March 2022 Meeting Transcript: In Sensorium, Notes for My People
Brandon’s note: Last year, I shed light on some of the stories in Book Club’s community. The post below is what actually happens when the Club meets to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences about and around a given month’s selection. This transcript of our March 2022 meeting is lightly edited, only to give the reader more of the rhythm of the room’s speech.
Yahdon:
Good evening everybody. Welcome to the Literaryswag Book Club. I am your host Yahdon Israel. How many people are first time Book Club members? We got some numbers here. Can we unmute our phones and cameras? A round of applause for our new members here this evening. Let 'em hear the claps.
Yahdon:
So welcome to the Literaryswag Book Club. I'm Yahdon Israel, the host. The Literaryswag Book Club is a social club that meets every last Wednesday of the month. We have been active since September of 2015. This is probably going on like 70 books now, right? Wow. From "Between The World and Me," I remember when most of the Book Club picks were mostly Black people, Black American people, and with the growth of this club changing and demographic and age and all these different things, I've expanded the readership by expanding what we read. And so this is no different, for the people who are new, I always do this spiel just to give you the background and the context. I started this book club as a collaborative event with The Strand, because I wanted to create an event that was essentially focused on the people who read books and not just the people who wrote them as a fan of literature.
Yahdon:
I hated going to these talks where, I wanted to be a part of the conversation and we got that last 15 minutes where we could really only ask a question. Even if we ain't have questions we wanted to ask. And then when you get your book signed, you can't really even talk to the writer. And it's like, I thought this was my moment. Like I'm spending $28. I wanna talk. So I wanted to create an event and a space where the readers, we could talk our shit. We could talk about the book. And I think that Tanaïs, one of the things you're gonna enjoy when being part of this and every author who attends a Book Club meeting gets reminded of the kind of conversations that they forget they can have when they're writing a book.
Yahdon:
Because we take for granted often times in these spaces. So many of the people who are in these spaces come from the literary world. And the way they read is they're reading for different things. But to get people who are reading where the stakes are more about, they just love, a cover or a sentence, they have different stakes. It reminds writers about the people who exist beyond the agents and the editors, the publicity teams and all those other things. Like there are people who are just connecting with these books in ways that are real and pragmatic. And so I always want, the writers to be reminded of the fact that there are readers out there for whom the concerns of, if your book is won an award, or if it's been reviewed are of less concer than say,..."well, what happened to your grandmother?
Yahdon:
How she doing? That's the type of conversations we have here and the type of connections we make. So I want everybody to, once again unmute their cameras because I want to introduce Tanaïs. Who's a good friend of mine. She's one of those people with whom, when you meet somebody that becomes one of your people, you don't remember when you met them, you just, in your mind, you always felt like you've known them. She was one of the people who, when I was doing my show called Lit, when I was interviewing writers, she was one of the first people to attend and took me seriously when I had a microphone and an iPad, recording conversations with writers, right.? And one of the things I've always appreciated about not just her thinking, but her writing is how sensual it is. And I think that everybody who's been reading this book understands how much of the senses she taps into and how much she brings to the page. So can we give a round of applause for Tanaïs? Who's here with us tonight.
Tanaïs:
Thank you so much.
Yahdon:
Yeah. So a little bit of the framework of how the evening goes. Tanaïs you got the little run of show, but basically what we do to get everybody talking, because once the Book Club kicks off, there's usually, in any conversation, it's usually like the same 7 to 10 people who talk, but everyone else listens and processes and things like that. So what we do to get everybody talking, we have a prompt in which everybody engages. Basically a question that's, taken in some way and interacts with the book to get everybody talking. People say their name, where they're from, they answer the prompt. We go through everybody. And then we open up a more open forum discussion that people can talk about the book. They can connect it to their lives. They can take connect it to pop culture, other things.
Yahdon:
It's one of the things I'm most proud of about a Book Club like ours is though we are a Book Club. One of the things that I always tell people when they think that the greatest barrier to entry is reading the book, I tell people, you don't have to read the book to be a part of the conversation. And it's because I understand that the hardest part of finding community is thinking that the only way you can enter a community, especially in a book club, is if you read the book and I want to encourage people, that the community is why people read books. I remember there's a lot of books I wouldn't finish if I wasn't in college. If I was the only one who had to read it, there's a lot of books I wouldn't have read, but that embarrassment of not wanting to be the only person who ain't read it was like, "man, this book is pretty alright, now that I finished it."
Yahdon:
So creating that environment of accountability that we have in Book Club, where every last Wednesday, you know, if nothing else, let me get a chapter in. And so I could just be amongst the people. And even if I don't read it to even have the conversation that provides context for how to read something, that's what this Book Club is about. So we gonna go down the list. I'm gonna start off with the prompt, which if y'all remember, it's "when you think of home, not necessarily your way you grew up, but home as a concept, what does it smell like?" What are the sense that you get? And the reason why I wanted to do that is because it wasn't until I read "In Sensorium" that I, and I think I said this to you on the phone when I told you I picked it, it hadn't occurred to me, how little books engage with the sense of smell.
Yahdon:
It's very hard to produce that with language. Right. So this book, we had read in January, Crying in H Mart. And we were talking about how food and taste, was brought to the front. It made me think about, often in books, the two senses that are engaged with the most, a sight and sound, but how do books engage our other senses? Right. So Alex, thank you for the alley oop. The prompt is "when you think of home, what smells come to mind?" And when I say home, I mean, where you feel safe and comfort in that ease. So what smells do you associate with home? All right, so let's do it. Oh, and I gotta say this people who don't know Tanaïs is a perfumer.
Eunice:
Ordered some of your perfume.
Tanaïs:
Thank you, Eunice.
Yahdon:
It's important to know she got this scent called Sàndalo
Tanaïs:
Oh yeah. That's like a Yahdon scent
Yahdon:
And I, I spray that on. I think my credit score went up 10 points after. I'm telling you this was a scent that added points on my credit score. It changed the game.
Tanaïs:
It does. I thank you.
Yahdon:
That's the quote right there. You can quote me on that.
Yahdon:
All right. So good. Everybody at this point too, please add your pronouns to your name so that..
Tanaïs:
Oh Yeah. I'm they/them pronouns, Yahdon.
Yahdon:
All right. Do you want me to throw it in for you? I could just add it on your thing. Cause I'm a host on your name thing.
Tanaïs:
Thank you.
Yahdon:
I got you.
Tanaïs:
I would love to hear people's scent memories or what came up for you as you were reading. That is something that guided me while I was writing the book. So I definitely can't wait to hear.
Yahdon:
All right, so we gonna start it off, right? So I'm gonna kick it off. My name is Yahdon out in Brooklyn. He/Him. The scent I think of, when I think of home, when I think of comfort, I think of, what's that smell? Pink lotion. I don't know why but I...
Tanaïs:
I used to use that in my hair.
Yahdon:
The scent of pink lotion.
Yahdon:
Makes me feel at home because it just reminds me of a simpler time when a outfit was a t-shirt and a white pair of sneakers. That was a time in my life when it was just very little worries. And anytime I smelled pink lotion, it just felt like, yeah, this is home. So we go down the list. All right. Abby, what smell reminds you of home or, when you think of home, what smell comes to mind, Abby, you with us?
Kristin:
The scent that came to mind for me was tea rose, because my grandma used to wear it.
Yahdon:
Okay. Okay. Alex on you.
Alex:
I'm Alex. I use she/her, I live in Brooklyn and my scents are a tie. One of them is this particular brands, Fig Candle. I associate that with growing up and I just like repeatedly buy it and burn it all the way down. And then I use it to hold like Q-tips and stuff. I clean the little glass jar out and I have so many of them, it looks a little creepy in my bathroom. The other scent is kind of the like overwhelming chemically smell of a nail salon. It's not a pleasant smell, like the fig smell is, but it's like very familiar to me. And I have spoken about nail salons in this Book Club before, they are important to me. So I like that smell
Yahdon:
Appreciate you. Amina, what's yours?
Amina:
So this, this is actually kind of scary how this happened. So yesterday was my husband's... Yahdon I remember cuz you called me last year at this time to join, to come. Yesterday was a year of me burying my husband and I went to, South Street to this place. My husband used to take me to, to Nepali, where he liked to buy the incense. And Frankincense is very much a thing that we Muslims in Philly, Philly Muslims, specifically NOIs and my husband used to burn a lot and I have got it to burn in memory of him. And it was weird that you asked this question today. I'm sorry.
Yahdon:
No girl, you with us. Yeah. You with us. I'm glad you here cause this is the community.
Amina:
These past two months have been hard to read because I would read with him.
Tanaïs:
Oh. Yes.
Amina:
And I wish he was here for me to read with him, but... I had to come today.
Yahdon:
Well, glad you could make it. Andrea on you.
Andrea:
I feel like you get us with these questions cuz you asked the question about like what food we want. And I cried when I lost my stepfather about like the food thing. Like when we talked about foods we lost on "Crying in H Mart." So I feel like you always get us every month with these questions, with these really emotional responses. I had tears two months ago on our question. For the scent at home, I always think of the way the rain smells in Las Vegas, which doesn't really smell the way it rain smells here, like anywhere else.
Yahdon:
Okay.
Tanaïs:
What does it smell like?
Yahdon:
Yeah.
Tanaïs:
The desert rain?
Andrea:
It's I think it's the smell like on the concrete, something about the concrete it's kind of dusty. It does smell good, but it's not, it's hard to explain my sister talks about how she misses it all the time too. It's not like, I guess like the nail salon thing. It's really earthy, but it's not a good smell, but it's pleasing.
