This is Eric Glass. On This American Life, we like stories that surprise you. For instance, imagine finding a new hobby and realizing to do this hobby right, according to the ways of the masters. There's a pretty good chance that you're going to have to bend the law to get the materials that you need. If not break it. Yeah. To break international laws. Your life stories, really good ones. This American Life.
Before we get started a note to listeners that this episode includes exploration of racist material. The other day, I was reading this book about the first crusade. It's a moment in history that anyone who knows me knows I have long been obsessed with.
And in one passage, there was a detailed description of what the city of Antioch was like then. There were details about the way the streets looked, the size of the citadel, how loud the central market was. But there was something noticeably missing. No description of what it smelled like. It was weird because I register a lot of thoughts and memories in my head through smells. I'm sure you do too.
And I realized I almost never stopped to think about how or why I smell things. Like, why does a rose smell like a rose? Would the people in medieval Antioch have described the smell of a rose the same way I do? Well, Christina Kim, a reporter and producer on the ThruLine team, has been thinking about those kinds of questions a lot over the last few years. The other day, she even described smell as a superpower that allows us to time travel.
Yeah, she went deep on some of the big questions about our sense of smell and ended up on this winding historical journey. And now you get to go on it too. Christina is going to take it from here. Ever since I was a little girl, I've been enveloped by the smell of lemon, rosemary, and spices. It's the smell of this Spanish perfume called Álvarez Gómez Agua de Colonia. the classic fragrance that's been made in Spain since 1912, that my grandmother, mi yaya, and my mother have always worn.
It's the smell of my yaya sitting on the couch in Madrid, with her legs crossed, wearing her kitten-heel house slippers, reminiscing about being a little bit wild, un poco traviesa, as she reaches over with her soft hand to give mine a squeeze. It's the smell of my mom running after me whenever I'm in my childhood home in California, with a bottle of it, trying to spritz some over my head, a fus fus before we leave the house to smell fresh.
And the smell of her reassuring hugs, which let me know I am never alone. The top note is crisp, sharp, like a Mediterranean lemon whose yellow-hued brightness makes my nose tingle. Once I let the inhale get to my chest, I reach the fragrance's heart note, and it becomes more green and fresh. And finally, when my breath makes it all the way to my belly.
The base note rounds everything together. It's like the umami part of the fragrance. This kind of fullness and richness that expands throughout my whole body. Like a soft hug. Like home. The act of smelling a perfume is like hearing a full orchestra. In order to actually smell it, your nose has to parse through thousands of different molecules, translate them, and then transmit it to your brain. so that you can smell what you recognize as your favorite scent. Be it a perfume or a rose.
And that's just what has to happen to smell a single thing. The reality is that for most of us, our noses are parsing through a massive number of different odor molecules a day. And it's so easy to take this riot of smell for granted. Unless it disappears. In the summer of 2022, I became one of the 15 million estimated people to have lost their sense of smell because of COVID.
The minute I noticed that I wasn't able to smell anything, I ran around from room to room sniffing anything I could get my hands on. I went to the kitchen and opened a jar of peanut butter. Nothing. I took a spoonful of peanut butter and put it in my mouth. Instead of the sweet, salty, nutty flavor I expected, all I could sense was how it felt. A thick, flavorless paste, sticking to my tongue and gums.
Finally, I ran to my bedside table where I kept my giant glass Art Deco bottle of Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia. I took a big breath, waiting for the fresh herbal scents to take over and make me feel better. But all that I inhaled was an empty void of what I knew was there, but I could no longer access. It felt like my tie to my mom and my grandmother was severed. After I gathered myself, I did what any journalist would do next. Hello? Okay, you are here. Okay, wonderful.
And that meant calling up someone who's dedicated their life to studying and understanding smell. My name is Rachel Herz. I'm a neuroscientist and I've been studying the psychological science of smell for over 30 years. Rachel is the person for all things smell. She's the author of The Scent of Desire, Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. And she immediately empathized with how I was feeling.
The fabric of our existence, literally the threads that weave together, how we feel within the world, both with other people, with our past experiences, and fundamentally with ourselves, is... deeply deeply connected to our sense of smell I felt vindicated I wasn't being overly dramatic this was a big deal And when that becomes broken, those relationships, those outer relationships and our inner relationships with ourself start to really stumble and fumble and fall.
