de Tanaïs
The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfiction
Fragrance 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—
Focusing 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.
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. In Sensorium is archive and art, illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation.
The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfiction
Fragrance 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—
Focusing 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.
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. In Sensorium is archive and art, illuminating the great crises of our time with the language of Liberation.
Critiques-
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November 15, 2021
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. -
Starred review from December 15, 2021
A novelist and perfume maker serves up a lyrical memoir, sensuous and sensual, that crosses decades and continents. Tana�s, author of the acclaimed novel Bright Lines, brings a millennial sensibility--and a rejection of outmoded mores--to their work as a sharp observer of the world. Refusing old binaries, they move freely among peoples who are bitterly divided. Though descended from Bangladeshi Muslims, the author feels at home in India among Hindus, writing that neither religion "is absolved of brutal violence or enslaving innocent people." Later, they add, "I celebrate Kali puja. I recite a Buddhist Tara mantra every morning. I probably know more mantras than I do surah in the Quran." Try to explain such things to "a jaunty Indian bro" at a party, though, and the old walls come back up. Though the Brahmin in question fully grasped the racism wrought of "being brown in America," he did not carry the memory of genocide that Bangladeshis do--even today, adds Tana�s, Hindu fascists are stirring up pogroms against India's Muslims. Much of this evocative memoir is told through the vehicle of perfumes and their history. Scents mark the sex workers of South Asia and the enslaved peoples of Africa, find their way into Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, and serve to enhance appetite and desire everywhere. Readers with an interest in such things will learn, through Tana�s' elegant prose, just about everything about sandalwood essences, rhododendron incense, and "perfume as fluid as language, as lineage, as rivers of sweat." More, they'll emerge with a deeper understanding of the many ethnicities that make up South Asia and that merge in the author's sensibility along with cultural artifacts from America and elsewhere in the West, from manifestations of "radical-vision Buddhism" to the occasional dose of LSD. A heady pleasure of language in love with the author's many subjects, and perfectly suited to them.COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Imani Perry, author of Breathe and South to America
The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfiction * One of NPR's "Books We Love of 2022" * A Shondaland's "May's Must-Read Books by Asian American Authors" *One of Kirkus's Best Books of 2022 * —
"We selected In Sensorium by Tanaïs as the winner of the 2022 Kirkus Nonfiction Prize for its daring, inventiveness, vision, and lyrical eloquence. Using the framework of fragrance and scent, the author's work confronts aspects of our society related to women, gender, and people of color. Seductive, vital, and incomparable, this is a reading experience that endures." — Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Panel
"This memoir from writer and perfumer Tanaïs is as ambitious as it is wide-ranging, telling the story of their experience as an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme moving around the world in a wise and engaging manner that asks deeply relevant questions about queerness, gender, colonization and South Asian identity." — Vogue
"(In Sensorium) is, in short, the balm we have always needed." — Harper's Bazaar
"In Sensorium is a potently beautiful testimonial of feeling, touching, and breathing beyond the boundaries of empire, patriarchy, and the rule of law. It is a love story for all of us who not only live on the margins, but make magic there. With remarkable sensitivity and frankness, Tanaïs has given us an unforgettable, wise, and sumptuous story. This book will be with me for a very long time." — Imani Perry, author of Breathe and South to America
"In Sensorium does to the senses, particularly smell, what Toni Cade Bambara did to sound. I have never come close to experiencing a book that reminds us to accept the calcified histories and fluid futures deeply packed in our senses. What an absolutely unique and momentous book! Tanaïs has made a book only they could write, and my body is so, so thankful. Stunning work." — Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy
"Novelist and perfumer Tanaïs blends in this beautiful work memoir, history, and notes on perfuming to interrogate love, violence, and generational healing. Throughout, rich imagery and language are married as Tanaïs moves through their ancestral trauma to discover a place of healing...Readers will find more than just their olfactory senses heightened by this beautiful meditation." — Publishers Weekly
"A lyrical memoir, sensuous and sensual, that crosses decades and continents...Tanaïs, author of the acclaimed novel Bright Lines, brings a millennial sensibility—and a rejection of outmoded mores—to their work as a sharp observer of the world. Refusing old binaries, they move freely among peoples who are bitterly divided...A heady pleasure of language in love with the author's many subjects, and perfectly suited to them." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"To read In Sensorium is to be made as aware of the sensuousness of place, time, and body... It brings the past and the present into being, beyond the boundaries of knowing, and lingers like scent on the skin." — Guernica
"Through a series of investigations into the origin and capture of notable scents throughout history, In Sensorium takes us through the ambitious project of mapping scents to Tanäis's own history and the histories and connections that come from their own embodied experience as an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme." — The Cut
"In Sensorium works, like perfuming itself, to 'reconstruct silence into sensuous...
