How Scent Returned My Life to Me

This is Per Fumar, a column by Mishka Hoosen about the olfactory art of perfumery and how it has impacted his life.

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When my seizures come, it’s almost always a smell that sets them off.

The scent of bricks, sometimes, or the scent of menstrual blood. Sometimes all it takes is a single breath, and time collapses in on itself. I’m five years old again, or thirteen—the world distorts, color and light shifting and deforming until I don’t know any separation between me and the wall I fall against. The world concentrates into a screaming in my lungs, and my muscles spasm until I feel I’ve been electrocuted. Every twitch sends my nerves screaming, and the world swims until my brain can’t process sight at all.

When these happen, I often lose my sense of time for hours afterwards. I was about five when they started. I would go catatonic, or claw at myself as they happened. We had no explanation for the seizures then, but they almost always started with a smell.

Scent is notorious for collapsing time. Any reader of Proust can tell you that. But scent, for me, has always existed in the troubled borderland where narrative becomes a fraught thing. A smell could be a doorway, or a window from which I’d jump. Because of my trouble with sensory perception, the line between my body and the world would become blurred. When that is combined with trauma, time takes on a different, more troubled aspect.

For a long time, I didn’t have any memories before the age of seventeen. Though my parents always did all they could to protect me, growing up as an autistic child in a difficult neighborhood in Johannesburg meant that there were times when my disability left me vulnerable to abuse. Because of this, I dissociated heavily and often.

When my seizures grew worse, I started losing whole months of memories to them. Each one became a rip in the framework of my memory, a place where language and cognition were scrambled, until it was impossible for me to function in my ordinary life.

I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where doctors posited everything from early onset schizophrenia to temporal lobe epilepsy. EEG scans came back normal, an MRI showed some brain damage, but nobody could give me a straight answer. Instead, I was put on antipsychotics and anticonvulsants, and told gravely by my doctor at the time that if the seizures continued at the rate I was experiencing them—at that point three or four times a month—I’d have full-blown dementia or be braindead by the time I was thirty. I was nineteen.

At the time, no psychologist or psychiatrist could help me understand what was happening to my mind, so I resolved to do things my own way. I quit drinking and, since I didn’t know how much longer I’d have to enjoy it, resolved to throw myself into life as voraciously as I could: into adventures, relationships, the world itself. I was determined to distract myself from the chaos that seemed to lurk around me like an invisible minefield.

Still, there were these gaps of time that I couldn’t account for, and through it all—the distractions and obsessions, the many ways I tried to outrun what hounded me—I was haunted by an aching emptiness. Who are you without memories? Who are you if you can’t tell the story of how you got here?

And then I discovered perfume. Apprenticing with a perfumer, I learned how time could be collapsed with the smell of vanilla and bread, until I am six years old in my grandmother’s kitchen again. How the scent of mushroom could send a shiver down my spine, a memento mori that entered into my very breath, reminding me of how brief and fragile my one life is. I’d stand in front of an orange tree in the Company’s Garden, a short walk from our apartment in Cape Town, memorizing the differences in scent between the blossoms at dawn, afternoon, and dusk. I learned, slowly, to let things other than pain inhabit me.

Something in it hinted at a larger pattern: a way of reconciling the body and mind in a way that created a story, a thing made whole again. But it was incomplete, tentative still, and for the most part, I learned to live with the quicksands that trauma could open up in front of me. I worked, and lived, and tried to reconcile the many gaps in my memory that had no words to make them whole. I walked on eggshells, but I walked.

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Then Covid-19 happened. South Africa went into lockdown pretty early, and the panic was palpable. As I’m medically vulnerable, we started isolating right away. And when I first heard that many people with Covid-19 experienced anosmia—a loss of their sense of smell—I had a full-blown panic attack. As a person with a chronic illness, I’m no stranger to the ways in which our bodies can betray us, but the thought of losing my sense of smell has caused me anxiety that seems out of proportion relative to all the other terrifying things we have found out about the virus. I became paranoid and withdrawn, and my mental health started to deteriorate, until I experienced the worst set of seizures yet.

In France, even before the pandemic, where anosmia has been rigorously studied for years, support groups for anosmics meet regularly to mitigate the isolation that many of them report. High rates of suicide have also been observed among people who, for one reason or another, have lost their ability to smell. As someone who deals in perfumes, I feared, more than anything, the loss of a world I had fought so hard to live in. I feared exile from the broader family and rhythms of the world, and it drove me mad.

Before lockdown, I revelled in wandering the streets and gardens of Cape Town, breathing in the scents of Casablanca lilies at the Adderley flower market, the scents of coffee pouring from the doors of the little cafés, or the scents of fruit and dust from the roadside vendors. At the height of the pandemic, the flower market stood empty for months, and many of the little corner stores and cafés shuttered. The family of things—of work, people, the city’s rhythms of coming and going—were undone overnight. In our apartment, there were days we could smell the scent of the sea; on a clear day, we could see waves sparkling in the distance. But it, and the world, felt achingly removed.

