In Sensorium: Notes for My People

Novelist and perfumer Tanaïs (Bright Lines) blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. “Whereas a body cannot escape circumstance,” Tanaïs writes, “a perfume allows us to, if only for a moment.” Using the notes of a perfume—from the base to the heart to the head notes—as a framework to meditate on exile and liberation, Tanaïs contends with their roots as an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme. They begin their “base” by recounting the alienation they felt as the child of immigrants growing up in America in the 1980s and reflecting on a similar erasure of their ancestors by India’s colonization and caste system. Moving on to the “heart notes,” Tanaïs ruminates on surviving sexual violence and reclaiming joy through embracing their erotic and feminine sides. In their “head notes,” they consider their spirituality, psychedelic experiences, and how changing their birth name set them free “from patrilineage, gender, and religion in a single utterance.” Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanaïs moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing, where, they write, “a perfume emerges as a sensuous act of resistance.” Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)