I don't know what a vibration is. I know that for thousands of years, my people have had an agreement with the salmon that they will allow us to eat them, and every year, in honor of this relationship, we take a fish from the river, kill it, cook it the way we always have, and eat the flesh. This is not magic, black or white: it's tending and care.
Magic is a seductive idea. Astrology, crystals, tarot--these pursuits that seek to locate and harness an influence on human life that exists outside of both the scientific and the religious--remain as popular as ever. They offer, perhaps, the possibility of control when life seems beyond control, not merely because fate is fickle, but because the world is organized to keep control in the hands of some and out of the hands of others. But even the world of magic is not immune from this. In her essay collection, Cowlitz writer Elissa Washuta highlights the double meaning of "white magic," which in one sense represents the way that whiteness has appropriated Native practices--sage, dreamcatchers, etc.--for their own use. A real white magic, a magic that is used for healing, is not just separate from whiteness but opposes it; it works to heal, and the wounds of racism, anti-indigeneity, and sexism are some of the most powerful in existence.
I'm not really the right audience for the "personal essay." There's something about it, and about White Magic specifically, that makes me feel like a voyeur, looking over someone's shoulder while they talk to their therapist. There's an unfinished quality to them that is epitomized in these essays, by which I mean are about the process of self-investigation and discovery, not merely cognizant of the way resolution and closure are elusive, but written before the possibility of resolution and closure even presents itself. If a memoir is in past tense, the personal essay is the present tense. For that reason, the focus of White Magic on Washuta's trauma made me frustrated, made me squirm. That's the point, of course. And it goes without saying that it takes an enormous amount of bravery to be so vulnerable on the page, to write about rape and addiction, and perhaps even more bravery to write about these things with so little distance.
White Magic is suffused with popular culture, and television and internet culture specifically. The process of self-reflection, for Washuta, passes through Tinder, Instagram, Wikipedia, Twin Peaks, Fleetwood Mac, Oregon Trail, and even former Twitter main character "cliff wife": "This never would've happened to me. I would not walk a cliff's edge. I'm afraid of heights. America would love to shove me off. No, actually, America asks me to do it myself." There's a risk of silliness to this, but how many among us can deny that Twitter has an outsized role in the production of our public and private selves? The essays seem to me to avoid clear theses in favor of a style that jumps from these cultural products to the personal and back again, exploring what Washuta calls "synchronicities." Finding oneself in a meme or a YouTube video is not so different than pulling the right card from the tarot deck.
The most successful essay, to me, recounts Washuta's months-long experience as the "writer-in-residence" for the Fremont Bridge in Seattle. Washuta's application was chosen because she wanted to write about the bridge from an indigenous perspective: the bridge passes over a canal that, when built, obliterated a traditional Duwamish meeting place. A Duwamish story says that a river monster once lived in this place, but disappeared; Washuta hoped to discover why it went away. From her perch above canal Washuta looks down superyachts cruising through the place where the Duwamish and the salmon no longer are, and thinks on the ways in which the scarring of the earth overlaps with the scarring of the self, and how the same historical forces are at work. I found White Magic most effective when it is about place, in this essay, but elsewhere also, as when Washuta recounts the story of the sacrificial Native maiden who gives Jenny Jump mountain in her home state of New Jersey its name, or in a playthrough of Oregon Trail II, searching for the indigenous presence in the Cowlitz lands that were taken from her forebears.
At the end of her experience on the bridge, Washuta is forced to admit she has no idea why the river monster went away. She can barely write the piece she was given a stipend to write. She turns to magic to make the spirits in things come back again--a tolerable self, the "twin flame" of love--but the results are yet to be determined there, too. I don't believe in astrology; I don't believe in magic, but these essays made me understand why you would.
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