ABSTRACT
Although there are better and worse deaths, everyone dies. And although we all experience different kinds and degrees of suffering, no one dies without their share of it. This is everyday darkness. The very idea of dark tourism is premised on selective attention to instances of events that are, in fact, ubiquitous. In this volume Tunbridge argues that any heritage site has multiple meanings, and can be variously dark to different people, and I have previously argued that in a place where there is abject death, fear, and suffering, this can be variously seen and experienced by differently situated people. 2 I suggest here that we think of layers of darkness which are historical, and I evoke the idea of darkness accruing over time, much as sedimentation leads to geological layers. These layers of darkness usually leave no trace discernible to someone passing through. Perhaps those traces are buried in the memory of the people affected, perhaps themselves now dead. Although this might sound grim, in Nepal one does hear the word dukkha (suffering) far more often than its counterpart sukkha (happiness, or more realistically, contentment with the lack of obvious, intrusive suffering). And the heart of the philosophy of the Buddha, Nepal’s most famous son, is that suffering exists as a fundamental feature of human life. Certainly, the geological analogy is just an analogy, but it is useful as tourists do travel through social landscapes built through time and memory. And although they travel to see the landscape, their journeys—on buses, the focus of this chapter—take them through landscapes marked by dukkha. The highways are marked by the places (and mangled vehicles) of the death of previous travelers, by the death, maiming, and destruction of a civil war from 1996 to 2006, and now by an earthquake and its aftershocks in Spring 2015. In this chapter I describe how tourists variously brush up against these sources of darkness, are confronted by it, or are engulfed by it. Also I describe how, on the other hand, they can pass through it unknowing and oblivious. The tourists that are aware of the darkness can also variously experience these encounters: they can be fun, exhilarating, terrifying, uncomfortable, and sometimes profoundly disturbing. I conclude by reflecting on heritage sites and memorials in the midst of this everyday darkness. Although the layers of darkness rarely leave a trace discernible to a tourist passing through, sometimes they are marked by memorials and dark heritage sites. But which traces are marked is highly selective. The “light in the dark places” that Dunkley encourages in this volume—a change in the tourists’ 148awareness of injustice—may also come from tourists’ more mundane yet embodied activities, in addition to the particular crafting of sites which Dunkley advocates.
