In the August 2023 email newsletter, IAO’s Saskia Wilson-Brown takes a moment to think about memory, nostalgia, her grandmother’s return to Cuba, and how it ties in to scent.
August, 2023
When my grandmother Josefa returned to Cuba for the first time since the tumultuous years of the revolution, she came to her lost home with big expectations. The island was fixed in her memory as a place of love, as a place of beauty; a place she painted over and over in translucent watercolors from her exile in a drab apartment building in Washington D.C.
I accompanied her on that very important trip. I was young and don’t remember much, but a memory that remains is following her down a rickety set of stairs as we exited the plane. The tarmac was hot, the air was humid, it was nearing sunset, and it was beautiful. It smelled like gasoline. Somewhere on that staircase, my grandmother burst into tears.
Was she crying because her expectations were met – or because they weren’t? I sometimes wonder how much scent played a part in that emotional moment. It’s too late to ask her now, but I can hazard a guess that if she anticipated a smell, it was almost certainly not the standard cigar-smoke-and-rum duo featured in so many Havana-inspired perfumes. Her memory of the island was too precise for those broad strokes. Or… maybe it wasn’t. Was it the gasoline – an unexpected smell displacing the golden memories of her youth – that made her cry?
At a recent talk at the IAO by Hsuan L. Hsu, a question about historic scent reconstruction got me thinking about the fallibility of scent memory. How do we reconstruct an olfactory past when direct, empirical knowledge ages into nostalgia? What happens when our scent memories get filtered through time, politics, and emotion? Do they become pastiche? Do they have any value?
While we reached no grand conclusions, the conversation served as a reminder of the permeability of knowledge. Our stories about “home” are nothing more (and nothing less) than our very human attempts to mitigate loss; music, language and food play their part, and so does scent. And if an imprecise mental map of smells has evolved so extensively that it bears no semblance to reality anymore, so be it. The imperfect memory is still yours to enjoy.
+ Read the August 2023 email newsletter