But even though our sense of smell is such an important facet of our lives, it turns out we still don't seem to know that much about it. We really do not still fully have a grasp or grip on how it is that we perceive smells. So it really still is this enigma. The deeper I dug into what we know about smell, the more I started to realize how much our sense of smell has shaped not just our personal experiences, but also the world we live in and our understanding of the past and the present.
And it got me thinking about how smell is kind of like the science of history, because it's so wrapped up in who we think we are and how we remember the past. Which kind of makes it the perfect ThruLine episode. So here we go. I'm Christina Kim, and today on Thrilline from NPR, I'm asking you to go on a little adventure to unpack the enigma of smell. We're going to explore how olfaction actually works.
from our nose to our brain, how smell has been used to legally divide us, and finally, how harnessing our sense of smell and memory can make us all into time travelers. Coming up first, how we know what we know about the science of smell. This is Khadijah from Seattle. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Ho, ho, ho.
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Part one. To smell is to feel. It's 1988, and a young scientist named Linda Buck is sitting in a laboratory at Columbia University, struggling to wrap her brain around a question. That's... one of the things I love about doing science. It's really puzzle solving. What you find is so beautiful. Nature's designs are so elegant.
This is Linda Buck's voice from an interview she did with the American Academy of Achievement. She sat at her desk in the lab, astonished by a simple reality, one of nature's elegant designs. one many of us take for granted, I know I did, smell. Well, at that point in 1988, scientists didn't really understand it at all. The first question was,
How you can detect up to 100,000 chemicals in the environment in the nose. How was that done? I became completely obsessed with this. This was it. I had to solve the problem. It may seem unbelievable, but scientists didn't understand exactly how the nose and brain were able to process and make sense of the wide range of chemicals we breathe in. So I decided that the first step had to be...
to find out how odorous molecules or odorants are detected in the nose. Nothing else mattered. From that research bench at Columbia. Linda began her quest to understand how the sense of smell worked. This was actually a very high risk. And in retrospect, it was potentially suicidal. I mean, potentially suicidal in terms of a career. Linda, along with her mentor Richard Axel, invested much of her time in this research.
research that was not well-funded and largely ignored. And she passed on other job offers to study other topics along the way. I'm a very empirical scientist. I don't theorize because... What usually happens is that the answer, the biological mechanisms that are used, are usually far more elegant than the theories that people come up with.
She ran experiment after experiment using rats, an animal whose sense of smell works similarly to humans. She studied their genetic code relentlessly. This went on for years. And then, one day. Eventually, it was a Saturday night, I think, and I was in my kitchen. Sitting in her house, looking at the results of her experiments, she recognized a pattern. And I had colored pens. And I had written down the sequence. Her life's work. The genomic sequence of the smell receptors in the nose.
It was really beautiful. I remember just being stunned looking at them when I first had the first set of them. Linda couldn't believe what she was seeing. And I had a friend. in the other room who was watching tv or something i kept running back and forth saying look at this can you believe this it was like patchwork quilts where bits and pieces were exchanged
between the different receptors to make proteins that would have different, be able to detect different odorants. Linda and Richard Axel solved the puzzle. They'd found 1,000 smell receptors. It was just absolutely thrilling. Over the next decade, Linda Buck, Richard Axel, and their collaborators continued to build out how our brains perceive smell.
which then led to them winning the Nobel Prize in 2004. Rachel Herz says the Nobel Prize made Linda Buck into a rock star in the science world. Suddenly, everyone was paying attention. And so a lot of people who were working in the molecular biology and biochemistry and other systems went to study smell. And this led to basically an explosion of research looking at the molecular basis. of how the sense of smell works.
The thing that surprised me the most about all of this was we, as in humanity, knew very little about this sense that I was now learning to live without. Like the smell of onions sizzling. rain on warm concrete, or my yaya's perfume, how does that go from out there in the world into my nose, up into my brain, and become a fundamental part of my memories, emotions, my story?
Well, after Linda Buck's discovery, we have a better understanding of how we smell what we smell. What smells are is that there are chemicals that float through the air. Air, what we breathe in every moment, is made of chemicals like nitrogen, oxygen, helium, that we can't actually smell. So... Air is like a blank canvas and the sense that we can perceive are like the paints on it that are the world that we exist in.
