half title page Series title page Title page Copyright page Contents Acknowledgments PART 1 • LOSS . . . Broken Arrow 1961 1975 The Crash A Roll of the Dice Survivors The Demon Lady i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. In the Presence of God I Make This Vow 1 2 3 4 5 6 Pretty Girl Murdered Confessions of a Dark Tourist Abecedarian for the Abeyance of Loss Amblyopia: A MEDICAL HISTORY Force Is Equal to the Change in Momentum(mv) per Change in Time—Part I I Try to Use My Lazy Eye for Personal Advancement Force Is Equal to the Change in Momentum(mv) per Change in Time—Part II Our Second Date John Milton Receives No Answers, Part I Force Is Equal to the Change in Momentum(mv) per Change in Time—Part III As If in a Horror Movie or a Gogol Novel, My Good Eye Takes on a Life of Its Own Please Describe in Detail Any OTHER Medical Complaints My (Now Ex-) Partner When I Interrogate Him on Our Fourth Date Ulysses S. Grant Writes a Love Letter to His Wife After She Learns the Surgeons Won’t Operate to Relieve Her Strabismus John Milton Receives No Answers, Part II Coming Back from Dinner with My (Now Ex-) Partner’s Brother A Definition of an Important Medical Term My Mother Suggests I Use My Amblyopia for Financial Gain Corrected Diagnosis Maybe My Mother Was Right About One Thing Our Third Date My Google Search for Celebrities Who Suffer from Amblyopia Generates a List Two Weeks into Our Relationship Forms of Exercise I Do with a Lazy Eye What I Won’t Do Because of My Lazy Eye Processes That I Have to Modify Because of My Lazy Eye The Couple Next to Me on the Flight to Sri Lanka Some Random Man My Mother and Father Take Me on a Pilgrimage Because of My Lazy Eye I Harass My Mother About Finding Someone Who Will Fix My Lazy Eye On the Eve of the Demise of a 13-Year Relationship Why I Am Obsessing on John Milton’s Blindness PART II • . . . AND RECOVERY Soft Target i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. The Answer Key Six Drawing Lessons 1. In Praise of Shadows 2. A Brief History of Colonial Revolts 3. Vertical Thinking 4. Practical Epistemology 5. In Praise of Mistranslation 6. Anti-Entropy Punctum, Studium, and The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” Notes “Broken Arrow” “Lady” “In the Presence of God I Make This Vow” “Pretty Girl Murdered” “Confessions of a Dark Tourist” “Amblyopia: A Medical History” “Soft Target” “Six Drawing Lessons” “Punctum, Studium, and the Beatles’ ‘A Day in the Life’” Series Page