Tanaïs:
Thank you
Yahdon:
Christy on you.
Christy:
I think I'd to say my grandmother's meatballs cooking that smells like home to me. That's my physical home. I would say the place I feel most at home or the scent that makes me feel most at home. In addition to that would just be the ocean. The meatballs, they're really good. There's something different about the way that she cooks them. The way that the sauce smells, the meat smells when it's cooking with the bread and the onions and the spices. So, that's that's home for sure.
Yahdon:
Thank you. Connor on you, big dog.
Connor:
Hey, I'm Connor, he/him out in Stanton, California. When I think of home, it's kind of an odd smell I guess, but there's this specific smell of pine needles and all the refuse that collects under pine trees when it gets really warm and it smells kind of dusty and dry. That reminds me of home just cuz I was born and raised in Colorado and we had a bunch of pine trees around our house and it didn't matter what the season was like when the sun hits all that debris that collects. It always has the same smell.
Yahdon:
Thank you. Diana, welcome back.
Diana:
Hello everyone. What was the question, please?
Yahdon:
When you think of home, what does home smell like? Like as a source of comfort? Like what smell?
Diana:
Oh, damn. So many. Okay. I guess it's a combination of the smell of the ocean with the fall crisp air, you know? As far as a kid, when it's late summer fall, at home, riding home, later at night and gets cool and there's a specific smell. It's a combination of, I live near the ocean with that crisp fall air. Just like riding my bike home at night, that sort of reminds me of home. And tea. My mom always, always makes tea.
Yahdon:
What kind of tea?
Diana:
She'll dry out some like orange rinds or some hibiscus and then she'll mix it with all different natural fruits and herbs and then she'll soak it and I'll always smell it when I come home.
Yahdon:
Okay. Appreciate you. Elizabeth on you.
Elizabeth:
Hi, I'm Elizabeth. I use she/her pronouns and I'm in New Jersey. I wrote a list. Cologne and sweat and smoke and dirt, ozone, my mom's perfume and cat dander and old breakfast food.
Yahdon:
Sound like a poem. Okay, all of those things smell like home.
Tanaïs:
All of, yeah.
Andrea:
My mom, she loved Clinique.
Yahdon:
Appreciate you. Eric, on you.
Eric:
Hi. I'm Eric. I go by he/him. I live in Jersey City. I'm originally from Michigan though, like a very suburb city part of Michigan. And I guess when I think of home, the smell that I think about is my grandparents' cottage. That's still in the family, but it's in the Northern part of Michigan and it always has this distinct outdoor smell. So it's very piney and dirt like, but the air is really heavy in Michigan because it's really humid in the summer. So it's a very distinct outdoor smell that I've never smelled anywhere, but it still smells like that when I go home. And it always makes me think of when I was a kid, being up there with my family and stuff like that.
Yahdon:
Thank you. Errol on you, homie.
Errol:
Hey, I'm Errol. He/him, I'm from Brooklyn. The scent that always reminds me of home is I don't know if this is the exact name of the spice. It's something that Haitians cook with with rice and fish. It's something that when I was growing up, it had a very distinct, very savory scent that you knew dinner was ready and it reminds me of my grandma's house often. I live in a place where there's like a lot of Caribbeans and Haitians, so every now and then I'll be walking through the halls on Sunday and I'll smell that scent. And yeah, it would just remind me of home.
Yahdon:
All right, brother. Thank you. Eunice on you.
Eunice:
My scent is called Cypress it's evergreen, but not a strong scent of evergreen. And just like some of the other guys were talking about that pining smell, it's a comfort, not too strong, but enough to lift the nose. So it's, well maybe a little woody, but evergreen, but not a strong sense.
Tanaïs:
I loveCypress, a beautiful smell.
Yahdon:
Jake on you homie.
Jake:
Yeah, I mean, initially I was thinking of home growing up and I grew up on the water a lot, around boats. And so I was thinking about just the smell of gasoline, how old boats or old trucks have that smell of gasoline. It's weird cause it's not something I really enjoy, but it's something that every time I smell it, it's the one thing that just floods back, like memories of childhood growing up. So, yeah. That's what I was thinking initially when you were framing "home."
Yahdon:
Bet. Bet. Jules,
Jules:
Hey, Hey, I'm Julia or Jules. she/her from Manhattan originally, live in Oakland, California. The first scent that came to mind was, the smell of a freshly vacuum rug.
Yahdon:
Oh, that's a very distinct smell.
Jules:
I think it's because, my grandmother's home is the home of my heart too. I think she was just working right up until the last minute before we'd arrive. That was the "welcome" smell. You could still see the tracks of back and forth with the vacuum cleaner on the carpet. But then that brought me to my other smell, which is making country ham. So like salt cured ham, and adding at the end to make red eye gravy, adding coffee to the drippings of the country ham. And so that combination of like salt, pork and coffee is also just like seared into my memory.
Yahdon:
I like that. I like that. Kate, on you.
Kate:
Hi Kate. She/her pronouns and I live in Northern California also. The first thing when you said home at first, I immediately thought, oh God, I don't have any good associations of smells with home. Except I immediately thought of my neighbors when I was really young and their house smelled like sour milk. And I just remember thinking at least my house doesn't smell like theirs. But when I realized you meant my comforting smells and good associations, I immediately went to horse manure. Because the barn was the place where I would run away to and where I felt the most at home and the most at peace. So that still is, I don't ride horses anymore, but I work at a barn like Equine therapy and it is totally for, the selfish reason of just being surrounded by that smell of horses and horse manure and hay. It's just a barn smell I love.
Yahdon:
Thank you. Thank you, Kenny.
Kenny:
Okay. He/him New Jersey Bridgewater, New Jersey. So I think home, I think about my grandmother's home and I think about food. So it's the bread pudding, that smell maybe going over there to eat breakfast. The bacon, the smell of biscuits and grits and ox tailes. I mean, she would make the spread. So that was always a comforting place. Of course I'm eating well. And the smell was good and in the basement, very damp. Yeah, those are the smells. I resonated with Jake though. The smell of gas. It was something good about that. I dunno what it is. Was it going in the car? I don't know.
Yahdon:
High. That's what it is, y'all was getting high. (Laughs) All right. Kristen it's on you.
Kristin:
I like this one cause I lead of my nose a lot. I think not like location, but it's the way both my mom and my dad smelled growing up and my mom wears this cologne called 47 11, and she's worn it her whole life. Um, and it's like cheap, but it's a really beautiful smell to me. And then my dad's kind of the opposite. Like he's a builder. So he would always smell freshly cut wood, like freshly cut plywood and like sweat and work. And you know, one's very clean and one's really heavy and musky. And interestingly enough, those are the kinds of perfumes I really prefer, which are like both like have a light citrus, but then like a real spice to them too.
Yahdon:
Damn. You know how to talk about smells. I just realized, I said pink lotion. I can't describe it. I could just tell you and just hope you get it. Put pink and lotion together, whatever you think that smells like. That's pink lotion. Maggie on you.
Maggie:
I'm Maggie. I'm from Seattle. She/her. I agree that sometimes these questions are just a gut punch to you and I thought about it and I think the smell for me kind of changed the course of my life when I was a kid. My friend Cosser wouldn't let anybody over at her house because she said, we thought it would smell weird. So I finally got into her house and her mom was making fresh chai, like she had just ground the spices in the mortar and pestle. And I remember being overwhelmed by the smell of Cardamom and she sent me home with some and still, that's everywhere when I get a new apartment or a new house. Cardamom on the stove with some oranges, just simmering and trying to stain my house with that smell.
Tanaïs:
Sounds amazing.
Maria:
Hi, I'm Maria located in Brooklyn. She/her, the smell that I think about is the smell of tropical storms. Cuz I grew up in Brazil and so they are very common during the summer and I was trying to find words to describe what that smells like. And it's sort of hot and very herby because there is a lot of like mountains with a lot of heavy vegetation around. And so it just becomes a sort of damp green smell and that together is actually the smell of a new book. Cuz that's how I used to spend my summers. I would buy a bunch of new books and we just read them during the tropical storms.
Speaker 4:
Wow. Beautiful.
Yahdon:
Right. Thank you. Who's next on the on the docket. Nuratu, please say you're stationary right now.
Nuratu:
I am stationary. Come on now
Yahdon:
Ok now. This is a running joke. This is one of the members who's always mobile in the car somewhere.
Nuratu:
Always, always, up and about. So I actually just got my book on Monday. So I have not had a chance to fully dive into it the way I would like to. I'm also someone who leads with their nose, but I had COVID last February and then I had COVID again in the beginning of this year.
Nuratu:
And so one of the hardest parts of that is that my sense of smell and taste has not fully come back. And so in thinking about what smell reminds me of home, it's a little trippy because I was very, very, very connected to my sense of smell. And so yesterday I did laundry and I found myself dumping almost the entire bottle of fabric softener, just so that I could smell something again and now smell is very altered and everything. I can smell like the chemical behind everything things I used to, like I can't smell anymore. In the way that I used to know them. So, I don't know because I'm reorienting my sense of smell to what my life is now. And I am still mourning the loss of it in a lot of ways. So I can't even really answer that question.
Tanaïs:
Oh, I started my book with that. I also lost my sense of smell and it's so traumatizing. You just start by smelling things and training your nose again, you know.
Nuratu:
I live around the corner from a laundry and I pour all the fabrics softener in it, cuz I just wanted smell something familiar, like fabric softener that I remember in my mind, the smell of, but it's not connecting in the same way. So it's just, and for someone who is very, very much connected to their sense of smell, it is very much a mourning when you lose it. It is a trauma. You feel disoriented in so many ways. Like I can't even smell get ass all the time.
