Critic Reviews
Great
Based on 9 reviews on
Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, "starter witch kits" of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.
In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life--TwinPeaks, the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham--to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.
Bracingly honest and powerfully affecting, White Magic establishes Elissa Washuta as one of our best living essayists.
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"The essays that make up WHITE MAGIC by Elissa Washuta are bold, inventive, bewitching, and oh-so-raw." https://t.co/vqA1ELr0Xi
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire.
Have you read Elissa Washuta's White Magic yet? No? What the fuck are you even doing Truly one of my favorite books of 2021 and definitely the best cover of 2021 https://t.co/JBtPCEX4a5