Today, we know that humans can detect around a trillion cents. This number dwarfs the amount of tones we can hear, about 340,000. Or shades of color we can see, around 1 million. So our ability to detect smells is actually far greater than our ability to detect any other sensory experience. This is because smell was extremely important for our prehistoric ancestors who lived in an inhospitable world.
A world where they needed to be able to smell predators or prey from long distances away. A world where their instincts were driven by the smells they encountered on a daily basis. And the accuracy of those instincts. were often the difference between life and death. We're breathing. We're inhaling through our nostrils, taking a deep inhalation in every couple of seconds.
And with each breath, we are carrying in the odors in the air. Air that we can't smell coming into our nostrils and traveling up our nostrils. Right into our nasal passages. which are actually quite complex. There are all these little curvy structures and kind of curves and bends inside the nose, which are actually there to... create as much turbulence to bring up the air carrying these odor molecules. The odor molecules move up and up lightning fast and eventually they're stopped. Landing.
on this patch of mucous membrane, which is basically at the level of our eyebrows. And on this patch of mucous membrane, this is where all the receptors that are capable for detecting, you know, smells exist. The genes responsible for those receptors are what Linda Buck discovered in 1991. They detect the chemicals, then start communicating with other neurons that will carry that information to a part of the brain that processes scent.
And that's the amygdala hippocampal complex. And this is where we go, ah, it's a lemon. This also happens to be the part of the brain where our emotions and memories are processed. The same part of the brain that's... Giving us the experience of emotion is also giving us the experience of scent. And so instantly that we are consciously registering a scent, we are also to some degree experiencing an emotion.
I mean, to smell is to feel is what you just said. It's the exact same system. It's exactly that. It's perfectly said to smell is to feel. I love that. So after Rachel patiently explained to me exactly how smell worked, I had one obvious question. How do I get it back? At this point in time, the most supported...
way to engage or reactivate your sense of smell after smell loss, and especially if it's from illness like COVID, is with smell training. I know what you might be thinking. Same thing I was thinking when she said it. Smell training? Really? Well, Rachel walked me through it. All you need are four distinctive scents. So for instance, maybe peanut butter, shampoo.
Maybe suntan lotion and coffee. Let's just for random example. Let's actually try it together. Like us. Go ahead and grab something to smell. Ready? several times a day. So at least three times a day. Sit down, unscrew the jar, sniff at what is in the jar. And even if you can't smell anything, think about, okay, lemon. I know this lemon, lemon. Maybe I'm even salivating just thinking about it. I put lemon on fish or whatever. So you have a little.
thought connection as well as the scent itself, you know, thinking about what it is, even if you can't smell anything. Okay. I'm using peanut butter because I love that smell. So open the jar and breathe it. And then you try to do it at least two more times a day and try to keep on going at it for at least 12 weeks.
According to Rachel, studies have shown this should help smell reemerge. So our sense of smell is constantly regenerating, which is one of the great things about unhealthy sense of smell. And what we're hoping to do with smell loss is like... start up that process again. And if there hasn't been any damage to the pathway between the nose to the brain, then this is something that you can help do by just...
actively sniffing. So like sort of turning on the genes that will then turn on the receptors to re-engage and regrow. But Rachel says this is something anyone can and should do, even if they haven't lost their sense of smell. I think everybody should be doing this, regardless of the sensibility of your sense of smell, at least once a day, every day. And this is because our sense of smell is directly involved with the health of our brain and our body.
smell is a deeply personal thing. It's a conduit for our deepest memories and thoughts. But it isn't just about what's happening in our minds. Smell has played an important role in shaping our society. in deciding who does and does not belong. Coming up, how one of the most infamous legal cases in U.S. history came down to assent. This is Jose Rodriguez from Tampa, Florida. You're listening to The ThruLine on NPR. What happens to democracy when one political party has near-complete power?
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And you can do it right now at plus.npr.org. We know you value through-line stories that take you back into the moment and explain how we got here today. And you can help keep our reporting possible. by supporting us now. Thank you again for being a critical part of the public media community. Join NPR Plus at plus.npr.org. I was in the backseat of the car on a beautiful summer day. And the windows were rolled down. We're going through pastoral landscape.
