As the pandemic enters year three—and the white-supremacist patriarchy enters year three million—so many of us are fed up with living constricted lives. We crave the space to exercise our reproductive rights, express our gender identities, love and be loved by the humans of our choice, and simply breathe without fear of violence, persecution, or disease.
In times like these, writers like Tanaïs matter more. Whether it’s through authoring critically acclaimed queer fiction with their novel Bright Lines, successfully navigating the overwhelmingly straight, white perfume industry, or speaking truth to power on social media, Tanaïs carves out space for the rest of us. Their latest book, In Sensorium: Notes for My People, continues in this tradition, interweaving the science of perfumery, the voices of freedom-fighting Bangladeshi femmes, and the author’s own experiences as a queer Muslim writer into a narrative that fearlessly envisions liberation. It is, in short, the balm we have always needed.
I recently spoke to Tanaïs about writing a feminist memoir, researching the history of scents, and the importance of making the time to “touch joy.”
This book is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Can you tell us about the process of writing something so original?
I had so many different streams that I was swimming in! I had my academic sources. I had my memories. I had the fragrance and perfuming materials. I had the mythologies. I had the patramyths of history that have erased our experiences as women, femmes, queer, trans, survivors of patriarchy. Slowly, I started to see the connections, and I created a path forward by following the fragments to a totality.
I really wanted to form a new way of writing where you’re entering something that is its own world. It was a really beautiful experience because I was creating a way of telling a story that I had not yet encountered in literature. It was very organic and intuitive and not bogged down by editorial vision, because I didn’t have a set editorial vision. I wrote this book completely free. You can feel that when you read it.
I definitely felt that, especially in the pages where you frankly discuss the emotional experience of producing the book. Why did you feel this part of the process was important to explicitly include?
I don’t think separating our emotion from what we write is useful. Being “objective” feels like a white, male, ocular-centric mode of appraising a situation or a history. I can only honor and embody the femme experience—the softness, the tenderness, the rage, the eons of anger that I’m processing through writing—by being vulnerable and letting readers see what I’m experiencing as I’m learning this history.
I’m not translating for whiteness. I don’t do that. But I am translating this for my readers who are not South Asian but are Black, Indigenous people rejecting dominant cultural ways of storytelling. They’re my people, but they’re not people who come from where I come from; they’re coming from a different place. And you have all these young people who have been wanting to hear this truth of our experience in a larger context, a way that doesn’t feel like we’re selling out or whitewashing or erasing ourselves. I’ve been wanting that my whole life, so I had to write it. I had no other choice.
Tanaïs
Speaking of embodiment, can you talk about how you wove the senses—and, in particular, the sense of smell—into the narrative?
As you can see through the sources in the book, in academia, there is a new kind of revisioning history through the senses and how bodies experienced the past. It gave me goose bumps to read about enslaved people being on ships and to learn how the fragrance wafting off those ships would indicate if the cargo was humans or spices. Because those are the details that really show you the horrors of colonialism and slavery and the damage that we have held on to because of white supremacy and the path to a capitalist society.
A lot of the research I was able to access was written by either upper-class men or white men or Brahmins. For example, in medieval Indian texts, there’s this note called choya nakh. It’s just a regular, everyday oceanic note used to fix a perfume, but they described it as the scent of a loose woman. It’s not considered a fine fragrance like sandalwood or jasmine or any of these upper-caste fragrance milieus (even though these scents also belong to everyone). It really gives you a sense of how they thought of the femme body, and the fragility of Brahminism is really exposed.
Another thing I loved about the book is that it includes so much femme history I’d never read before. Why was including this important to you?
Creating a feminist text means threading together lineages from a multitude of sources. It’s rejecting this Western notion that story comes from the individual. The experience was very powerful for me because it’s not just my voice, it’s my voice as part of a collective.
I wanted to honor voices that are not just dominant-culture voices, while also realizing that some of the translations of ancient texts or medieval texts come from dominant-culture people, whether they are white or Brahmin. My understanding of what I was reading became that alternative telling. Because the way that I interpret something is different from how it’s been interpreted. And I think that’s where we can do this work of reclaiming.
Artists have to emerge as truth tellers who reject binary systems and dominance. We have to reject the idea of being the first of our kind. We have to know that others inhabited the world and felt the way we feel before us.
I loved the sections about your life as a perfumer. Can you tell us a little more about that?
For me, the process of making perfume is an act of decolonization. It’s about creating new sensory milieus that don’t necessarily resonate as a Western perfume practice. If you smell Mala, which is one of my perfumes dedicated to Delhi, yeah, it has rose and carnation and marigold, which are various South Asian floral notes. But I wanted to make it my own, so there’s tobacco and incense and all these other things too. It’s a remixed scentscape. It allows a huge swathe of people to experience an olfactory imaginative space outside of Western notions of perfumery.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell your readers?
When you finish the book, I hope that you don’t feel weighed down by trauma but uplifted by possibility. We do have to honor the pain and suffering and death of people who were treated with violence and savagery, but that’s not our only narrative. I think a lot of dominant-culture literature wants that to be our story, but we can’t always exist in our trauma. That’s not fair to us. As people who are living, who are the descendants of that loss, part of surviving is touching joy. We have to touch that joy.
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“We Have to Touch Joy”: Tanaïs on Their Latest Book, In Sensorium
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