In Sensorium Quotes

“This idea of being the first of our kind is a construction of dominance, a patramyth. Each time we utter I am the first, we are forgetting. We forget how Muslim women have long been cast as being both behind the times and, in hindsight, ahead of their time, visionary, but born in a society that never knew how to read them.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“One of the inheritances of colonization is what I call mysticynicism, a persistent doubt of the Unknown, the Divine, the Sacred”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“We know too much, so you have to disassociate from us, the shamed woman, the woman who talks too much, the femme who doesn’t give a fuck. We are inherently ruinous for powerful men.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Outsider means that you are invisible until you provoke or bother the social order—then you become hypervisible—being excluded makes you keenly aware of your oppressor”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Whereas a body cannot escape circumstance—in my grandmother’s case, she married at thirteen, did not finish school, lost her son and husband at a young age—a perfume allows us to, if only for a moment.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“From the very start of my life, my name announced my gender and religion. Tanwi Nandini Islam is a name corseted tight with meanings. When my parents named me, they wanted to express their syncretic, intercultural, adhunik, or modern, beliefs by honoring both the Hindu and Muslim traditions that run through our country, like rivers that flow from the mountains in India through the plains of Bangladesh.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Psychedelics illuminate eternal truths. Nothing is original, pure, sacred, nothing matters, but love, we are descendants from every path, every lineage, something that eons of queer and trans ancestors have known: the patramyth of the male-female dyad is dead, our genders and sexualities are as infinite as nature.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“That evening, after the show wrapped up, she needed to drop off her perfumes at a shop in Flatiron, so I decided to walk with her to the train. We decided to keep walking, summer lingered in the air, and we talked about everything—the Middle Eastern–Arab–South Asian–Muslim milieus that inspired us, how the first perfumer in the world was a woman in the Middle East, Tapputi, a chemist in Babylonian Mesopotamia, how the erasure of these histories from the dominant culture valued the noses of white men, how we faced snobbery and struggled to make the outsides of our brands, the packaging, match the quality of our scents, with money we hadn’t inherited.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Slave trade of young women and children on the Indian Ocean circuit, between the colonies run by the Dutch and British East India companies, increased during periods of famine, when families sold their young children to save them from starvation. European enslavers forced people’s labor to harvest sugar and spice, building vast wealth they themselves would never see. For hundreds of years, our people have been deemed backwards, rural, illiterate, but why do we forget that those with power have pushed them back to assure their own ascendancy?”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Perhaps our memory, too, is a forked tongue, our version of what has happened versus whatever did happen. I read and loved books between the sentences, imagining myself in those characters because no book ever imagined me as the reader, as the descendant of its history.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Vasanas are imprinted in textiles, traces of perfume and natural body oils and dirt locked in the weave of vintage silk, cotton, polyester. Holding the memories of the wearer. But what about the traces of the laborers embedded in the fabric? From farm to factory, the weavers, the spinners, the pickers of cotton bolls and silkworms, the fabric cutters and dyers, their sweat and blood pricked from a needle, vasana of touch. To be touched is to be made and unmade in relationship to another, another’s body, another’s desire, another’s trace, according to scholar Poulomi Saha.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Our sense of scent has a limited vocabulary. 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. We reach for language to describe smells in relation to our other senses. Bright, green, metallic, smoky, floral, fecal, loud, round, sharp, or citrus are words I might use, but these notes can be traced to objects, not the odors themselves. My favorite perfumes are slightly addictive, like the feeling of devouring a book. Perfume language is purple, its prose comfortable for me, it’s as if I revert to sensory language when I forget the performance of writing for a society (a country? a culture?) that loves a bare, spare sentence. I’ve been a devotee of purple anything since childhood: clothes, lipstick—a sentence. I admit that when I write in perfumed language, I feel truer as a writer, wilder and messier, anachronistic or mystic, I feel more embodied, when I write the physical materials I work with, encapsulating a story inside of a vessel. I perfume with materials distilled from the earth, but also aroma chemicals extracted from fossil fuels. This leaves me with more questions than answers, but perhaps that’s how we know there is a future, when we continue seeking answers to eternal questions: What is real, what is false? What is natural, what is artificial? What is necessary, what must be thrown away?”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“We still say the Urdu word —ab-o-hawa, water and wind—for weather. We’d never deny a beautiful phrase. We say pani, as Bangladeshi Muslims, the word for water used throughout North India and Pakistan. West Bengali Indians use jol or pani, interchanging the words depending on whom they’re speaking to. Bangladeshi Hindus will say jol, distinguishing themselves from the Muslim majority. Both words can be traced back to Sanskrit, paniyam the word for drinkable; jala the word for water. Language, down to a single word or phrase, might reveal whether we were Muslim or Hindu, starting with all our separate words for water, bathing, hello, goodbye.