The family of things—of work, people, the city’s rhythms of coming and going—were undone overnight.

Of course, had it not been for the quick action taken to curb the spread of the virus, many more lives would have been lost by now. But in the rushing crowds trying to stock up on supplies for a lockdown that had no clear end in sight, in the terrifying information that has been released daily about the virus, and in the brutal actions of police enforcing lockdown regulations on the most vulnerable, fear was palpable in the city in a way I have never experienced before.

Many experts have spoken about the spike in mental health crises during the ongoing pandemic. Isolation from the world made me turn in on myself: I was severely depressed and floridly manic by turns. The seizures started again, and I began mixing up times and people, certain that time itself was bending itself around my panic. Even my sense of smell seemed distorted. I lost all track of reality.

For over a month, I was riddled with paranoia, loosed from time. I thought I was a child again, thought I was a teenager, and then thought I was at death’s door. I heard voices talking to me from my music playlists, convinced there were secret messages being transmitted to me from the dead. I couldn’t sleep, could barely eat. I believed seeking medical assistance would lead to me contracting Covid-19, subsequently infecting and killing everyone in my family. These were not rational thoughts, but they carried in them a grain of truth rooted in my deepest fears.

Eventually, I had to be taken into a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. I emerged more sane, but emotionally ragged. It felt as though my senses had been taken to the breaking point and snapped. I was depressed, disconnected, sluggish. And what frightened me most was that my very senses seemed dulled. I couldn’t discern smell. I couldn’t connect with touch.

In desperation, I sought help from a sangoma, a traditional healer. On our video call, the smoke from scented herbs painted the air of the screen. She told me things about my family, my ancestry, that seemed impossible to know, things about my illness that caused me to shudder and flinch. But I listened.

As she spoke, something seemed to fit into place. She explained how there is more than one way to remember, and that sometimes, the body’s remembrance can no longer be ignored. She advised me to revisit the herbal remedies and plant knowledge passed down to me from my grandparents, advised me to draw—all I could draw was herbs and flowers—and to listen, softly and intently, to what my body wanted in those moments.

And what it wanted, all the time it seemed, was scent. The camphor bitterness of angelica crushed in the fingers, the dusty sweetness of kapokbossie, the sharp vivid tang of rosemary. I started carrying a little bundle of crushed herbs around my neck—lavender and dandelion root, wormwood and cape snowbush. My loving partner brewed cup after cup of buchu tea. My best friend brought me rooibos sweetened with honey. And little by little, my senses returned to their places.

Little by little, my senses returned to their places.

I remembered the sea salt and honeyed moss smell of the fynbos that bloomed in the Company’s Garden. The orange tree was still there, breathing its scent into the air. We bought herbs from a local co-op, and a stout sprig of rosemary flowered on our windowsill. I revisited the vagaries and particularities of oakmoss, galbanum, and rosemary from the few sample bottles I’d saved in a drawer. And I learned that these things—the raw stuff of the world, vegetable, animal, mineral—could be woven together again, until they told a story.

What’s more, this story was rooted in the body, in the place that remembers when our minds cannot hold it all, or put words to it. When I smelled blood in a perfume like Eau de Protection, it was tangled with roses, and became something regal and ethereal, full of old power and magic. When I smelled it in Bull’s Blood, it was laced with gunpowder and tobacco, full of fire and fury, ready to stand and fight. Suddenly, the bare bones of the world could be made into more than the sum of their parts. Here, returned to me intact, was an alchemy that turned the bare material into something with a mind of its own, something that could speak, and live, in a way that defied and transformed the old ways in which I’d perceived them before.

Maybe it was the magic inherent in the herbs, or maybe it was the love that accompanied the giving of them, but little by little, my body started to learn that the world could be touched lovingly, that memory could be held softly. The scent of rooibos brought back the days when my father would sit with me after school, tears fresh on my face from the day’s bullying and abuse, and he’d brew me tea to soothe my nerves again. The salty rasp of rosemary brought back the days I’d spend at the sea when I was twelve, diving into the water again and again, testing the strength of my will and body against an immensity that comforted rather than terrified me. And with each memory that returned, my body calmed. The memories from all those years came back, but they had their place now. They could be remembered without destroying me.

I learned that the raw stuff of life is only changed by the meanings we give it, that memory could be dissolved by scent, but also redeemed. Sometimes the world is too much for us, but sometimes it holds the things that bring us back to it. There are still times when my senses are too strained to take in anything calmly, but there is richness enough in the world that abides, waiting until we hunger for it again.

Memory is the same. Pain is not our only inheritance. Delight can abide as much as the things that haunt us do. Sometimes we need both. Sometimes the world hands it back to us transformed. And in the process, we are too.

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