Mishka Hoosen

Profile Photo

Mishka Hoosen is a writer and researcher from Johannesburg in South Africa. Their work has appeared on the Ploughshares Blog, and in Bare Fiction, Plume, Illuminations, Rolling Stone South Africa, The Missing Slate, and others. They write extensively on perfume, madness, and the body. They are currently working on a novel, "Through Smoke", which will examine perfume as an embodiment of desire and remembrance in the postcolonial city.

Stories

Cover Photo: Photograph by Emily Wang/Unsplash
How Perfume Gives Me Peace in My Genderfluidity

There is no opposite to reconcile. I’ve been both bride and groom, loved and lived as both, since both lived in me.

Aug 04, 2022
Cover Photo: Production still via A24
Dev Patel in ‘The Green Knight’ Helped Me Manage My OCD

Many times I could have said the same as Gawain, terrified in the face what was to come, “I’m not ready. I’m not ready yet.”

Nov 23, 2021
Cover Photo: Photograph by Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash
How Scent Returned My Life to Me

The raw stuff of life is only changed by the meanings we give it. Memory can be dissolved by scent, but also redeemed.

Jan 11, 2021
Cover Photo: A photograph of a bottle of the perfume Elizabeth Taylor White Diamonds: a sleek elegant tube of clear fluid with a band of faux diamonds at the neck
In Elizabeth Taylor’s White Diamonds, I Find the Women of My Family

For many people, they smell White Diamonds and, instantly, they melt. They remember their mother’s indulgent laugh; the arms that held them.

Apr 08, 2020
Cover Photo: An image of colorful tarot cards that overlap one another
What Tarot Taught Me About the Stories We Tell

I’ve read that trauma disrupts time. That violent events are recorded differently in the brain.

Mar 25, 2020
Cover Photo: A silhouetted individual spraying perfume from an ornate bottle as an image of swans on a lake appear in the cloud of fragrance
In Discovering Perfume, I Discovered Who I Am

Before I transitioned, perfume was the only thing I felt safe to experiment with. It worked in the realm of the invisible, the as-yet-unsayable.

Jan 29, 2020
Cover Photo: An illustration of the author in silhouette against a stained glass window, beyond which is the night sky on fire
The Smell of Notre Dame Burning

This smell of Notre Dame burning was the smell of books older than all our lives—on fire.

Dec 18, 2019
Cover Photo: An apothecary table filled with aromatic herbs, plants, and oils in different glass containers
When Chronic Pain Dulls My Senses, Perfume Helps Me Reclaim Them

I learned that kind of hard-won glamour; that we should have beauty, however much the world wants to keep it from us.

Sep 30, 2019
Cover Photo: Still from "Camelot"/Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
‘Camelot,’ the Hollywood Failure That Taught Me to Live Again

I think now, what is life if not a rather ridiculous, fumbling, histrionic, financially ruinous, unwieldy thing?

Aug 21, 2019