Yahdon:
René
René:
Yeah. So I'm Renee, she/they pronouns. I live in New Jersey but I'm originally from Missouri so that evergreen smell is very familiar to me also. My grandmothers played a big hand and raising me and my brothers. I spent equal amounts of time in both of their houses. So also you have Tide, Tussy deodorant, lemon, lemon joy dish detergent and roasted artichokes also reminds me of all of them and white diamond of course.
Marcy:
Appreciate you. Marcy, on you.
Marcy:
It's okay. I was trying to remain invisible. I'm a little zoom shy. I live in Los Angeles. She/her. I think because from such an early age, my mom was such a heavy smoker. I kind of prefer the idea of home is sort of a no smell and then it can get filled selectively with good, bad, but something that's like a smell that I know is gonna be transient. So that the idea of being just inside of a heavy, bad smell is something that I'm so thankful to have receded from my life. So I like this idea of sort of like selective smells and then just integrating good, bad, and then just kind of letting it go. And I, I guess that's kind of the wonderful thing about smell is that the sort of transient nature of it.
Marcy:
I wanted to say one more thing. I think it was Andrea earlier was talking about the smell of rain in Las Vegas and there's that word? Petrichor, which describes the smell of fresh rain in an urban surrounding.
Yahdon:
You gotta type that in the chat. That's a group chat word. I thank you for sharing that. That's why you come to Book Club, you learn new words. Cherrelle, what's the smell for you? Smell of home.
Cherrelle:
I'd say the smell of home thinking just inside of the home would be like incense, nag champa incense, or Palo Santo. And I think of like warm candles. My mom had candles lit a lot when I was growing up. So I think of the color red and just warmth and yeah, nurturing smells for inside. My mom also had the windows open a lot and I grew up in Minnesota. So a lot of just fresh air and like fresh cut grass. I can recall.
Yahdon:
Bet. And then, Tanaïs you take us out. When you think of home, what smell comes to mind for you?
Tanaïs:
I feel like for me, it's a mix of different...the smell of my home is very steeped in spices and Curry. And then the bodies of all the perfumed feminine people in my home, my grandmother, my auntie, my mom, my sister. So I would say like florals and coconut oil and creams and lotions, pink lotion as well. It's like that muskiness but sitting on this very spiced Curry sort of base, so it's just a really always intensely smelled environment.
Yahdon:
Thank you. So, Tanaïs can we have you bring us into this conversation, with a read from
Tanaïs:
Yeah, let me grab my book.
Yahdon:
All right. Well, while she's grabbing her book, I would love if you could read from between page 9 and page 11 at "ancient perfumes exist as fragments in texts" and take us to the paragraph that ends with "acts of resistance."
Yahdon:
And the reason why I'm asking you to read this section is because I think that what you do brilliantly with this section is you take a concept and you give smell a tangible language. In reading this, I would've never connected all the different kinds of concepts to smell as a concept. So when you talk about the idea of text, I think about am I literate in my sense of smell, am I able to discern what smell means for me and able to read those sort of things? So one of the things that Nuratu said is to not be able to smell gas in a particular context means she could be in a kind of danger that she's unaware of. Right? Like that's what makes carbon monoxide so dangerous. So just read that section for you so we can jump into this conversation.
Tanaïs:
Thank you. So it's page 9? "Ancient perfumes exist as fragments in texts, but what if we ourselves don't appear in texts? The dominant culture version of our histories becomes the Record of Power, where lies, misrepresentations and erasure abound. I call these the Patramyth -- foundational lies and mythologies recorded in history to protect the powerful. There are multiple etymologies in the word, patramyth, which shares the Greek root patria or lineage, with patriarchy; Patra is a written document in Sanskrit, a language wielded by the powerful in India for a couple thousand years. Myth is an origin story, but in my mother tongue, Bengali, mithya is a lie. Patramyths have justified grave violence by way of religion, science, philosophy, literature, anthropology, books, and laws that deemed brown-skinned, Black and Indigenous people, smelly, savage, slave, prostitute, deviant -- deserving of exploitation until death. Learning to see ourselves outside of the specter of the dominant culture's Patramyths -- decolonizing ourselves --- means recognizing true knowledge from that, which seeks to uphold domination.
Tanaïs:
Scent is a savior for people in exile and diaspora, said my friend Dana El Masri, an Egyptian-Lebanese perfumer living in Montreal. I make perfume to encapsulate the notes of desh, homeland that has never been my home. Perfume would be the shortest route to my grandmother after her death. Gandha is a perfume, aroma or a stink, gandha is my pilgrimage through the vast, syncretic lineage that I've inherited: Dravidian, Sufi, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Persian, Afghan, Turkish, Indian, Pakistani, snake-goddess worshipper. As Western modern thought and whiteness evolved during European colonization, the sense of sight ascended to prominence. Smell became associated with primitive and barbaric people. They imagined man as separate from nature, severing the connection to the feminine and the sacred. A perfume collects these fragmented histories into a single borderless substance, a seamless composition of oils and resins distilled from plants that might be strangers in nature, from countries with a violent colonial relationship, like French lavender and Haitian vetiver. By collecting fragrant materials, what Saidiya Hartman calls degraded material of the archive, and transforming them into new compositions,
Tanaïs:
I have found a way to wrest back our memories, bodies, stories and smells from the hard damage of colonization. This book is shaped like a perfume, built from the perspective of a perfumer. First, I lay down the patramyths, the heavy base notes of history, of South Asia and my childhood; a foundation for the heart notes, collected stories about the women in my family, feminine love and desire, the unimaginable violence imprinted on survivors; all the way to the top notes, the invitation to a fragrance, touchpoints akin to sites of pilgrimage, psychedelic experience and spiritual awakening, as evocative as they are fleeting. Using this degraded material, a perfume emerges as a sensuous act of resistance."
Yahdon:
Lets give them a round of applause. That's fire. That's fire. Also wanna apologize to you, Tanaïs. I mistakenly misgendered you a few times in the conversation.
Tanaïs:
No, no, it's ok. I wanna just clarify that because for me, she/her is gonna be how I grew up in the world and that's.. It's my embodiment as well. But if you read to the end of this book, I get into language and being that we have no gendered pronouns in my mother language, it's like returning to that way of naming myself and that feels true. And it's some thing that I felt like I lost because of English. And I think it's like part of that process, you know? So I, I see it as a process.
Yahdon:
I respect it, but I wanted to acknowledge it though, at least if nothing else. So one of the reasons..I want you to get in and immediately start talking your shit. But the reason why I also highlight is because I think the authors know what you do on the authors note as an act of empathy for a reader, right? There's a lot of complex things that this book does. And when you don't have a guide, I thought about your ethos is what you do as a perfumer. And so it extended itself into the authors note where it literally, the note is you're helping a reader understand what it is that they're encountering as opposed to just kind of waving something beneath their nose and just trusting that they'll be able to tell the levels of what you're doing. So could you just take us into why was the author's note important for you.
Tanaïs:
I think the act of writing, just like reading, you're navigating a terrain that is unfamiliar. And for me, I felt I always had to go back to, why am I writing this? Why am I asserting smell and scent culture in literature? I'm a writer first and foremost. And then I found perfumery and I will say one of the challenging things about being a multidisciplinary artist is justifying the different ways that you try to understand this world, this universe, through different modes of art making. And sometimes they don't resonate with each other. And for me, scent, it calls upon me to use language in a very, it's florid, it's deep and sensuous. It's a lot of things that go against how I learn to write in an MFA program in New York in a Western context. And I wanted to give a guide or map to the reader to show that there is a reason for why we're using scent, because that was one of the ways we, as people who have experienced colonization, enslavement, genocide through our ancestral lineages, it was used to justify those acts of care and violence. And that is something that I want to explore in my writing and in how I make scent. And I don't know if that connection is that obvious to people from just from living in this world, that we feel like we need to divorce our scent of smell from how we understand where, how we got here. So I think that was important for me to give that language, to something that isn't familiar to people.
Yahdon:
So let's just jump from that. Let's jump into this discussion. So, for those of you who don't know, if you want to raise your hand, use the raise your hand function, you can find it in the reactions, if you on your phone and you can't find it just type an exclamation point in the chat and let's talk our shit. All right. So Maggie then Jules.
Maggie:
Tanaïs, I loved this book. It pours over you not just with your description, but also the history. I found a different color of highlighter, just so I could go back and go down rabbit holes and Google for some of the history and some of the things I don't know. In the prompt, we all had an answer so visceral cause smell is memory. It just brought home to me cuz I grew up in the restaurant business of just how in America, in this country we do kind of live divorced from smell. It's why when people go to Europe for the first time, when they go to Paris for the first time and they experience a different way of life.
Maggie:
That's not so different. We have coffee and baked goods and stuff here, but the way we experience things here, and I so appreciated, giving that sense. It's due. And it's reminded me, so much of its absence of a thing that we keep our cheese in the fridge and stuff like that. Like everything in America is about the scent of clean, almost more than about the scent of you or the scent of a place or the scent of a family or the scent of history.
Tanaïs:
Very sanitized. There's a very big fear of death. And I think when you are reckoning with that fear of death and ugliness and historicity of violence in America, like there is this desire to sanitize. And I think when you feel like you're bursting out of body and your skin, just for the way you smell the way your hair smells, the way your body smells, that othering that is happening, cutting down of that happening. That's some, that's what you're talking about it, that what I'm hearing. So I think like it's just interesting to hear that that becomes activated in a different environment where you're like it's so alive and that's how I feel in south Asia as well. It's just the fear of death is not so omnipresent.
