Barrelhouse Reviews: White Magic, by Elissa Washuta
Review by Paulina Jones-Torregrosa
Tin House / April 2021 / 432 pages
In an interview with David Naimon for Between the Covers, Elissa Washuta reflects on why she found formal constraints useful in her previous essay collections: “Creating rules for myself was the thing that I did because that’s always been a thing that helps me feel comfortable within chaos.” In contrast to her earlier works of nonfiction, Washuta opens her latest essay collection, White Magic, with a narrator who is exhausted by established genres, especially narratives of progress. Her newfound sobriety has brought no relief from the trauma of generational and interpersonal abuse. There is no end in sight to the contradiction of living as a Cowlitz Indian woman on stolen land. And not even magic, least of all the appropriated versions of the occult peddled by white, non-Native influencers, can lead Washuta out of the darkness: “I google spells to take the PTSD out of me. But is that what I want? To stop my brain from thrashing against the wickedness America stuffed inside? I need to get better and I’m out of ideas. I arrange the candles, and I pray.”
White Magic is a potent, imaginative exploration of how and if experimental literary forms can help a writer claw her way out of the legacies of cultural and sexual violence. Washuta’s essays press up against the boundaries of literary and cultural contrivances, including self-help books, the “drunkalogues” told by people in recovery at Alcoholics Anonymous, oral and written histories of U.S. landmarks, and the arc of the cheerfully colonialist children’s computer game The Oregon Trail. In the introduction Washuta expresses the need to escape the stinging thicket of her newly diagnosed PTSD (after years of living with an erroneous diagnosis of bipolar disorder), and she heightens the stakes in the first section: “I think what follows could be called stand-alone essays. Fine. Or you could think of this as a dossier, the evidence of my attempts. If I don’t exit these time loops, these men echoing men, their cause, their effect, I’ll meet my tragic end. I’m saying a man might kill me if I keep choosing wrong.”
Labeling the works in White Magic “essays” becomes a necessarily provisional term, an acknowledgement that there is an assumed throughline of progress or discovery. However, the journey toward self-knowledge might not be enough to prevent the work from becoming a “dossier,” the chronicle of a death foretold. In each entry, Washuta explores how many of the genres we rely upon to tell stories of progress are at best inept and at worst insidious, false talismans against the intertwined dangers of colonial, sexual, and physical plunder. The best moments in White Magic arrive when Washuta persuades the reader to sit with her, candles lit, conjuring the feelings that resist narrativization in the hopes that this will make them dissipate.
The opening essay, “Little Lies,” is an intriguing collage of pop-culture references made of fool’s gold. Washuta searches for a D.A.R.E. video she remembers from her teenage years that may or may not exist, featuring Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies.” As she remembers the video’s schlocky plot, she reflects on how it entranced her into doing the very thing it warned against: “Those teens’ demise was sketched into every gesture: the lean against the counter, the gleeful opening of the passenger door, the hurtling down a dark road. I learned from D.A.R.E. to drink like I was dying.” The closer she looks, the more other narratives seem to foretell demise: the legend of how her Native ancestors entered into a treaty with the U.S. government, the stories of her father’s ancestors at working in a Pennsylvania coalmine, the memory of a lackluster date with her ex-boyfriend, a curse conjured by Stevie Nicks in her song “Silver Springs.” The essay ends in a captivating meditation on Nicks’ vengeful power, a conclusion that perhaps the best way to combat lies of progress is to shore up one’s own force until it becomes real.
Two essays in White Magic explore the fictions told on and about stolen land. “Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and Shades of Death” borrows a line from Paradise Lost to expose the dark underbelly of the landmarks in Washuta’s suburban New Jersey hometown. “How am I supposed to live,” she asks, “not knowing where the ghosts are?” In a later essay, Washuta abandons the collage form to meditate on the settler occupation of Washington State and her occupation as writer-in-residence of the Fremont Bridge in Seattle. “Centerless Universe” links Washuta’s journey to excavate the Native histories of the Fremont Bridge and its surrounding waterways with her difficulty in building a narrative about her on-and-off relationship.
Washuta best exploits the slipperiness of progress narratives in “Oregon Trail II for Windows 95/98/ME & Macintosh: Challenge the Unpredictable Frontier,” retelling her pixelated journey from Council Bluffs to Oregon City. She narrates Oregon Trail’s plot in the second person, allowing the reader to laugh at the glibness of its programmed dialogue while feeling uneasy with its implications: “You stop at the McDonald Ford of the John Day River. This is your traditional territory. Your ancestors should be here. You find only a white man with suspenders who says, ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s cross!’” In Washuta’s deft hands, the game’s arc reveals the maddening yet necessary ways in which sobriety feels like a similar series of make-or-break decisions, with only a fiction of forward motion to justify one’s actions.
Washuta’s narrative ingenuity peaks in the work’s longest essay, “The Spirit Cabinet,” which painstakingly intersperses the plot of Twin Peaks with repeating events from her on-and-off relationship. While Washuta wants the reader to grasp the depths of her obsession with temporal and relational cycles, I found myself slightly exhausted by the number of details. I exited the time loop early (which is cheating, I know), flipping forward to White Magic’s conclusion: “I thought I had solved [the riddle] by believing there is nothing greater than my assemblage of problems. That wasn’t right, but it worked, because even though the solution was wrong, the block was lifted, the gate opened, and I was dismissed, as though walking out of a cave.”
I find the phrasing “I was dismissed” slightly misleading in its passive voice. It seems as if Washuta eventually makes the same choice I did as I read “The Spirit Cabinet”: you cannot stay on the floor with the candles lit forever. At some point, you just get tired enough of sitting in the same place with the same old stories. White Magic emerges as a collection that is not as much a “working through” as it is a “working with,” sifting through the fictions that shape, maim, and at times save us.
Paulina Jones-Torregrosa is a freelance writer and graduate student based in Chicago. She teaches undergraduate courses in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, and her writing is forthcoming in Feminist Studies. You can find her on Twitter @young_abuelita.