Dear Hasanthika Sirisena,
From the opening essay of Dark Tourist, I felt the way I did the first time I played Bloody Mary in the bathroom of my friend’s house: nervous but unwilling to turn on the lights. I was already along for the ride. This first essay traces the parallel stories of your father’s life as a Sri Lankan doctor in America and a U.S. B-52 that nearly detonated two hydrogen bombs in North Carolina. While the two topics appear to be disparate at first, you skillfully interweave the two tales of near-misses and tragedy until a final portrait emerges with a startling truth. Both the near-detonation of H-bombs on American soil and the stroke your father suffered reveal that as much as we want to believe we are in control, we are always a step away from disaster. And that’s not the worst of it. The tragedies that we try our hardest to avoid, the ones that generate the disaster tourism and endless cycles of revenge and reconciliation that you portray with such nuance in this book, are often created by our own actions. While we wait on Bloody Mary to appear, we end up where we started: in the dark, staring in terror at our own faces.
Throughout the book, you take us on a journey to the places, both internal and external, where we can examine the all-too human failures that simultaneously plague and entrance us. In the essay “In the Presence of God, I Make This Vow,” you examine the seemingly bizarre secret marriage of your father and his second wife, Anoma. It is so illogical and convoluted for them to keep their marriage a secret from their friends, family, and own children, that the immigration lawyer assigned to Anoma’s case actually believes it is fraud. You speak openly about the feelings of resentment that you harbored when you initially found out, and the frustrating conversations you had with an immigration attorney in trying to decode your father’s untruthfulness. You write with acerbic wit about the cross-cultural negotiations you make to justify a uniquely individual action:
“I say, ‘I don’t know why he kept his marriage a secret from us, but I don’t think it was fraud.’ Then I add, ‘It’s cultural.’ The lawyer seems to accept this last statement at face value, though I feel terrible. I don’t know any other Sri Lankans who would do what my father has done: marry his wife’s cousin, bring her back to the States, and then lie to his three daughters and to both families. My father is a singular construct that way.”
The rest of the essay is a journey of understanding and reconciliation, drawing on South Asian and American cultural norms and the peculiar case of a couple in 16th century England whose families tried to have their drunken marriage annulled. What begins as a family story soon evolves into an examination of marriage as a classist tool, immigration hurdle, and societal trap that has little, if anything to do, with real love. As you write, “I wonder how much happier and secure so many people would feel, inside and outside of the institution of marriage, if we didn’t insist so firmly on the rigid public moral spectacle of it all.”
Speaking more directly to the idea of a dark tourist, I was on the edge of my seat while reading your essay about your war tour of Sri Lanka. In the guise of a Sri Lankan citizen, you accompanied your family on a tour of former war sites where the LTTE and Sri Lankan army shed blood. You wrestle with the ethical quandaries of visiting these places and the eerie ways in which they have been converted to tourist attractions. You contrast this experience with that of Alfred Ely, a dark tourist during the American Civil War who was captured by the Confederate Army and went on to become an advocate for prisoners of war. He used his proximity to violence for societal change, whereas most dark tourism is centered on a personally transformative experience in which “the dark tourist goes from passive bystander and mere consumer of history to witness, with all the uniqueness and privilege that being a witness affords in this culture.” The articulation of these differing experiences allows us to see a way forward after the irreparable harm enacted in war, in which we must move beyond witnessing and towards empathetic action.
While many of these essays center around the impact of graphic violence, ranging from your sexual assault to the murder of young women, there is also much rumination on less overt forms of suffering, especially in regard to artistic practice and the quest to define one’s sexual identity. The essays are delicately crafted, brutally honest, and the product of intense self-reflection and research, resulting in hearty discourses on everything from Southern queerness to William Kentridge’s art. Ultimately, Dark Tourist reveals that the challenges we face in our lives are circumscribed by our experiences, and the way we conceptualize them bears heavily on how we can live through them. Thank you for writing this book, and giving me the courage to sit in the places in myself where I am most scared to go.
Warmly,
Vahni Kurra