And all of a sudden from the front seat, my mom says, oh, I love that smell. She says it. It's got to be good. It's this beautiful day. I'm all really happy. So I make this connection between positivity and scent. And I disclosed this on the playground when I was about seven years old. I made this comment that, oh, I love that smell. I actually still didn't know what it was called at this point.
And then everyone turned to me and yelled, ooh, that skunk, you're so weird. And I was met with derision and screeches and children pointing fingers at me and running away. To smell is to learn. Sense of smell allows animals, including skunks, to detect danger and navigate their environments. We humans also use our nose to discern dangers, like the smell of a gas leak or a fire.
But we've also ascribed emotions and perceptions to certain smells, associating them with feelings like fear, delight, or something putrid. And those associations aren't natural. They're learned. The culture around me tells me that skunk is a bad smell. So I have learned that. And yet I have this personal experience, which is really positive. And that's actually going to supersede the cultural aspect of it.
So it's a multi-layer system between sensitivity, cultural learning, and personal experience. And it's the meaning which determines how much you like it. We create the meaning of smell, but the cultural constructs around what we decide smells good.
or bad can be weaponized. So for instance, the immigrants who moved in next door, you know, using the smell of both food and then the smell of the person who eats that food as being... other and bad and not part of my tribe and someone or a group that should be pushed away from who I am. So it's not pure. The scent is very much tied up in the culture. It's very much tied up in the particular moment.
in that instance in time, let's say politically, where whatever is going on, that that scent then takes that meaning and where it's coming from. Simply put, smells can have as much of a history as a black and white photo can. We're kind of hostage to visual conceits. This is Mark Smith. We fetishize the ocular. We look at the visual as the preeminent source of truth and reason. He's a sensory historian at the University of South Carolina and author of the book
a sensory history manifesto. And I think what sensory historians try to do is say, hang on a minute, historians should examine all of the senses. Mark says that historical writings are full of descriptions of sounds, textures, tastes. All of a sudden, what was implicit is now explicit. And all of a sudden, your world has increased by a factor of five. So history becomes much more robust, more meaningful.
And those sensory descriptions can provide important details that are key to better understanding our history. For example, Plessy v. Ferguson. Yes, that Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case that legalized separate but equal treatment. Segregation in the United States was founded in part on an argument based on racist perceptions of smell.
If you were to explain how that case actually worked just by relying on eyewitness accounts, you'd have no idea why that case was so important. If you don't pay attention to smell... You've really missed the foundation of modern segregation in the United States. So to understand, we have to go back to Louisiana in 1890. We're in New Orleans. This is in the aftermath of the Civil War. Slavery is being abolished. An educated, wealthy Black and Creole population is thriving. But a new system of...
Bodily control, social authority has been erected, and that's called segregation. Segregation was a key part of a larger system that would later be called Jim Crow. It was a wide-ranging effort to reverse the progress Black people had made since emancipation. To achieve that, a strict separation of life for Black and white people was enforced. Separate entrances. Separate schools. And one of the most public spaces at that time, railroad cars. And what you have is a group of whites.
who want to segregate railroad cars in New Orleans. One of the things about New Orleans is that it has a very high African-American population. and a very, very robust, elite African-American population that has been there for many, many years. And they want to push back against this segregation.
A group of prominent Black leaders, the Citizens Committee, came together and organized to specifically challenge this segregation law on train cars. So the group decided the best way to do this is to create a setup. to stage an act of disobedience that will allow them to bring a case to court, to challenge the law, and ultimately have it struck down. Think Rosa Parks.
So in order to do this, they needed someone that could blur the lines of segregation. And they choose a man named Homer Plessy. Homer Plessy. He was a shoemaker, an activist, born into a family of French-speaking Louisiana Creole people. And they choose him because he is visually ambiguous. He is considered to be black under Louisiana's statue. But visually, he looks white. And it's because of this ambiguity that he was the perfect person to challenge the validity of segregation laws.
Segregation is based on the assumption that race can be seen and always detected. In other words, that race can be fixed, that it is a stable category. And we know that race is an invention. It functions to fulfill the mandates and imperatives of people who have power at the time. So here they have Homer Plessy, and they say, we want you to go onto the white car.
So Homer Plessy boards the whites-only car. And he sits down, apparently. And a conductor, who was in on Plessy's plan, asks him if he was, quote, colored. And it's Homer Plessy, because he's trying to prove a point, that has to tell the conductor, Sir, I'm on the wrong car, because I'm black.
