Columns | Per Fumar

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.

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

*

Navigating our way to the train heading to Versailles is a minor nightmare. Both my husband and I are stressed out. We manage to slip in through the closing doors of what seems to be the right line, breathless. It’s one of those days when being surrounded by French—though it’s a language I know fairly well—is too overwhelming to process. The little tricks of masculin et féminin slipping, my tenses all at odds. How does everyone seem to know the right word for everything except me?

It’s been a hard, strange few weeks. I’ve been feeling increasingly dissociated from myself, increasingly panicked about what I am beginning to accept is a gender dysphoria that has persisted throughout my life.

Nothing I wear seems right. The angles of my face seem at once to align with what I think they should be, and dissolve into a feminine softness that feels like oil smudged across every mirror I look into. I constantly gauge people’s reactions, especially in the very gendered world of Paris.

I tug awkwardly at the sleeve of my suit, certain everyone sees right through me. I put my head against the glass, try to calm down before we reach Versailles.

When the train stops, we step out into the rain, navigate little music-box streets until we get to the campus of the Institut supérieur international du parfum, de la cosmétique et de l’aromatique alimentaire (or, more easily, the ISIPCA), where they train the next generation of great perfumers. I have managed to secure a private meeting with Isabelle Chazot, one of the curators of the Osmothèque museum, housed on the campus.

Isabelle is elegant, of course. More than that, she has something like a flame about her. A dancing, impatient curiosity, a vivid enthusiasm that speaks out of every gesture, piercing eyes, quick hands glittering with a few tasteful rings, the flutter of the sleeve of her silk shirt. I feel profoundly awkward, a scruffy teenage boy in a worn suit. Still, she’s gracious, and we sit down at a little table surrounded by antique glass flacons.

We talk about perfume, something that for most immediately conjures images of frippery and fashion, his-and-hers promotions, talk about pheromones, the raw stuff of desire. But today, all of that fades into the essential concern here, and what I love about so many of the people I’ve met in France: What is beautiful? How do we serve that beauty? And I come alive.

I’m usually terribly self-conscious around women as poised as Isabelle. How many years of my life had I been held to that standard, the instruction from my family to “become a woman of substance”?

With her, now, I don’t feel like the misshapen, awkward person I usually do. My back straightens. My voice doesn’t hesitate. We talk and talk. About heritages of beauty, Proust, memory, loss, the paradoxes of being one of the strange people in this world who has dedicated their life to something as ephemeral as scent.

“It’s an act of creating a dream,” Isabelle says. “I say here, we are keepers of dreams.”

We talk about Diaghilev scenting his curtains with Mitsouko, about being the strange children, the feral ones always guided by their noses to stealing the neighbors’ flowers, getting lost in the fields. Among people who know and love perfume, the idea of gendered scent is laughable. Men here wear lush bouquets of wine and peony, ripe fruit and honey. Women wear chypres as pristine and piercing as blades of grass on a frosted morning. Beauty is the thing, is all.

“We create ourselves,” she says. “When you choose a perfume, you are choosing the person you will be.”

Afterwards, I step back into the persistent spring drizzle. My husband and I walk along suburban streets with roses, poppies, and wildflowers I can’t name, all overgrown as if no one can bear to cut them away. Every street is drunk with flowers. I think to myself: This is the year.

*

Perfume has always been an institution in my family: working class with aspirations, occasional forays into and delusions of grandeur. My grandmother, our steely and elegant matriarch, always told me, “Even if you aren’t, you have to behave ‘to the manor born.’”

Once, I gave my uncle a hug hello. He asked what perfume I was wearing. “Oh, just something from The Body Shop,” I told him. I was a student, after all.

“Here,” he said, handing me his credit card. “Go get yourself a proper signature. Please.”

“We create ourselves,” she says. “When you choose a perfume, you are choosing the person you will be.”

A few days later, I went with my grandparents to one of the ritzy department stores in Johannesburg. A charming woman with an undefinable European accent asked what kind of girl I was. My grandparents looked at me. I didn’t know what to say, but there was such love, expense, and expectation in the whole enterprise. This was their way of helping me become someone they could love, see, be proud of.

“I want to try L’air du temps.”

I’d wanted to try it ever since watching Silence of the Lambs, those lines Lecter tells her, “You know what you look like to me? A rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube, with a little taste.” Something about that went straight to my gut. I wanted to answer it, with Clarice Starling’s set, stubborn jaw.

“Unfortunately, that’s been discontinued, but allow me to suggest something—simple, elegant, young.”

She handed me a bottle of Dolce and Gabbana’s Dolce. I sprayed it into the air, onto my wrist, and breathed it in. It was as she said. Virginal, almost. The smell of a treasured daughter, young and beautiful.

My grandparents looked at me, beaming. “Oh Mishka, it’s so you,” they said. Who could tell them no?

