#3 In Sensorium by Tanaïs

[On Scent] “Melody, musk, a scattering of shells, an ocean of vasanas that we leave for each other, for the world.“

Most of us have never been formally introduced to scents even though they’re the strongest impressions of memory that last on our skin. I remember the scents of my first best friend’s house — the detergent that her mother used smelled like baby powder. I could tell you stories behind every mall perfume I spritzed on my wrists and neck and ankles (shout out to Hollister’s “Crescent Bay”), the familiar cologne or deodorant worn by people I’ve loved, and the scents I remember the most when I come back home after traveling. Scents replicate the person, places, and times that we’re unable to return to. They are history — but like all history — told by humans and tempered by dominant voices of power.

Self-taught perfumer Tanaïs, in their new memoir In Sensorium: Notes for My People (2022), reminds us of how history fails in honoring people and their humanity. As a Bangladeshi Muslim femme, Tanaïs takes on an impressive re-historicizing of South Asian perfume history while challenging what archival material looks like. Throughout the book, they include epigraphs and evocations of erotic and religious texts, rape survivor testimonies, personal history, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, and conversations with Bangladeshi artists whom Tanaïs befriends in New York City. As the title itself suggests, in sensorium, is to shape the personal memoir as a collective repository.

If you’d like to read along, here’s a link to purchase In Sensorium at your local bookstore.

Tanaïs presents their memoir to us, three-prong-structured like a perfume — first, the base notes, then, the heart notes, and lastly, the head notes. An author’s note reveals to us that they had written the book in isolation during the pandemic. While they grieved the death of their grandmother, they suddenly lost the ability to smell because of COVID-19. In mourning, Tanaïs writes, “I understood why mass death made us yearn for beauty; after a genocide, beauty revives a possibility of survival.”

But they conclude the note with a much harsher glare on perfume:

Throughout history, humans have divided themselves by odor, what they found putrescence versus pleasant — between the silk and the healthy, the poor and the rich, the polluted and the pure, the slave and the master, the Dalit and the Brahmin.

This is where the beating urgency of the memoir begins. Tanaïs launches into the structural violence of the caste system, leaving scathing remarks toward the Brahmin upper-caste men. They retell the history of imperialism that furthered the division between Western-approximate Christians and Hindus against the Muslims, the recent liberation of Bangladesh as an independent state, and the irreparable violence of the Pakistani army soldiers. Within an angry, retributive retelling of these large-scale historical events, Tanaïs locates themself in America, existing as an Indian Hindu “passing” woman who has grown up being told they’re unworthy for a Brahmin son. Tanaïs is not just a present-day voyeur of the past; they’re a living reverberation of it.

The memoir is a perfume. Not just because of its structure and form and the perfumery language that swirls on the page, but because Tanaïs tries to grasp and translate the scent of a past. This reminds me of Stuart Hall’s essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1996) where he argues that diasporic people tether themselves to remembering an imagined culture of origin, a motherland, that no longer exists. Culture is fluid and transmutative alongside other cultural presences, always becoming rather than being. Just like how the same perfume smells differently on every person’s skin, and the registered notes temper away — with time and air, transforming.

Handblown glass bottle crafted for Bagh-e Hind.

There’s such an innate affinity towards perfume when thinking about alternate history — and more towards the end, how we heal from the harm of our histories. Tanaïs proclaims early that, “How we use perfume to ascend social class or trauma fascinates me more than glamour.” To actually do this, Tanaïs must see themself and their history unfiltered and unmediated by the dominant gaze, which they coin the patramyth — “foundational lies and mythologies recorded in history to protect the powerful.”

As a rare perfumist of color, Tanaïs challenges elite Eurocentric perfumists’ reckoning with their colonial past. The French fragrance house Guerlain had coined the “Oriental” fragrance family in 1925, distinguished by notes of sandalwood, spice, vanilla, and incense. Tanaïs, in quoting from Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” details an online argument with a French, self-proclaimed “Master Perfumer” who defends the use of “Oriental” as a legitimate perfume description: “Oriental is a reveur, a dream, a fantasy, nothing offensive … Oriental means exactly the style and beauty and luxury before the colonies!” Tanaïs doesn’t even have to condemn anything to point out the irony of the proposed harmlessness of Western olfactory culture.