Yahdon:
Jules then Amina.
Jules:
I too, and this is probably something you get from everybody who's read your book. I just was so struck with your use of language and the sort of scent as a foil to go into such multifaceted complex ideas and explorations within a relatively short period of time, it was just so profound. One early on in your author's note on page two, that I was just "oh wow, I'm gonna buckle up. This is incredible." You write "whereas a body cannot escape circumstance. In my grandmother's case, she married at 13. Did not finish school, lost her son...."
Yahdon:
I'm sorry, what page you on? Oh, page two. Okay. Right, right.
Jules:
"Lost her son and husband at a young age. A perfume allows us to, if only for a moment" and the construction of that sentence, is a literal representation of the circumstance of escape that you're pointing to in your family history, through your grandmother. But you represent the idea of what the perfume enables in that sense of escape for a moment. I mean, it was just masterful. And I guess if you would share a little bit about just how...I think about as a writer sentences like that take to edit, revision after revision. I'm just sort of curious. Was that flow? Was that really architected? I'm sort of curious about your process. Or is it poetry?
Tanaïs:
Mm. Someone called me a poet manque, which is like a poet. Someone that failed to realize their destiny as a poet. I was like, "Thanks, bro. Um, thank you for noticing that sentence." I think just going back to not having my sense of smell and talking about how traumatic that was and being in this time of illness and death, and we're not really out of it, even though we're trying to find normalcy, obviously we're all very fragile in some way. I think a veil has been thinned and I let myself feel my language in a way that I don't know if I did that for my first novel. I don't know that I learned to write that way because we're very stuck in our mind. And I think when you use your body to write and trying to connect to the body of my grandmother who died right
Tanaïs:
when I started writing, I went to a place that in Western thought might be considered gosh, or too much or not enough. And to me bringing all those thoughts together, to use a perfume as my vehicle, I am going to talk about what it means to be descended from child brides, from a land that has been dinuted and extracted. Like to me, that just makes sense. My job as the writer is to make that make sense. And that process meant trusting how I was moving through language with reactions and impressions and feelings. And I think that is something that is so hard to do and trust because it's like, am I too queer? Am I too fem? Am I too? And, and I really was like, I'm asserting fem intellectual power in this book in a way that has been destroyed disrespected and denied and Black and Indigenous and women of color and fems of color know that.
Tanaïs:
And queer people know that. And trans people know that. I wanted to speak to that place of knowledge that is just in my body waiting to be written. I just felt that entire way through the book. I just went to that place where the language is waiting for me to pull it out and to craft it into how I feel and make it make sense. So I don't know if that answers that, but it was a very embodied process.
Jules:
Really appreciate that. Thank you
Yahdon:
Amina on you.
Amina:
So, I had a lot of emotions in this book. Some were like, "oh, this sucks. I hate this shit." Let me tell you, no offense. But then the other process I was like, "yeah, I relate to that." So, thinking about last year "Minor Feelings" and I remembered a question, but my brain was so messed up at that time. I said the wrong thing as a minor feeling, a minor feeling that I always have is trauma. I always see our trauma as South Asians as being not as big. And I just segue to what you just said, watching my husband and watching all the people that I grew up with's trauma and watching how people treat them as Muslim women, like Muslim Pakistani women, me and then my Black Muslim women friends, how they get treated is not the same.
Amina:
And I know people always say, you can't compare trauma. There's no "oppression Olympics." But I mean, I feel like a lot of times, my husband couldn't get outta bed because of the things he would face day to day as a Black man. And then I watched my daughters and my kids. They don't go through the same issues. And I feel..I notice even in like "Minor Feelings" and "Crying in H Mart" a lot of non-Black authors would compare their trauma to Black trauma. And I feel, I know there's no comparison. It always offends me. I don't know why, I don't understand that trauma, but I just feel like..experiencing, my husband and my students and all of their trauma secondhand. I feel like our trauma is like, is not equivalent.
Amina:
I know, I know this is offensive to a lot of people, but another interesting thing was that the book talks about Ramadan, right? When Ramadan is coming up. And I thought that..that resonated with me because I was like, man, I'm not feeling Islam right now. I'm not really feeling Muslim. The one prayer I prayed to God was not to have my kids lose their dad. Like I lost my dad as a kid. And then God did me dirty, like, damn, like you really killed my husband. Like my four kids are little, they younger than I was. And they really don't have their dad now. But you know, so this Ramadan is like, trying to find my spiritual cuz my husband used to be, like "you said, Kali." Yesterday, I was literally looking for the Kali statue like, "oh man, but I'm Muslim.
Amina:
I bring a Kali statue, that's a disgrace to my people." But then my husband always was like, his orisha was always Shango. And we were both chaotic and our spirits were very chaotic and interesting. A lot of people know us in Philly and they just felt, "oh hell nah, here they come." Like "here comes the drama." That was always us cuz Leo, Aries, fire. We were fire all day. Now I feel like I lost a lot of my fire, but I still feel that chaos in my soul. And just that Kali, how the Orisha and I don't know a lot about Orisha, but I remember he always used to be like, yeah, I'm Shango. And I was like, I guess I don't know what that means, but now I understand. Reading your book was bringing me, of course, memories of like, "I wish he was here so I could share this right now." But it was like, I was struggling. I was like, "oh I hate this. Oh I love this. Oh my God." But you're writing. It's so beautiful. Like it's written so beautifully. That I can't take that away. But my emotions as a Pakistani woman, I was like, oh hell non-Pakistani.
Tanaïs:
It's complicated. Thank you for sharing that. And I'm very sorry. I feel like, to know love that deeply and to know loss, that deeply is very, you're just holding that all in. I feel honored that you've shared that. I wanted to talk about Bangladeshiness in a way that could be made legible to people who are not just my people in the sense that they're Bangladeshi, but also Pakistani, also Black, white, Latinx, queer, anyone to step into that. And I think for me to understand what happened in this land with Indigenous and Black people, I needed to better understand what happened to my people. And I don't wanna compare the same struggles with enslavement and genocide. But to know that we have common languages is something that helps people who want to find peace.
Tanaïs:
I don't know, like to me the project of solidarity and peace is my project to have Pakistani people read my book, is part of healing because for my parents' generation, they have a lot of negative, violent memories. And that is something I do wanna heal with people. And I think it does bring up, it brings up discomfort. It brings up anger. But my book is with anger. I'm a Aries rising, so I vibe with that anger. I think anger is so powerful and productive. And I feel like, even talking about Kali and how that's resonating with you, like as a Muslim, maybe that's complicated. There were a lot of Pakistani people who did live in the land that's called Bangladesh. They did connect to Kali and that was taken from us because we weren't allowed to have this connection. And we did have that. And like people from Bangladesh lived in Pakistan, Pakistani people had Bangladeshi prime ministers. I don't know, like this shit is not...
Amina:
My uncle was a P.O.W.(prisoner of war) During the Bengali war. Sometimes I think about..I grew up in America. So I'm like, how was he fighting other Muslims? This is confusing. I don't understand this.
Tanaïs:
But it's about, caste and
Amina:
Yeah. Caste is deep, is deep in our culture.
Tanaïs:
So I feel like you reading that to me, I'm just grateful. Like I wanted to reach people that would feel different things, complicated things. So thank you for sharing that.
Yahdon:
And you know, before I go to you, Christie, people who come to Book Club, there are these sort of interactions that Amina, and you have useful context. What I started realizing in Book Club just to zoom out was, how many books was I picking that enabled certain Book Club members who are navigating between whatever sort of binary framework I was working from as a Black American heterosexual man, right? Like I'm picking books that in some ways they're using the binary to try to work towards something a bit more unexpected. When I think of picking a book like "Minor Feelings", when I think of picking a book where the experiences are marginalized and the framework of a binary, right?
Yahdon:
It's not this or that, but it has to, like in some ways use the language of the binary to decide where it belongs. Things that sound comparative are really about how do I contextualize this experience? That's not immediately legible to people who are used to thinking as if you're not black or white, you're trying to be either black or white, right. They're either trying to be a minor minority or you're trying to be Black in it. And what I appreciated about what you do in this book is you bring so much of the intersectionality of what it means to be a human. And you articulate it through the different ways in which like, if you look at the countries, right. And you talk about, "I can't even find my people on the map." It's like, that's something that is quote unquote, the term is problematic and limiting, but like the set of universal is like something very specific, right?
Yahdon:
Like what does it mean to not have a home, but then also, what does it mean to give that non-home language enough for people to know, oh, this is something, and this is something very idiosyncratic, like to be able to witness Amina and you talk specifically about certain cues that, I don't know what the hell y'all talking about, but to be on the outside of a of conversation is part of that solidarity as well. Right? Like there's gonna be moments where I don't know what's happening, but am I willing to be present for that exchange? In America, in our culture, there's a lot of the need to insert oneself into someone else's experience. So it's like, "I don't know nothing about that, but" right. Like people will lead with "I'm not a lawyer, but" I'm not this, but," and I love these moments where like members can engage with the book in a very particular way that very few other members can. And if nothing else it's like to give members those moments when it's like this, I know in an intimate way that no one else knows, but here is where I feel empowered to be able to speak to something in a way. So, that was just beautiful. I just wanted to comment.
Tanaïs:
It's very important that you're creating that space. Cause I feel like when we talk we're flowing, but when we think about the culture now, and everyone's sort of in their lanes and their cultural milieus in context, we still are moved by a sentence or a story. There is something universal. We want to touch with that, you know? So I appreciate the space that you're creating with that.