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“My handwriting in Bangla is childlike, block-lettered. I think about the origin of our letters, traced back to the unadorned glyphs, lines, loops, and circles of ancient Brahmi, the root script of nearly all writing systems in South and Southeast Asia, from Bangla to Tamil to Thai, which spread across the subcontinent around 300 BCE. Brahmi has been found as inscriptions on rock edicts, on punched coins and potteries. Both South Asian and Western scholars have debated Brahmi’s origins, whether or not Brahmi is indigenous or derived from a Semitic script outside of South Asia. Western scholars prefer the latter explanation, anything to center themselves, rather than believe that the Indigenous Dravidian peoples of South Asia are the ones who created and spread the usage of Brahmi. Is naming the script Brahmi, the feminine form of Brahma, the divine Hindu masculine, a tacit acknowledgment that the way we come to know the language of our people, the language inside of us, how we learn to write and to speak our tongues, comes from our mothers?”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Throughout Indian history, the thoughts of Muslim women have been ignored, overlooked, regarded with a sense of being ahead of this time, or out of place. This is the conundrum of being invisible, and very much seen. I italicize non-English words because they look more beautiful that way. Since we can’t honor the beauty of their own script and still be legible to most readers of English, I want to give the words their own space. Some think of italics as othering, but I am Other when I speak my mother language. Words in Bangla or Arabic or Urdu have their own weight separate from English. America took my first language, mother language, gave me my life language. I don’t recall the feeling of my first language fading as I learned the language I write, love, and fight in best.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“We found ourselves in a lovers’ arrangement common in cities, when you see each other after midnight, once a week or so, sometimes dinner if he felt up for a date. I wanted more, but he had just gotten free of a long relationship, and I’d never been in one. We dated other people. I gravitated to people who reminded me of him, quiet, reserved, people who moved with diligence and discipline in their art. Masculine, but soft. When I couldn’t bear our arrangement, I cut myself off. But I wanted to smell him. I traced his scent back to the source, the Brooklyn Bangladeshi-owned oil shop Madina on Atlantic Avenue, an institution. Named for one of the two holy cities in Islam, the word al-Madina simply means the city, and the shop’s visitors include Black and Muslim entrepreneurs, fragrance aficionados, folks who want to smell good for cheap, imams who sell the oils to the prison commissary, making perfumes available to inmates. I would purchase five-dollar roll-on bottles of oil to smell him in those periods we were off-again.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Once my father-in-law, Loucif, smelled a perfume I made, Night Blossom, a bouquet of North African flowers, Egyptian jasmine, and Tunisian neroli, blooming open on a bed of sandalwood. It reminded him of an attar his mother once wore. This simple joy of smelling took him to a place back home, to his youth.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“There’s this Western desire to connect to something beautiful, abundant, and mythic—like the rose-scented sails of Cleopatra’s ship, all things ancient Egypt, Ayurvedic healing and yoga, traditional Chinese medicine. They yearn to belong to a sensuous past that existed before the colonizer arrived, before the violence and the genocide. But did that past ever exist? Oriental is an erasure of the actual living, breathing descendants of the Orient, the native people, the laborers, the low caste, the massacred, or the enslaved—the very people colonizers believed too inferior to comprehend their own ancient greatness.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Notes of sandalwood, spice, vanilla, and incense expanded the nineteenth-century European perfumer’s palette, as did the aroma chemicals in their laboratories. While the colonial project was underway—and the prices of raw materials were driven down by the endless capacity to exploit human labor and the creation of new synthetic materials—Parisian perfume houses became the locus 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. Allures of luxury and the exotic nature of the materials described in purple, perfumed prose. This is what first drew me in, language that is lyrical, historic, romantic, and scientific, at once. There is inventive signature in the way independent perfumers describe their creations. Yet I often find the opulent, canonized, big-brand Western perfumes powdery as the dusts of conquest.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“How could the word Oriental—derogatory to East Asians in modern parlance—ever be expansive enough to contain the vast histories of Africa, Asia, the Middle East? Another perfumer in the discussion sent the Master Perfumer a copy of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” to re-Orient why discontinuing his use of the word Oriental mattered. “Orientalism,” a revolutionary text, became a revelation to me as a young feminist, mind-blowing as a perfumer. As Orientalist scholars embarked on their translations of ancient texts, languages, civilizations, they helped colonial rulers make sense of Empire. Knowing their subjects made it easier to categorize, divide, and conquer them. Perfumers summoned these faraway lands into temporal sensory experiences. Perfume as little museums of the colonies, a fragrant addition to the social and scientific discourse, yet another generalization, an immutable law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“In preparation for market, medicine men concocted ceremonial baths of brewed plant roots laced with the powers of forgetting, to cleanse people of their old lives. Hausa traders made their captives eat a legume they called màntà uwa, forget mother, its toxins intended to steal the memories of everyone they loved. In the markets, mountains of cowrie shells, harvested by South Asian laborers in the Indian Ocean, were used to purchase and enslave West Africans on the Gold Coast. Their jagged little teeth an omen of how they sucked the blood of innocent people.