So what you have here is a really powerful illustration of the fact that you cannot see race in all instances. And if you can't see them in all instances, then how on earth could you erect an entire system? on segregation that assumes that you can detect race. Everything went as planned. Homer Plessy was arrested and charged for violating the law. And the case went to criminal court. in front of Judge John H. Ferguson. So we're in the courtroom, and the way that it's framed is...
These black leaders in this parish of New Orleans are trying to say, hang on a minute. If you want to prosecute my client, Homer Plessy, for violating a segregated... car statute, for going into the wrong car, surely you have to be able to say, well, we could identify him as black. Please tell us how you know that my client is black. Because if you can't tell us that...
then he's innocent. And Louisiana's prosecuting attorney replies to this claim by the defense counsel. He said, well, I don't... really need to see him to know that he's black. I don't need to see his race. I can smell it. I can smell it. And what the prosecutor argued was... My eye might not be up to the task of locating race and identifying Homer Plessy's race, but my nose is.
And that's the conceit, right? That's the invention. They're not true. They're inventions. But if you have the authority to make the claim that you smell, it becomes the social truth broadly accepted. Homer Plessy was found guilty by the state, and his legal team appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the damage had already been done.
I mean, it doesn't matter if Homer Plessy is innocent or guilty. What matters is that people have now articulated very clearly that they can rely on the sense of smell in order to adjudicate. In an overwhelming 7-to-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Homer Plessy. laying out the legal foundation for segregation in the United States. There's little objectivity to how we interpret what we're smelling.
Most smells aren't innately good, delicious, putrid, or even foul. And yet... If you don't pay attention to smell, you won't reveal the power hierarchies of that time. You'll actually be in a kind of blind spot because of, hang on a minute, what? That's natural, isn't it? And the whole idea behind power is to naturalize it. It's always been this way, it is this way, and it will remain this way. So next time you really like how something smells, ask yourself why.
Start thinking about where you learned to like that smell and what that tells you about your history and identity. Coming up... How our sense of smell can help us understand what we can't always see, both in the past and the present. And you're listening to Through Mind. I'm Lakshmi Singh. Public radio reminds us of our shared humanity, even at our darkest hours.
like with a story of an artist couple who make beautiful spaces for communities to grieve. We found that people will usually stop by and just feel a little bit more open and willing to talk and share. Help us make room for light in the dark. Give before the end of the year at donate.npr.org. Part three, to smell is to remember.
Germany's big on Christmas. It's just such a huge festival. And there are many traditional Christmas markets. And there was one particular stand with a Christmas market setting. Roasted almonds. This is Ernestine Dean. She's a South African musician and medicine woman who lived for a few years in Germany. That's where she smelled those roasted almonds, a scent that took her on a journey.
It was as if there were these kind of fingers, like wafting, pulling, drawing the end. These tendrils of the scent was so familiar and reminded me so much of... my grandmother's kitchen. And I was back there when I smelled these roasted almonds, that sweet scent, this kind of nutty aroma, chestnutty, beautiful almond scent. And it was just such a delicious experience for my buddy. Ernestine may have been thousands of miles away from her childhood home in Cape Town.
But in that moment, the smell of roasted nuts transported her. You know how it is when you can have something like that and you instantly are back there. Your eyes are closed and you are this visible one. It's something that's happened to a lot of us. We smell something and all of a sudden we're jolted out of where we are into a memory of a place or a person that almost feels real.
Scent memories are bringing back a very discreet episode that's, you know, fully fleshed out as one moment in time. That's a very special kind of specific time travel that scent. enables us to experience. And in a way that other sensory experiences don't, because we feel much more back in that original time and place. It's so much more visceral, like we've actually kind of moved from now to back then. This is Rachel Herz again.
She says the reason our smell memories are so evocative goes back to how our brain processes what we smell. When we smell something familiar, my grandma's perfumes say, or those almonds Ernestine Dean smelled in the German Christmas market, The parts of our brain that light up are also the areas that process our emotions, the amygdala, and our memories, the hippocampus. which is why today researchers are looking at whether or not smell can improve cognition, address PTSD, and stave off dementia.