Yahdon:
Well you know, WE create this, this is everybody. So Christie, Alex y'all, tap in.
Christy:
I just wanna say real quick that I've listened to about an hour of this, which is very beautiful. I'm very slow this month and I've physically read like 30 pages. But, I think it's beautiful, what I've read and listened to so far. And I love to hearing that page(s) 8, 9, 10 again, cause that brought up stuff that relates to what Amina just said, to what you just said Yahdon, and to something I'm reading for another book club that I was in last night, but if Alex has a real specific thing for Tanaïs, I'm gonna let Alex go first cuz mine is more like an Amina question. And I know that there's a time limit, so I'm gonna pause.
Tanaïs:
Yeah. I feel like I can, I'm just here.
Yahdon:
Right. So I mean, Alex, do you wanna, and then we come back.
Alex:
I do have a specific question, but Christy does have a specific question, too.
Alex:
Um, I can go. I don't need to...
Yahdon:
Just go. You already got the money. Just take the floor.
Alex:
I wanted to talk about something like a passage on the bottom of page 50 and the top of page 51. And this is when you're talking about, your reaction to, this person calling you a goddess and you ask, "what does it mean when you call me a goddess?" And I was really interested when you invoked the cyborg idea, because something that..I don't know exactly how to articulate this question, but something that I thought was really interesting throughout was your articulation of your femme identity and a really sensual way and a boundary blurring way. But I think I would love to know more about your perspective about.. what does it mean to claim a femme identity. And does that inform the way that you say, like at the top of 51, "Goddess feels truer to my embodiment than cyborg, even as you and I merge into one by way of technology." And then the final thing is when you said that there's "the confluence of the paramyth and the feminine divine." Could you speak a little bit more about that? I thought that was so beautiful and also a little bit confusing.
Eunice:
I was confused, too.
Tanaïs:
I feel confused right now as well. Kidding. So, I think owning any identity, it is, a melange or a syncretic confluence of different identities. And for me, femme is the way that I've come to embody or feel about this word. It's like having my femininity, but also acknowledging the divine. And I think as Amina had talked about the complex relationship to Islam and being Muslim and all this stuff, I think part of this process is acknowledging that we are coming from different milieus and cultures that collide. A cyborg being something that is part man, part technology, part human, part imagination like that to me, is not as connected to the divine as this idea of a goddess, but that idea has been used to oppress, to put people on pedestals, just to smash them down to the ground.
Tanaïs:
And I wanted to find a way to feel honored in my divinity, in what I feel is my spiritual practice and this feminine embodiment in this embodiment that has been under attack, violated, dismissed, and destroyed, like I was saying before. So the patramyth is all that, which seeks to erase that embodiment and to assert one's femininity and divinity in the face of the patramyth is this very powerful act of owning who you are. So that's just my thinking around it. I think it's maybe less confusing if you're specifying like the different context that that's coming from. Like to me, the goddess Kali that comes up in the book using that enraged divine feminine force that is used to destroy the patramyth. That is a goddess that I very much identify with. And a lot of different peoples identify with that goddess who are not just south Asian. So I think like this is sort of leading into that other discussion. Does that answer your question though?
Alex:
Yeah, it
Tanaïs:
I feel like I'm trying to understand the question, but it is coming out of this sort of like collision of the record and asserting who I am. And to me, woman doesn't do that. Woman feels very loaded in a patriarchal understanding of this embodiment. And femme feels a bit freer and owning that I feel connected to something larger than this this human existence, this material realm. So that was my thinking, behind that part.
Alex:
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. I feel especially what you just said at the end was really getting at the part that I thought was really thought provoking. And I was wondering if it was fully clicking for me and I see now it wasn't, but that is so beautiful and makes so much sense. I didn't fully understand, I think what the term femme is, or could be, I don't think I had the imagination there to think of it in that way. So I was interested that you talk about your pronouns, which to me seemed like a particular, even if it wasn't that maybe it's just my perspective, reading into this, but I thought it was a certain rejection of gender. And I think I probably just conflate the word femme with certain gender. I think that I have a lot to learn there. So this was very helpful and I really appreciate you're sharing that. That made a lot of sense.
Tanaïs:
Yeah. I think femme can belong to any body. I think that is something I keep learning as I write is how do the binaries that we think and write and exist in actually fall away and don't actually make sense and to be a CIS person, pushing myself to complicate my understanding of gender. That is a constant negotiation. I think a lot of these things keep shifting. I think finding the word femme and having that resonate, it's new language for me, but it feels lighter and more ease is in this word for me than woman. And I don't know what it's gonna be in 20 years. I don't know. I don't know, I think language is an evolution for each of us. So this is the word that's fitting, feeling good in my mouth. In my words, when I write them, that's the word that I, I feel at home in right now.
Yahdon:
Appreciate this. Christy.
Christy:
Thank you. I love that question from Alex, cause I was trying to make sense of that too. It confused me as well. So I love that. I love that all the questions are coming out. Well my question that I said is more for Amina. As I was listening and, and trying to wrap my head around, like Yahdon, you said you were trying this, like on the outside (of this conversation) trying to understand. Amina, you had said that you understood like minor traumas, am I understanding, what you're saying is that the traumas that you were experiencing felt like people weren't taking them as seriously or as they weren't as important as the trauma as your husband was experiencing as a Black man. Is that what I'm understanding? Or am I misinterpreting?
Amina:
Yeah. I don't care if people think my traumas are not (as important). It's that I think that my trauma.. My people actually think that my traumas are intense and I'm like, I didn't go through shit. I didn't go through nothing. What? I lost my father when I was young? That's so many of my students, they deal with violence every single day. Like just today, they were like, "yeah, we walk around. They be shooting, it's all good." I'm like "That shit ain't all good. That's not all good." Why do we live like this? We shouldn't live like this, mind you in Philly, we live like this, but it's not normal behavior. And so, yeah, I'm experiencing that in Philadelphia, but I have not experienced it over the years as my husband has, as my students have. And as many of my friends that I grew up with have. And again, they always say, "Amina stop comparing your trauma to ours. Your trauma is real." But to me, I'm like my trauma. Yeah, it's real. But it's, I feel it's not as intense. Like y'all giving me too much credit for something like, I don't deserve that credit
Yahdon:
But you know, what this conversation brings up? And I appreciate that you brought up "Minor Feelings," cause the one thing that "Minor Feelings" did, was how something is loaded and this is about language, right? Tanaïs, you bring up there's something as loaded as all the terms, right? I'm thinking about like, when there's this interview, where somebody was interviewing, and asked Malcolm X, this question about why he preferred to refer himself as Black. And he said, well, when you refer to somebody as "colored," you're basically implying that they're other than white. And he said, "I wanted to pick a definition that was more definitive, as opposed to comparative." Now we've worked ourselves in language to a place where even now Black can sometimes feel like a pigeon hole, whereas before it was given the context of what it came out of, the most sort of imaginative way of thinking of one's self identity.
Yahdon:
And so I say this to say that when I, when I think about "Minor Feelings" when she says, "when we say Asian, what do we mean? Do we mean South Asian? Do we mean East Asian?" And then she cracks that open and she goes, "do we mean Vietnamese?" And she starts just breaking up, the seemingly thing. "When I say Asian, who comes to mind?" And I have to think about that. And I remember leaving if nothing else with the language of like, oh, I'm when I'm thinking of someone from China or Korea or Japan, I'm thinking East Asian, when I'm thinking of someone from like, from Bangladesh or Pakistan, I'm thinking South Asia. And just even having that nuance that I did not have, like, all I had was Asian. And, and I'll be honest. I had Indian for all the other countries representing South Asia.
Eunice:
Oh Wow.
Yahdon:
It wasn't like a common term that I would say. I had the context to understand that South Asian identified something very specific because also in language I'm relying on, when I say a word, the person I'm talking to more or less has the same framework, we're working from a similar framework. And so what "Minor Feelings" introduced was another framework of like I never had to consider when she brought up the conversation of Richard Pryor's joke about the Black and white. And she goes "as a Korean woman, where do I fit into this joke? Like, do I identify with the Black woman who takes no shit? Or do I identify with the docile white woman?" And then I was like, I had never considered who gets left out of Black jokes because as a Black American, I think that we had represented in many ways, the true marginalized experience.
Yahdon:
So to see how, even as a person who comes from a marginalized experience could end the most sincere assertion of one's own identity is still limited in conceiving of other identities that are happening simultaneously. I was like, God damn, this language is always changing, is always growing. So I wanna bring it back to the book real quick. To that last chapter, you talked about the perfume as beyond the binary and you sort of break down in different ways, like more or less the etymology of being. I thought that, that also, like, when we talk about names and the definitions of words, and there is seldom a word that I see in the dictionary that has only one definition, right. It has one definition and then the definitions grow, right. Like notes in a perfume.
Yahdon:
Like you never necessarily smell one thing. Right. And so when I think about the binary as a perfume, it's like, "oh, this stinks, this smells good," but that's not really telling you what the actual smell is. Right. And so, what happens when we categorize people in our world as "oh, they smell good. Oh, they stink." Right. As opposed to like, "this person smells like Frankincense, this person smells like sandalwood." It starts to create a more expansive and imaginative way of seeing the world. How do I cultivate language in which I am both able to hit a target, that's moving but then also recognize, that the target I hit yesterday may not be where it was the next day. Right. And that's why language in all it's ways are so duplicitous is because to the extent that you can trust it, there's also a caveat in knowing that it can only capture something that by the next time you see it, you might have to describe it differently.