I tried, for a while, I truly did. I would spend hours on my hair, my makeup. I would agonize over the cut of a dress, the hang of a blouse. My natural love of beautiful, crafted things served me well. Friends would come to me for advice, ask me to shop for perfumes with them, ask me to advise them on dressing. I was loved and indulged by older men. I was harassed and assaulted, too. Walking down the street, men would tell me, “You’re beautiful.” I felt valued. I felt objectified, scared, sickened.

But I was loved by my family, who told me, beaming, how beautiful I looked, how elegant. I read a text over my mother’s shoulder once, saying, “Thank God, she’s gotten over saying she’s a man. She dresses so well now, and looks beautiful.”

I thought, I can do this. I can be this person.

Once, I said to my friends, “My mother always told me, when you’re sad, you put on your lipstick and perfume, and a good dress, and go out smiling.”

Softly, one of them told me, “You must be sad really often, then.” I choked, and turned away.

One day, before going out to lunch in Johannesburg, I stood in front of my wardrobe, distraught. I didn’t know who to be that day, I told my husband over and over, I don’t know what to do. I pulled things down. I started hitting myself like I used to when I was a child. I scratched long, ugly lines down my face, and covered them with makeup. It was only months later, that my friends admitted they’d seen them the whole time, and worried.

My husband and I would fight, often. “You don’t want to let me past this wall you have up,” he’d tell me helplessly. “You have a script in your head that you’re trying to follow, rather than telling me what you really feel and think.”

I couldn’t meet his eye. Without my little bit of beauty, I thought, what will there be left to love in me?

When we moved to Cape Town, we were allowed to stay in that same uncle’s unoccupied apartment. It was still filled with his things, including a shelf of colognes and perfumes he’d built up over the years.

I sorted through them, sniffing each one. Many of them were entirely too brash and stereotypically masculine for my taste. One, though, went down to my spine. Terre d’Hermes was like a fresh young branch, broken to release its sap, fresh as blood. It was a smell full of ozone, bright light, the belly-spark of fire, a storm on the horizon. I put it on, and when I looked in the mirror, I could meet my own eyes.

It was a smell full of ozone, bright light, the belly-spark of fire, a storm on the horizon.

It wasn’t long after that I told my husband how I was feeling about gender, that I didn’t know what to do about it, all these tangles of desire and body, none of which felt like they could be reconciled. I knew I loved him, I knew he was my soul’s twin, even if I didn’t know what I was. We laughed and cried our way through it.

I decided to go to a spiritual retreat organized by a local organization run for and by queer Muslims. I took Terre d’Hermes with me.

*

While there, up in the mountains, walking to morning salah along little dirt paths of bougainvillea, sunbirds flitting in the aloes, air clear as the beginning of the world, I felt my heart split open. I sat with the most devout, reciting prayers into the grey dawn, the sound rising with the plume of smoke from the incense that was lit every time, without fail. People there, scholars and students, people fluent in the Fus’ha Arabic that made my heart yearn and ache, told me I wasn’t a sinner, a blight, a monster before God, for being trans.

I learned of new ways of interpreting the old histories and laws, a ringing, steadfast call for a new way of imagining ourselves, and God, in the world. I prayed salah like a man, bareheaded, with a woman leading the prayer. It was the world I’d known turned upside down, shaken loose and free, to let the light in.

In Islam, wearing perfume, particularly before prayer, is considered sunnah—a preferable conduct, an action recommended through the example set by the Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him. Mosques used to have musk and rosewater mixed into the mortar, so that the scent would last generations, breathing through the lines of worshippers like prayer itself.

I wore my Terre d’Hermes. I stood up straight. I wept, reciting words that before had always filled me with the dread of obligation, of feeling worthless and despised in front of a God I adored.

And I fell in love. Another attendee, a scholar with brilliant eyes and a liquid laugh, a steady-eyed way of facing down things, who made me feel humble, and alive. I wanted to be gallant, and good, in front of her. We walked together in the early morning, talked late into the evenings. I recited poetry to her, she told me stories.

She didn’t quite know how to read me. I told her I thought I was trans, that I wanted to transition. Once, getting up from salah, she said blithely, “Are you coming, habibi?” And I stopped dead, my heart in my throat. I called my husband, later, sobbing, and told him how I was feeling. He laughed, told me he’d always known I was polyamorous and told me he loved me and trusted me to tell her.

As we got ready for the big dinner party at the end of the retreat, I set aside the one abaya I’d brought, and wore a suit. I wore the Terre d’Hermes. I wanted her to see me.

That evening, unable to dance because of my disability, I watched her dance with a cis man. Later, when she and I started a strange, painful sort of relationship, built mostly on her wanting to experiment, and me desperately, terribly loving her, she told me a trans man wasn’t enough, that she needed someone cis, someone “more forceful, someone less tender,” to be satisfied.