And it's also why smell triggers such emotional memories that enable us to momentarily travel across time and place. I feel like there are bookmarks. Ernestine says she uses these certain smells to archive her memories. If I looked at our stories as pages of a book, they're very important bookmarks that remind us of who we are and also really is who we are.
Bookmarks that help her remember her family's history in South Africa during the decades-long era of apartheid as mixed-heritage indigenous Koi people. should be preserved. I think it is a generally accepted fact today that the non-European is at the lowest stage of development. Under apartheid, racial discrimination and segregation were completely legalized in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. And many, like Ernestine's family, had to abandon the homes they'd known their whole lives.
My family was forcibly removed in the 1960s at the time of the Group Areas Act, where certain groups or certain places were zoned for white occupation. Between 1960 and 1980, an estimated 3.5 million Black and mixed-race South Africans were forced to leave their homes. Ernestine's family was part of that number. They lost their home in Constantia.
a lush, fertile suburb of Cape Town, and were forced to relocate to the much drier Cape Flats and the suburban neighborhood called Grassy Park. I was born into this amniotic fluid of grief. Ernestine was born after the forced removals, but she still inherited her family's deep sense of loss. It took a lot out of my grandparents to do that. My grandfather made sure that some animals came along.
And he said that when everything had been packed up, when it had been packed on the donkey car, it came to the back of the house. It was now empty. And he stood there. He just stood and took a last look at... this place that they had never imagined would at some stage not be home. And he said he stood there at the back of the house, out of the sight of the family and everyone, and he cried like a baby.
Ernestine inherited that grief, but she also inherited a connection to the land her family had to leave behind. And so when I close my eyes, I'm already smelling that dark, rich soil, that kind of chocolatey brown, rich, grainy soil. A place of such comfort for us because it's where we come from. Several times a year, the whole family would go back to Constantia to bring dahlias and lilies to the tombstones in the family graveyard.
And when you walk in there, you walk on your crunching acorns with your feet and on like a bed of pine leaves, which also brings like releases so much earth. a dryness of it in the summer and then in the winter and autumn months where it's more wet, it also feels so alive. And that's where there's so many pine trees there and there's so many cones on the ground that we would collect.
And those pine cones are what brings us back to the almonds that Ernestine smelled while visiting that German Christmas market many years later. The one that transported her back in time to her grandmother's kitchen in South Africa. to Grassy Park, and back to Constantia. One of the things that we did with them as children was to go back and gather pine cones.
Bring it back to Grosso Park, roast it either on the fire or in the wood stove. And this heat would then release the cones that open them and release or make visible pine cones. They'd roast the pine nuts, together with her grandmother on some cousins, and make a traditional sweet dessert known as tamalecki. The whole house smelled like it was just this incredible roasted...
kind of caramel scent in the house. Good fire to begin with. The heat of the oven and then the pine cones open. We need to take the pine kernels out and mash them. add brown sugar and butter, and there is nothing, nothing like that smell and that comfort that I experienced in childhood. You know, when I think of it now as a woman, As a mother of my own children, older than I was as a kid, I see that loss more now. Ernestine's smell-triggered memory was layered, complex.
It was happy. It was sad. It was both a window into a childhood memory and a whole country's history. And at its core, it was an act of resistance. Because at the same time that Ernestine's family was making Tamalecki, The brutal system of apartheid was literally obliterating her sense of smell. You cannot breathe. You start kind of choking and the throat is constricting.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the anti-apartheid movement was growing in Grassy Park. And the response by the South African apartheid government was fast. Riot police were a daily presence, and the air always smelled like burning tires and tear gas. The smell feels like an attack. It literally feels like an attack.
It's a burning sensation, like your nasal passages will throw at your mouth into your chest. Your eyes are burning and tearing. That's why it's called tear gas. Tear gas is an assault on the senses. It's meant to disorient. But in the face of that... Ernestine's family made sure she knew that the smell of pine cones, of rich, fertile earth, of dahlias and lilies, and of sweet tamalecki were part of her.
that she and her family were more than burning tires and suffering. There's so much grief there. There's so much sorrow there. And there's also so much joy and pride. We are so strong as a people. It's been 30 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa. And until recently, Ernestine lived just a few blocks from where she grew up in Grassy Park. She still goes back to Constantia.