Yahdon:
And so when you do all that shit in the kind of culture we live in, yeah, you gonna be frustrated constantly. Cause it's gonna be constantly like slips of the tongue. And like, I said this, but I meant that. But then like the definition. So my question to you Tanaïs, was did you have any particular methodology? Cause this is the kind of book that like, you might never be able to finish cause every time you wake up, there might be a new way to describe the thing that you had drafted the day before. So did you give yourself any boundaries? You had to give yourself in the framework of writing a book, you know, you had to give yourself some boundary of like "I'ma stay in these sort of lines." For the purposes of creating some kind of language that can be held in between a book. Were there any that you can speak to?
Eunice:
Or did you just cut it? I mean, she was flowing. She was flowing.
Tanaïs:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a structure question, I think in a way, which I love a craft question. I started this book in the middle of the book. The idea of reading linear and writing linear, it's not real. Like, I'm sure all of you read and write in different ways. And to me, I started with my sexual assault and that's because I was, was like, I'm afraid to write this part and I'm not even, I don't even go into it. I don't give you that many details. It's, that's a part of the narrative actually kept it very private cuz that's my experience. But I started with the smell of Curry. I mean, we started this whole conversation with what is your foundational home smell. And I started with that. I started with this smell, that clung to every part of my life and this young man's life.
Tanaïs:
And from there I started going into the war and the war is something that for Bangladeshi people, it's very recent trauma that all of our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents experienced. So then I wrote that and it was radiating out from this heart of the book. And to me, giving enough information in the beginning and the end to hold that heart became how I wanted to work on this book. I already sort of knew that I would end with psychedelic experiences or something transcendent in some sort of way to give that sense of escaping the bounds of the material condition, even escaping the bounds of a body. And I think to know where I wanted to start meant really deepening the understanding of the history, the different systems of knowledge that created the systems of caste, how colonization function, all these different ideas that I had, I needed to find a container and a way to express that starting in the center allowed me to radiate outward to do that.
Tanaïs:
And that felt very organic. And the interludes became sort of spliced in because I make perfume and I wanna give a body to it that can be experienced when you wear Sándalo or wear Ancients or wear any of the perfumes that I make. I wanted to also give you an opportunity to see that process, those memories, they're very punctuated and intense, like drops of that fragrant work interspersed throughout. And that came at the very end. So I think it's the way we move through writing and the way it comes together as a book are kind of two different things. And this is a quilt, this is a tantra, a weaving, patchwork, pastiche. It's like bringing all these things together to make sense. And I wrote them in that way.
Yahdon:
Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that because the fact that the matter is people read it from left to right. So even though you build it out, like it's just like the way people shoot movies. Sometimes they shoot the last scene first and then they shoot like the middle but when you experience it, like Pulp Fiction is like the best example of what you're describing, right? That was one of the first mainstream movies that had changed the way people have to think about chronology. Cause it was not a linear "and then, and then, and then," it was like, people had to like experience time differently and think about relationships. But the reason why I asked the question to you is like, when you open a book, it's not like someone goes page one is in the middle of the book.
Yahdon:
And then page seven is the first page and you gotta like jump around a book. So that's why I asked that question. Cause regardless of like the interior build of it, there's still like the Western framework of, you start here and then you go here to here to here. So even when you're doing these things with form and boundaries, there's still like that larger framework again that we're talking about that still constricts, how a person might understand it. So that's why I asked, but let me go to Maria, let me go to Elizabeth and I'm gonna come to you, Amina.
Maria:
Um, yeah. So my question actually is a different pace, but it's something that you said on the book that has stuck in my head and got me thinking a lot about is, there are a few passages when you talk about how the west uses words like clean or fast fashion to sort of..
Maria:
Ostracize certain things that are not Western and also choose that frankly are more accessible to a lot of the world. You talk a lot about what fast fashion is as well and how that's different when you're coming from the countries that are producing that. And I was just wondering if you could talk more about how you think through about this? Also keeping in mind that, countries like Bangladesh and also Brazil where I'm from, a lot of our countries are the ones that are most affected by all of what these industries do. So it's a dougle edged sword. And I was just wondering, if you could talk more about like how you thought through that in writing those parts of the book.
Tanaïs:
Thank you for asking that. There's two things that came recently to me around fast fashion. I was walking in the street and I saw a poster from Rent the Runway where you get like designer dresses and the poster just says "fast fashion is garbage." And I immediately was like, and it was the green color of the Bangladeshi flag. So I was like, I should do an art project, where I just put like a red circle in the middle of every poster from Rent the Runway. Cause I immediately felt like there is no human being being imagined in this campaign. There's no person who is exploited in this quest for fashion or, you know, just their idea of what fast fashion is, is divorced from actual people. So that was one thing. And then this thing that Kim Kardashian said about people need to work and there's this meme going around where a Bangladeshi worker working in a Skims factory for Kim Kardashian's clothing line is getting paid $96 a month for creating Skims.
Tanaïs:
And this person is like, "you need to work harder," but not acknowledging again, the people who are working to death to create this empire of hers. And I think when you come from a place like Brazil or Bangladesh or Mexico or anywhere where there is this labor force that is being invisibleized to decolonize and to critique capitalism means you have to talk about those forces and to talk about Bangladesh is like what I do because that's my mission as a writer to talk about it. How do I talk about this force that is run by young women and feeding their families and allowing them to educate their children and allowing them to break out of castes labor of working in someone's home for much less money than they're even making in a factory, honestly, to have access to healthcare. These are things that are very nuanced and I actually feel very compelled to complicate this idea that fast fashion is garbage because I love fashion.
Tanaïs:
But I also think that if these Western companies were serious, they would provide more to these people, not just say, "that's not good. We need to do slow fashion." I think that there's a problem with the way that we decolonize different like artisanal kind of spaces where like, this is better because it's slow and takes a long time and it costs a lot of money, but something about the way that we've moved in capitalism to have these factories has created these opportunities for people. And you can't deny that. And in doing that has erased a lot of indigenous knowledge, which means that we need to find a way to take care of the people in those western exploitative spaces or actually eradicate that. And I think eradicating that is not so simple because there is a dependency there. So I feel it's a complicated conversation, but my first commitment is to address the feminine labor force that makes it possible in all these countries.
Tanaïs:
And you know, I've been to factories there where there's this idea it's fast and it's not fast. I write about that in the book where it's just, there's 20 people making one shirt, it's 20 families are being fed with this one shirt. And I think that is a part of the Western mind that is very toxic and actually not able to see the real complexity of how the rest of the world is, is feeding into their dreams and their desires and their needs and their wants. It's just very divorced from that. And I think when you're from a place where those things are being made, you just think about it all the time. Um, yeah.
Yahdon:
One of the things that you highlight in the language right. Is like fast fashion is garbage, is like a misnomer of talking about the people who created without knowing it.
Tanaïs:
They don't think of those people.
Yahdon:
No, yeah. Saying
Tanaïs:
Yeah. I don't even know what they're saying. They're just being horrible.
Yahdon:
Right. But when you talk about this concept of eradicating, so much of colonialism and the violence of imperialism is erasure. Whereas one of the things this book is doing is, how do you create the kind of sensory experience as you describe to be able to see as many things at once? How can these factories that exist with all the things that they've taken away still be? How do we make sense of the fact that they're still there? And what do we do with what's there, as opposed to, "let's just move on." Which is like, all right, we're gonna take these factories and we're gonna move 'em somewhere else, but we're not gonna reckon with what those factories had already done in the places that they already exist and the 20 people, the five people making one shirt. How do we make sense of both that as we "move to the next thing", it's about how are these things linked and how do you kind of hold space and what kind of language accounts for both of, as opposed to trying to erase one and replace it with another. And that's really what the language is about, right?
Tanaïs:
It's hard. I think it's hard under capitalism. I don't think any of us are divorced from capitalism, we're living in it. But it is rooted in exploitation. It's rooted in destroying people. And I just remember my last trip to India, I was on the beach and there was this woman selling beautiful Indian jewelry, cheap materials. It was like brass on different metals. Beautiful though. It was so lovely and I was buying stuff, but she had all these shirts and none of them were selling. And it was like Jack Daniels' brand t-shirt, just things that no one wants to wear. And I told her, "sister, stop spending your money on wholesaling those American shirts, because the tourists want to buy your stuff. They don't want to buy that stuff that you think is American stuff."
Tanaïs:
So there's this like disconnection between what is "Americanness" or what is Westerness and what is beautiful about the local culture in this context. I think what it just showed me was that there's some knowledges that are being eradicated by capitalism and in that violent process, we, as people living in the west yearn to have that knowledge, but it's being erased and that's like a very deep process. And I think it's scary to imagine a world in which all of that is eradicated for a McDonald's, whatever, bourgeoisie capitalist, kind of rendition of that. And it's happening all the time and we're on social media and we're seeing how big brands sort of co-op these smaller ideas and then make them very palatable for a mainstream audience it's happening in literature, it's happening in every space. I think it's like part of getting our vision very focused on liberation means seeing where that exploitation is happening and actually seeking spaces where people are creating new forms of knowledge, new kinds of art that is outside of any kind of dominance or mainstream appeal. And that's hard, it's hard to do in this context cause we're very like majoritarian in this context.
Yahdon:
Elizabeth then Amina
Elizabeth:
Thank you, Tanaïs. I was wondering, is there a question you wish you were asked more often or at all? And, what would be the answer to that question if you care to share?
Tanaïs:
Hmm.