Perfume became a mode of sensory imaging of the Other and the fragrant material of the Orient. Most Western writing on perfume focuses on its capacity for transcendence or escape.

Unlike the “most Western writing” above, Tanaïs’s memoir — with its multitudes of writing on perfume, family testimonies, and matrilineal history of lower-caste women — focuses on its capacity for healing, knowledge, and resistance.

The anecdotes and primary sources that Tanaïs chooses to include in the memoir are indicative of who they’re writing for. The author draws from Black and Brown scholars, writers, and artists across history and geographies who have been writing for their people’s liberation from the bottom of the caste system. “Conjuring ancestral knowledge and their own deep botanical connection to the lands they labored on, enslaved Black people birthed a new sensorium of resistance,” Tanaïs writes. “Honeysuckle and rose petals steeped in benne oil, sesame seeds brought on the ships from Africa, perfumed their skin. Poison proffered an escape, a vengeance on white enslavers.”

Of course, Tanaïs’s work is ambitious. Not just in the scope of their reparative reading spanning geographies and time, but even in its technical scope. They write, “Across known languages, anthropologists have found fewer words for our olfactory experience than any other sensation. So, we speak of our olfactory experience in similes and metaphors.” In describing scents in analogies and figurative language, perfumists claim a universality that is dependent on membership in and knowledge of dominant culture. How would Tanaïs write about scents in a common language without replicating these narratives of erasure? What does an author’s voice sound like in a memoir about a history of people whose voices have been neglected?

Fariba Salma Alam, Alongside Her Utterances in N-Space, 2012, 2 AP 54 6" x 6" ceramic tiles and 30" x 20" archival inkjet print.

In the latter half of the memoir, Tanaïs ensures that readers listen to the voices of lower-caste Bangladeshi women who are shunned and spat on by society. From the women who worked as garment workers in a Dhaka factory who burned to their deaths in a catastrophic fire to the birangona rape survivors in the aftermath of the 1971 Liberation War who were never given reparations or apologies, Tanaïs writes with a noticeably less luster than their earlier sections.

The chapters become shorter and clipped. Tanaïs lets us feel how language after trauma is quite impossible. Coupled with the author’s own experiences with sexual trauma, the head notes section gestures toward how it can be possible to heal. Tanaïs returns back to perfume, the importance and purpose it serves for them and why they create scents to be worn by others. It feels very bell hooks’s All About Love in this ethos of pleasure as the first step to repairing harm. Tanaïs writes:

It is in this absence of language that the body begins to repair itself from damage. As a writer, the task of undoing patramyths means listening to this silence. It means we must imagine a new language to name what has been endured. Perfume is a void language, one which reconstructs silence into sensuous experience, a new memory of pleasure that had been stripped away. Perfume floods the prisoner of war, the enslaved, the victim in the reviving spirits of pleasure.

After reading In Sensorium as someone has no prior knowledge in perfumery or the chemistry of smells, I didn’t realize how desperately I would read it. Like there would be no other memoir or book like it to be experienced again. I hadn’t known what I would be covering in this week’s installment of silly bus, a newsletter that looks at noncanonical art, literature, and cinema, but I think I figured out why I chose scent this week. To be canonical is to permanent, long-lasting, evergreen. Perfume is ephemeral and fading, material-less. At the same time, it takes new life, an even stronger one in our memory.

By putting In Sensorium on silly bus, my syllabus for you, this is my attempt at holding onto this scent for a little longer — to witness the transformations this perfume endures.

---

Additional readings xoxo:

• Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978)

• Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (1996)

• Mandy Aftel’s Essence & Alchemy (2001)

• Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses (1990)

• Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)

• bell hooks’s All About Love: New Visions (1999)