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Description of  In Sensorium: Notes for My People

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 Tanas 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, Tanas 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. Read more