Tanaïs:
You know, one of the things that I think about a lot is, what does it feel like to struggle as an artist to be heard for what I'm trying to say and make enough to live off of that and talking about resources and talking about how you make a living life as an artist and keep true to this path. It's a privilege and it's also so difficult to navigate because you constantly have to keep evolving. So I guess what I wanna say is, that answer changes depending on where I'm at in my process. But I think there's an appearance of, "oh, this was a process that was really easy." With this book, only one editor wanted this book and she was a young woman of color and that was it.
Tanaïs:
No one believed in this fucking book. And that is something I don't get to talk about because at the end of the day I have a finished book and it looks so put together. No, in this industry, every book is not guaranteed for people, especially people of color. And we are all we have. Yahdon is working and publishing as an editor, that makes me so happy because we need that. And I think these are the kinds of things I wanna talk about more. I wanna talk about how difficult it is to get our ideas out there when they don't hit that like mainstream sweet spot of "this book is gonna be a bestseller that makes millions of dollars." I think that's still the center of the conversation, whether we wanna talk about that or not.
Tanaïs:
I had to fight for this book so hard. I had to fight for anyone to think it was relevant. I had to hear things things like, "I don't see a book here, no, one's gonna care about this. I don't care about these characters and people..." just violence. And in that violence, you have to keep returning to yourself and say, "I matter, I exist and this needs to be read written. I need to write this." And that's what got me through this whole process. I'm writing this for myself, but also just thinking about my grandmother who read avidly and married at 13, how she lived as different nation states fought for and shed blood for whoever her identity would be at any given moment in history. I wanted to create something that honors those lineages, despite the fact that I have been told by the industry that I am giving this to, that it doesn't matter.
Tanaïs:
I get really worked up about it, but it's true. That's the truth. I haven't really been asked that, so thank you for asking that cause I'm sharing it with all of you, but the process to this book was very, very, very tough. And you'll just notice, when you're hearing about new work by authors, how many of those authors are coming from non hegemonic backgrounds, like if they're south Asian, how many of them are Bangladesh or Pakistani, most likely they're Indian, most likely they're upper cast. These are the kind of nuances that I feel like I tried to write about, but they're not necessarily what people know about.
Yahdon:
I remember Jose Antonio Vargas. I remember, during the pandemic we were reading "Dear America: Letters From an Undocumented Citizen." And he talked about how most of the chapter, one of the Book Club members was a darker skinned Filipino who was mad about the fact that, or he was at least curious about why the chapter about the Filipino history was so small in comparison to everything else. And Jose explained, the editor cut it and said it was boring. Right. And it was interesting to see the Book Club member, to your point of being able to conceive of people working in a larger sort of publishing institution, have a responsibility because all you see is "Oh, Jose's name on the front." So you're not thinking someone else cut that you say, "oh, this author doesn't care about his own history."
Yahdon:
As opposed to like these larger systems that are invisible, right. Or at least they're in the back of the book, but it's like watching the credits and looking for this person who's like the makeup artist. Unless you have context. Coming back to what you do so well in this book, which is an active empathy, you provide so much context and while so many writers and artists think...I've heard writers of color or writers who might be understood in the framework of not being mainstream, strive for getting to a place where they don't need to have context, because they're like, "well, Franzen, doesn't have to explain. And so and so doesn't have to explain," but not thinking about how that lack of context speaks to this assumption that the world that you operate from is the other world that people experience.
Yahdon:
And that active empathy of going "I want to give you context" is that way of like, how do we build those bridges between experiences? I can't just trust that I will show you what I'm holding and you'll see it. I can't trust that I'll just wave this smell under your nose and you'll just go, "oh, that's what that is." So, I just wanted to highlight that work you're doing of building context to me in a book industry is a radical act in itself because you're identifying a space that exists between what we assume people should know and what they actually have access to.
Eunice:
Absolutely.
Tanaïs:
Thank you for saying that. Elizabeth's question just really brings that up for me. I want Yahdon and Elizabeth, like, I want you to get this book. I want you to get it. And that has nothing to do with the white publishing industry. We're not even necessarily reading books the way that they think we're reading books, but I want you to get my history because we're working towards liberation on another time scale, another kind of work is happening. That's very important to me. And to have these people tell me that my people don't matter, even though..
Tanaïs:
Richard Nixon And Henry Kissinger, were down to have nuclear war in our land. To me, that is the thing that I feel called to talk about because the clothes on our backs, the cabs that are being driven, the food that's being sold, my people are in all these different industries and the city that I live in. We're in every(place) and, but invisible. And I think so many people can relate to that hyper visibility and visibility kind of continuum. And I think our work as writers and artists and thinkers is to continually assert that our people and our stories need to be recorded because that project of dominance is not to do that for us. It will never include us. And this is not just white people doing this to me. This is Indian people writing a land of rural backwardness about where I'm from, people who look like me doing this, that's part of what's compelling the work. So thank you for acknowledging that the process is about creating context. It's very much about that.
Eunice:
Plus who wants to read the same type of book over and over again?
Tanaïs:
Thank You.
Eunice:
Hello. Give me some flavor.
Yahdon:
So Amina and Alex, I'm gonna let, y'all get the last two and then, we gonna let Tanaïs get to your next obligation.
Amina:
I really, really, really wanted to share cuz somebody had said something about "who wants to read that?" Which we're just talking about right now. And I remember thinking when she said "when I was a kid, I didn't read anything that represented me." And as a kid, I never cared about that. But my daughters do. And it's interesting because specifically, my 14 year old, she takes pride in being Black and Pakistani. She tells everybody "I'm Black and I'm Pakistani" and this little Pakistani boy says, "You ain't Pakistani. You just a Black girl." And she said, "no, I'm both." And now he's actually picking on her and her other girlfriends and like calling them the N word. He got the little white boys calling her the N word and she's like, "Ma I can't take it.
Amina:
He's saying sexist and homophobic things. And he's just really saying inappropriate things to us. And we went.." And I'm like, "okay, get it, girl." But I said, you know, what, if any book that you write, especially that relates to teenagers about south Asian, Pakistani specifically, there are children that wanna read that or teenagers that wanna read that. But page 73 actually made me laugh because, Bandit Queen is a movie that (I watched with)my only Pakistani friend ever had growing up. We were watching Bandit Queen. We weren't allowed to watch it. And there's a part where she goes, cuz we were reading the translation, it talks about her fucking somebody. And we said, "oh, let's go back and find out what that word is." And you're talking about language. And I said, I knew that's what that word meant. My uncle, my, my, my uncle used to be like mother Jordan. Then my mom would be like, you never heard that curse word in my family. I'm like, your brother used to say that. I know that means motherfucker. I know it does. I don't care what nobody says.
Tanaïs:
So
Amina:
When you said that, like going back to language, like there was like a lot of words that I was like, oh, that's, you know, it was like, I could relate. I'm like, oh, I know that, that word, you know, I know these words cuz you use a lot of Hindi words and um, but Bengali is similar, but not like Hindi at all and Punjabi that not. So, um, it takes a while and Arabic, a lot of our, like you said, Niaz but my friend she's a, her mom was a black Panther, but she lived in Iran. So she fluent in Fary so most black Muslim know Arabic and the prayer in Arabic is a lot, but she's the only one that knows Niaz and you said Niaz and I was like smile. And I was like, yeah, a lot of Americas don't know the word Daz is Persian.
Amina:
That means prayer or Hoda is, uh, you know, all these little Persian words that are in our language. So, you know, it's, I liked again, language, the different language, words or AAM say when you were like, when you were at the Atali tell and you were like AAM saying, and I guess I can't say it as relaxed and I would've been like calmed down. So that was, I, I really appreciated that. Um, I mean we hear Hindi a lot because of Bollywood, but it's not the same when it comes from, uh, somebody at Pakistani or Bengali. So,
Tanaïs:
And just read it. Yeah, no for sure. Thank you.
Amina:
Thank you,
Yahdon:
Alex. You have the floor for the last comment of the evening.
Alex:
This is just a quick question. I thought of it, like when I was listening to you talk about the anecdote with the editor, cutting out the history. I wanted to know what the like fact checking process was like for your book, because I was thinking of..I don't know her exact phrase, but Saidiya Hartman's idea about the archive. So what's there, what's missing, but how do you fact check something? If someone is like denying a certain fact about you or maybe to back up a second, what was your research process like? And then was there from your publishing house perspective, anyone that was running through it being like, "let me some people" or let me look at the archive. How does that work?
Tanaïs:
I'm meticulous. I don't know what it is in my chart astrologically. I've read sources from so many angles and documented every source, articles, books in academia, there is an influx of knowledge being created around the themes that are in this book. So I had modern day sources to pull from as well as old sources to pull from. So the way that that works is the first pass of your book goes through a copy editor. And they do this initial taking stock of all the different sources and I'm sure they're using Google, going to the J Store articles, trying to figure out if what I'm saying can be verified. I didn't like make the citations that visible in the book because to me that takes away the literary quality of the book.
Tanaïs:
It's not an academic book at the end of the day. So all of the things that feel like historic fact are assembled together from all this research I did mostly through academic books, interviews, articles, things that you can trace it all back to knowledge that has been verified and verified again and again. And the things that feel like, "oh, you know, this might have something that contradicts," we did have conversations that came up that were, "well, this version of this thing says this" and I just had to say "well, this is how I want to present it". And I vouched for what I wanted to say in that moment. I think when you talk about other languages, there's this one part where I'm talking about language and the word for rape is not in Urdu and I had an interviewer who's Pakistani who asked me about that part.
