Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass
How could addiction remake the world?
29 June 2023
Paperback / 9781914221200
ebook / 9781914221217
114 pages
‘Deeply personal and generous in its offerings … It portrays recovery as a return, the ebb and flow of the tide, and a distinctly non-linear experience.’
— resting up collective zine
Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass is an exercise in meaning-making, a thinking-out-loud. Waithera Sebatindira unravels how it feels to live as an addict under capitalism, pondering how engaging with these experiences could bring the horizon of liberation towards us.
Through embodied explorations of addiction and recovery, Sebatindira invites us to inhabit crip time, a concept that describes different temporal realities in the lives of disabled people. In this collection, the addict’s crip time is distorted, mutable and non-linear, hopping backwards and forwards through memory loops and memory loss. Blackout is time travel; sobriety is failure; finitude, freedom.
An uncompromising rejection of the objectification of addicts across the political spectrum, this powerful meditation on illness, disability, solidarity and spirituality illuminates their indispensable contributions to the building of a new world.
Waithera Sebatindira is a Kenyan writer based in London. Their previous writing and research interests have included food imperialism, drag kings and gender transformation. They are a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University.
Listen along to the Through an Addict’s Looking-Glass playlist, curated by Waithera Sebatindira.
‘Ground-breaking, generous and gorgeously written … An essential and utterly unique text, which will enhance your understanding of the connections between disability, addiction, Black feminism, abolition, faith and solidarity.’
— Micha Frazer-Carroll, author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health
‘Sebatindira’s essays will astonish you. This meditation in spiral crip time weaves disability and black feminism with spirit, justice, memory, recovery and community, evoking the grounded and complex writing of Audre Lorde.’
— Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
‘With clarity and skill … Sebatindira explores the new modes of critical analysis that emerge when we stay with the chaos and urgency of active addiction and recovery.’
— Lola Olufemi, author of Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
‘Incisive and critical … A much-needed and warmly embraced intervention into contemporary debates on bodily autonomy, political agency and public health.’
— Imani Mason Jordan, trustee of Release
Press
— resting up collective zine, 2024
PODCAST: Addiction, Recovery, Liberation w/ Waithera Sebatindira
— Red Medicine, 24 October 2023