I didn’t know how to parse any of this. I didn’t know yet what shape or stone on which I had to rest my assertion that I was a man. My masculinity, if I had one, or any, was uncertain, earnest: My grandfather, hiding in the tall grass of the veld to sketch butterflies. My father, skipping class to recite Shakespeare through the schoolyard fence to his girlfriends at the neighboring school. The Prophet Muhammed, peace be upon him, who had wept inconsolably when his beloved wife Khadijah died.

I felt broken open, measured, and found wanting.

*

For a long time, I stalled on my plans to transition. I felt I wasn’t “trans enough.” I fell into the transmedicalist way of thinking, a rigidly binary, power-serving understanding of transness as a condition to be corrected. It is a popular way of thinking about being trans in South Africa—a place that, while our constitution and laws are ardently progressive, still struggles with record levels of violence against trans people, and rampant transphobia.

I supposed, I could just be a masculine woman. Again, I thought, I can be this person.

And then I went to Paris. In our first weeks there, surrounded by cherry blossoms blowing from the trees, the crisp chill of early mornings on the Seine, I wept uncontrollably sometimes, just looking at it all. It was the culmination of so much work, struggle, and dreaming. But everywhere I went, a nagging something remained—a barb that, over the months I met people and wondered at things, dug a wound into me. I kept thinking: I wish I could be here as myself.

I felt doomed to constantly disappoint, to be constantly appraised, as a feminine, brown person realizing rapidly that, somehow, he is a man. Perfume was the only thing I felt safe to experiment with, working as it did in the realm of the invisible, the as-yet-unsayable.

Perfume was the only thing I felt safe to experiment with, working as it did in the realm of the invisible, the as-yet-unsayable.

About a week after I met with Isabel, I met a woman who had worked closely with a perfumer to create what is considered to be a modern masterpiece. She told me the story of the house, the perfumer’s mercurial moods, how she had thrilled to smell each new formula, until it was perfected. She told me about the bottles she still keeps in the fridge, the ones she’s bought up as she’s seen the house go into decline and the formulas change.

“Once these are gone, they will never exist again, as they were,” she said, her eyes large, filled with tears in the café where we meet and talk for hours. “Only we will remember.”

She and I somehow became inordinately close over my weeks there. She told me how the smell of sawdust and engine oil and tomato leaves made her ache for her childhood home. I told her how the smell of lilacs reminded me of friends and loves I’ve lost forever. I brought her tulips, and she breathed in their green, their vivid spice, with all the savor and abandon of a child.

“He always told me, ‘you and your tulips,’” she laughed, meaning the perfumer. “But give me these smells, always. Green. Alive. Sexy. New life pushing through the dirt. I want things that live.”

*

In Paris, I tried to kill myself. I was happier there than I have ever been yet, and I tried to kill myself one night. I tried to take pills. I planned to make my way to the river, jump in when they started to hit. My husband realized something was wrong. He found the stacks of pills I’d hidden under my pillow. He held me tight throughout the night.

It was then that we decided, if everything I’d worked for could be had, could be loved, as we had loved being in Paris, even while I wasn’t fully myself there, then I had to admit it: I needed to transition. To live honestly.

I made a pilgrimage to the original Diptyque store on the Boulevard Saint Germain. There, we spoke with an elegant, smiling man who worked with the brand’s original founders. We happily chatted about the Greek islands, about the raw materials, the particularities and price of Ethiopian frankincense. We smelled many of the perfumes in the collection.

One, L’Ombre dans L’Eau, made me shiver. I thought, immediately, of secret garden gates, of ivy and lines of willow. Green shadows, the ghosts of swans on the river in the early morning. Spring, in its rawest, most merciless form. Green shoots breaking through the dirt. Roses still new, just a breath of spice at the cold tips of their petals. Life, almost vulgar in its earnestness, its spare focus on making it, no matter what, into the light.

Its name means “shadow on the water.” And again, here, in Paris, if I were to ask this man who loves perfume, whether this is a man or woman’s perfume, he would look at me with scorn.

Another veteran perfumer had scoffed, “As if such things matter, when it comes to art.”

I tell the man at Diptyque, this one, this is what I want. He smiles and nods. “I wore it myself for a while,” he says. “It’s exquisite.” I thought, when I come here next, I want to be seen.

And as I walked, breathing in that scent, of vivid, stubborn, clumsy life pushing through into the cold air, despite everything, I thought, know me by this. At the Musée de Cluny, I looked at the tapestry for scent hanging at the point where the physical becomes the invisible. I thought of Nijinsky in Diaghilev’s bed, the wind blowing the scent of peaches and woodsmoke from the curtains. A faun in the leaves. The scent of the Medici fountains in the Jardins du Luxembourg, where Rilke often wandered and paused.

I thought, this is where it starts. I caught a whiff of myself and another, more whole, more alive self, turning a corner, shaken from my wrist like a shadow.

I know now that the body is made of the invisible, too. We exist, always, in some essential, invisible world. I follow where my body leads. I think I know his name.