Tanaïs:
And they said, that made me think about this word in our language and how it doesn't exist. And it opened up a whole new conversation. So sometimes something that is established as knowledge when presented from another point of view, it's just adding to that conversation. And this idea of history or fact is destabilized because one person's source or a version of history is not going to be the way another actor or player in history sees that information. So I wanted to honor the multiplicity in how that one act of sexual violence during a war is experience from different people and players who are perceiving that act. There's no clear answers. And I think that's the problem with history is that it tries to establish that and you just cannot do that.
Eunice:
So you should have told her to kiss your ass
Yahdon:
But we probably wouldn't have had this conversation we having now. So sometimes you just gotta keep that one on the inside and save it, because the book existing is the biggest ass kiss.
Eunice:
Okay. Okay,
Yahdon:
There you go. Then you go. So before we take this group picture Tali I want to honor the fact that when we did the prompt, I didn't get to you and I want to get to you before we do it. So can you please share with us, when you think of home, what it smells like. You wasn't getting outta here without that, I'm sorry.
Tali:
I was kind of hoping you wouldn't come back to that.
Yahdon:
No, no. That would make no sense.
Tali:
Thanks. But before I do get to it, thanks for the conversation. There was something about this book that kind of sucks you in just also because of the writing, but the sense and the poetry, the way you write and the history and the different layers. There was so much there, that at times I had to take a gulp of breath and put it away for a day or two and say, okay, now I'm ready for the next round because it really engulfs everything. But that's also what senses sometimes do. So I love how it all came together. The question of what smells come to mind to me...funny. It was something that I think Marcy said, my mom is a heavy smoker too. So I'm just used to smelling smoke and cigarettes. And I grew up in Israel and Jerusalem in the middle east, everybody smokes. So it's kind of there all the time. So on the one hand I'm used to it and that's a smell of home, but so it's something that I don't really smell like when I'm in it, I don't smell it. But let's say when I go visit, I, it feels like home. But then I come back to the states and only then I smell my clothes and I'm like, oh, that's the smell of smoke. So it's just an interesting situation where you smell it and you do, and thank, Yahdon.
Tanaïs:
Thank you
Yahdon:
You're welcome. So let's get this picture.
Yahdon:
All right, so you gonna do it 1, 2, 3, hold on. We got a second page 1, 2, 3. All right. So thank you you for joining us. Thank
Tanaïs:
You. That is amazing. I just love it. And I wanna say, if you didn't get through reading, I recorded the audio book. I feel like that's a great way to experience the book. Please enjoy
Cherrelle:
I got the audio and I did the reading. It was great. Cuz you're pronouncing the words correctly and I said "yeah, that's my girl!"
Tanaïs:
Reading is hard sometimes, so thank you all. It was so wonderful. Very thoughtful questions, beautiful event. Yahdon thank you for choosing this book. It means a lot to me.
Yahdon:
Thank you for writing it. It enabled our girl Amina to have a human moment in a time that she needed that connection. So I appreciate you.
Amina:
I did. I did. And right before, Yahdon the thing that you had it right before Ramadan, it's the weekend, this weekend is Ramadan. Yes. And then the book's talking about Ramadna and yoga and I said "that's what I was trying to do this week, this month." And I said "Damn, I'm feeling this" Thank you. I appreciate it
Tanaïs:
You get to go inward. Yes. Yes.
Yahdon:
All right. So you go get to your next thing. We we gonna jump onto the next thing. thank you. All right.
Yahdon:
Littest members for this month, I mean, come on. There is a phenomenon in Book Club that a person who attends the first meeting be wildin'. Elizabeth, we gotta give you a shout out, that question. I'm gonna ask that question when I don't got questions. That's question you ask when you aint do your homework, but you just put everything on the person. "What's the question that you wish you were asked and if you were asked, wha twould be your answer?" Amina, it's been for as long as you've been in this club, and I want to definitely take a beat, you were one of the people for me as a person who ran Book Club, to see the commitment of you taking that bus from Philly to Brooklyn before there was a pandemic, it's incredibly an honor, to be able to give you a space that enables you to continue to find community and connection in this time of morning, and that mourning is never gonna end, but I'm glad that you have us to be able to process that and work through it at least every last Wednesday.
Yahdon:
So of course, we put you on the map with that. Alex, with the questions, the backwards and forth and the feminine and the cyborg. We building and moving language. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. Jules as well, what you was bringing. This is just a lit ass Club. We just lit, you know, we just lit. All right. So are y'all ready for the next book book for April? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool. So we did looking at the list lot of memoir, essay, nonfiction. So I want to jump us into some fiction but something I've been learning.
Yahdon:
And I've been thinking about, I don't know how many people are familiar with the discourse around fiction. Whether it be that "bad art friend" article that came out in the New York Times about the woman who took a woman's Facebook note and turned it into a story, or the story of the woman who wrote this essay on Slate, about a writer whose short story on the New Yorker went viral had taken parts of her life and repurposed it in fiction. And there's been a lot of debate amongst fiction writers amongst the, I would call the "initiated" about what is, and what isn't ethical fiction, what fiction can and can't do. But for what I would call "civilian people," people who don't study it, people who don't write it, people who don't like publish it, for whom the stakes of this is very low.
Yahdon:
I paid attention to how many people did not know about this conversation and have very little context to care about what was at stake, right? And so, as a person who works in this, not only, does the book serves as a sort of interlocutor between these worlds of people who create these words and books and the world of people who are just looking for something to read. What I'm seeing a lot, is the way fiction operates in the wider culture of our society is almost like reading the Onion and not knowing what satire is. What do I mean by that? I mean that there are many people who read fiction thinking it's memoir. There are many people who read fiction thinking it's nonfiction. And by that, I mean, the basic premise of fiction is if you're reading it, looking for what's real, that means you're reading it on the lines of non-fiction one of the things I'm learning to articulate, right?
Yahdon:
When you're reading fiction, what you're reading for is, and what you're thinking about is, "what on the page is imagined?" Which is why, when it comes to the way readers engage with the Harry potters, the Stephen Kings, the J.R. Tolkiens and the George Martins, the reason why that kind of fiction is so much more easily "graspable", because there's a clearer distinction between the world that is real, and the world that's imagined. But when you're reading, say, "Beloved," which if anyone's read Toni Morrison's "Beloved," there's a whole ghost telling that story. That shit is a whole ghost story, but because it's set during the time of slavery, the visceralness of the experience, it feels real. Kendrick, same thing.
Yahdon:
This navigating between the seventies and slavery, it's a whole time travel plot. Shit is like back to the future. But cause of the visceralness, it's hard to make those distinctions. So for that reason, something I want to do with us as a Book Club, which is both giving us books, but also giving us context to understand the worlds we're entering. I picked a book of work fiction by to me, one of the best world builders and imaginary players, so to speak. Edward P. Jones "Lost in the City." Anybody who writes, I know Kate was like, "oh man, the man went to Edward P. Jones." This is a short story collection. If you remember the short story collection we read last year, um, Deesha Philyaw's " The Secret Lives of Church Ladies"
Yahdon:
This is a book where, Edward P Jones takes the world to DC and he imagines it through different perspectives of the people who live there. I wanna read to y'all why I picked this book and particularly this edition because just like we talked this entire evening about the necessity of context, how it helps, how context is an act of empathy to help people understand what they may not understand without us knowing. And I think one of the more hostile things we can do is assume what people know without asking what they don't and trying to build that bridge between it. But one of the things he says in this book, he says, I'm gonna read the first three paragraphs, just so you get context.
Yahdon:
""The stories in this book may have had many beginnings depending upon where my heart and mind were at the point of their creation; but none of those beginnings have to do with the lives of the people among whom I grew up, or the people I read or was told about. Aside from perhaps five or so percent of "The First Day," these people and their actions in these 14 stories were born in my imagination. And I cannot say that enough times because so many out there have forgotten or never knew, what miracles the imagination unfettered, fed by a reasonably working brain and sufficient blood in the veins can manage. I never knew or heard of one child, girl or boy, who raised pigeons. I never knew or heard of four high school girls who set out for a foreign country called Anacostia and returned from that place to a horror that had never existed for them before. No young man I know of worked and came of age in a small store and felt the need for a larger world."
Yahdon:
"There was never an old woman who went out first to buy oatmeal and then into a government office and came face to face with what terrible things her beloved Washington, D.C., Had done to her after decades and decades. But all the streets and avenues and roads those characters and the other people in this book go up and down are real, or were real once upon a time when I knew them as a boy. The Myrtle Street, the pigeon girl lived on in is on no modern map, only the one that exists in my head. Many of the buildings these people live in, work in die in, are gone, have been renovated to the point where that boy would not recognize them today. The store, as the story's narrator himself says, became many things after he went on with the rest of his life. In the physical world, the space eventually became an empty lot, but the man who had been the boy can close his eyes and command mind and memory to take him back to where he can open the door and hear the gentle tinkle of the bell over the door immediately before the smell of coal oil from tiny pump just inside comes to him, not all that pleasantly, like some clumsy greeting. The mind, once infuse with life, has a hard time imagining empty lots."
Yahdon:
And so this book is going to give us, somewhat fiction as a framework, gives us the gift of the imagination as a muscle. And so I realized one of the most difficult things about a broader culture that we live in. And you said this Alex, when like when the news is stranger than fiction, then what role does fiction have in a country where what we witness every day feels like it was imagined. So it's important for us to understand that what we will be engaging with directly is our imagination. So when you are reading this month, while the things that you're gonna read feel real, I'm excited to have a conversation about what you identified was imagined and what sort of imaginings you had to do to make the worlds that we experience on the page, feel real. All right. So this book is coming to you. We gonna hit these books getting out before the 5th again. We're gonna do two months in a row. I'm going for it . I wish you a good night and I will see y'all next month.