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Buddhist tradition rooted itself in our land before Islam, rising to prominence under the Pala kings, who ruled from the years 750 to 1161, until the Sena warriors who hailed from Karnataka in South India overruled them, establishing their new Sena dynasty. They instated a rigid Brahminical social order in Bengal, and, slowly, Buddhism started to wane.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Visitations to the library held our connection to our father’s inviolable self—gentle, brilliant, wise, never angry. One did not have to be a rich or an ambitious man in a library. Everything was free.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Near our old apartment in Auburn, there is a trail of trees called the George Bengtson Historic Tree Trail, named after a white research forester and plant physiologist at the University of Auburn, Alabama. A great man, I’m sure. These trees are grafted from scions of heritage trees. Among the trees planted: Lewis & Clark Osage Orange. Trail of Tears Water Oak. General Jackson Black Walnut. General Robert E. Lee Sweetgum. Southern Baldcypress. Johnny Appleseed Apple Tree. Mark Twain Bur Oak. Lewis & Clark Cottonwood. Helen Keller Southern Magnolia. Amelia Earhart Sugar Maple. Chief Logan American Elm. Lincoln’s Tomb White Oak. John F. Kennedy Crabapple. John James Audubon Japanese Magnolia. No trees are named for Muskogee, the First People who died in the millions during epidemics, displacement, and land raids. Under the buildings and homes and replanted forests are remnants of Muskogee earthwork mounds, temples, and trenches, a complex network of pre-American cities. There is a single scion named for a northern Indian Iroquois, Chief Logan, another for the Trail of Tears, the only nod to the suffering of Indigenous people. There is no mention of Sacajawea, never mind that Lewis and Clark would’ve been lost in the American wilderness without her. George Washington Carver Green Ash is the only scion named after the Black inventor and scientist. No Black or Native women or femmes are named. No mention of a single civil rights leader, which Alabama birthed aplenty: Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Angela Y. Davis. Imagine a Zora Neale Hurston Sweetgum or a Margaret Walker Poplar.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Incensed Muslims the world over burned and banned and fatwa’d the book condemned as blasphemous for its portrayal of the Prophet and his wives. This didn’t keep Baj from buying the book for our home library. Books transported us to other worlds, offered freedom from our bodies, revealed the absolute and inviolable freedom of an author’s imagination. Books were transcendent, so inviolable we were taught to never accidentally touch one with our feet, to never let a book touch the ground. Reading a book, no matter what its contents, no matter how profane—raised consciousness, which made them sacred. I felt afraid to even touch The Satanic Verses, intimidated by its red-and-black spine, by the title itself, unaware of how these lines traced back to a feminine divine.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Each composition is its own universe, with its own accords. Art to be experienced on other bodies, in ears, eyes, noses; bodies that will die, and so, the memory of our work will die with them. Melody, musk, a scattering of shells, an ocean of vasanas that we leave for each other, for the world. They are how we remember, how we disappear. How we love. Svaha.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“Without touch, without scent, you are a simulation. I need to protect my language. This love filled me with new language, but to learn it, I need to let go. I write to imagine freedom, even though I write in the language of power. The language of the colonizer. Can I ever be in possession of my power if I am with you? Not only is this ancient love—it is ancient pain.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“There are toxic aroma chemicals present in environmental and human waste, which the world’s poorest people are exposed to because of their proximity—cadaverine, putrescine, formaldehyde. These chemicals imprint themselves in the body and the brain, affecting mental and physical health. Even after the day’s work is done, sweeping and cleaning, the nightmare, the sensorium of labor, is inescapable.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“You haven’t been to India in twenty years. We’ve read lifetimes’ worth of stories about the spiritual sojourns to your motherland, but it’s still rare to read the perspective of a Muslim, Dalit, non-Indian South Asian, who experiences this motherland as an outsider. Even getting my ten-year visa to go is a trip. I need documentation of my parents’ origins—photocopies of their decades-defunct Bangladeshi passports from before they became US citizens. I made sure that I looked as “Indian” as possible, so I wore a bindi, a kurta top, making sure nothing screamed too Muslim. I rode the train far out to Richmond Hill, Queens, to a mom-and-pop Punjabi-owned spot.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation

“All Dalit and Muslim women and femmes were considered prostitutes. They were seen as illiterate, uneducated sexual deviants at the mercy of their sexist, violent men, and so their writings, debates, books, and articles are virtually unknown from this period.”
― Tanaïs, In Sensorium: Notes for My People – A Bangladeshi Muslim Perfumer's Kirkus Prize-Winning Memoir of Scent and Liberation