Only now, she's bringing her three kids and passing the smells and rituals on to them. I need them to know certain rights that are also survival and hold our story. The grief is always still there. To this day, Constantia is still a predominantly white and incredibly wealthy suburb. And while there's been a real effort to restore the land evicted families lost, there's been very little traction.
But Ernestine still takes her children back to tend the graves. And she's found that by staying engaged with her sense of smell, there's room for healing all around her. Because I'm on the other side of... the acute grief that I was raised in, and the acute trauma of the times in apartheid.
I'm starting to smell own things that must have been there. They were always there, but I'm smelling the lake. I'm smelling the wet, kind of the marshiness of this part of Grassley Park on the clay water, on the pond. When she steps out of her house now, the toxic bouquet of burning tires and tear gas no longer clouds the air. And in its absence, she's discovered that a piece of Constantia, of her family, was always in Grassy Park.
What's beautiful is that there are many lilies here, Erem lilies, which is in a way the totem flower of my people, of Constantia. It has a very, for me, it has a very fresh green scent, almost cucumber-like. You know, I'm sure it could smell different for different people, but it has a green smell. It's an old scent. in a new place, a new bookmark in her and her family's history. It's been special to be able to walk out into the water now and be amongst the lilies here and feel somehow.
that my ancestors are with me. Who we are. is a collection of the stories of our past and our life narrative is how we define ourselves and our life narrative is dependent upon remembering who we are and the things that have happened to us. And absolutely, scent is the key to that. The smell of your mother, the smell of your first child, the smell of pain, the smell of working out. These are things that kind of knit your experience together.
And if you take them out of your sensory experience generally, you're not going to have that more robust sense of your own past. Tener carácter no es tener margenio. A year after I recorded my yaya on her couch in Madrid, she passed away. It's been over six years now, and yet I find that she's never that far from me. She lives in my memory, of course, and the recordings I have of her, of her monogram necklace that I wear around my neck. And she's embodied in the scent.
of Alvarez Gomez Agua de Colonia. After months of diligently smelling an array of different scented essential oils, from lemon to clove to mint, my nose actually pricked up one day. and I felt the faint warmth of clove invade my nostrils. With time, I redeveloped the ability to smell the symphony of the world all over again.
And you better believe that I doused myself in Alvarez Gomez Colonia. I smelled fresh, clean, and most importantly, I had a piece of my yaya back with me. The minute I smelled the Colonia, it's like I could remember her more clearly. more fully, to the point that I could bring myself back to the moment of one of our last hugs. To this day, all I need to do is smell it.
and I can conjure myself standing in the hallway of her home again, both of us in our nightgowns, hugging for well over a minute. I can hear the beep of her hearing aid, feel her tiny frame holding mine. and I smell the faint scent of Álvarez Gómez in her perfectly coiffed hair. It's like I'm there, and so is my yaya, in all her fullness.
I went from having no sense of smell to being able to smell a chocolate wrapper from across a room. And now I have a new reason to be obsessed with smell. I recently gave birth to my first child. She's made me think about smell in a totally different way. I'm no longer just thinking about how certain smells shape my past and identity. I'm thinking about her too. What smells do I want to pass down to my daughter?
What sense will bookmark her life and remind her of me, of her dad, of her yaya, of who she is and where she comes from? One thing I know for certain is that she will definitely know the smell of Álvarez Gómez Colonia. And she'll know that she comes from a long line of strong Spanish women, of traviesas, like my mom and my yaya. I've had a capacity, and that's also to have a person, that I don't have a husband, or a husband, or a husband, or a husband.
That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui, and you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. Next week on our series, History of the Self, we take on modern love. Dating becomes this thing you can do on your phone all the time, just like you do everything else all the time. It's sort of where everything happens. This episode was produced by me. And me. And Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane.
Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Peter Balanon-Rosen. Thomas Liu. Irene Noguchi. Thank you to the American Academy of Achievement for their permission to use excerpts from their interview with Dr. Linda Buck. And special thanks to Hiro Matsunami, Dwayne Jethro, Melanie Bohi, Elise Pearlstein, Connie Chang.
Natalia Fiedelholtz and Yolanda Sanguini for sharing their time and expertise. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Audio was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Thanks to Johannes Durgi, Kiara West, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara, And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on this show, please write us at doline at npr.org. Thanks for listening.
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