Nanu’s tastes were village girl through and through: she loved a bright red lip and attar of jasmine, a narcotic floral with an animal stink. Her breathing, her cries for her son who died, her sleeplessness, her prayer, and, of course, her will that we should practice Islam, were as familiar to me as the scent of her body, one of the first sensuous cartographies in my memory-jasmine attar, violet talcum, paan juice, crushed rose powder, coconut oil, Pond’s cream, Tabasco sauce, canola oil. My illness began around midnight, when I received news from Dhaka-my maternal grandmother, Nanu, had a fever and seemed to be nearing her end. For two weeks, I was immobile from fatigue and headaches, everything I ate came out of me as liquid, and my sense of smell grew faint.

I sheltered in place in New York City, where tens of thousands of my fellow city dwellers died of a virus, and in mid-April of the year 2020 I, too, became sick. In Sensorium is archive and art, illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation. Structured like a perfume-moving from base to heart to head notes-IN SENSORIUM interlaces eons of South Asian perfume history, erotic and religious texts, survivor testimonies, and material culture with memoir. The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfictionįragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned-įocusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanaïs weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir, a reckoning that offers a critical, alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. From stories of their childhood in the South, Midwest, and New York to transcendent experiences with lovers, psychedelics, and fragrances to trips home to their motherland, Tanaïs builds a universe of memories and scent: a sensorium. Alongside their personal history, and at the very heart of this work, is an interrogation of the ancient violence of caste, rape culture, patriarchy, war, and the inherited ancestral trauma of being from a lush land constantly denuded, a land still threatened and disappearing because of colonization, capitalism, and climate change.

Tanais in sensorium