Smelling

I stumbled bleary-eyed into my daughter's nursery as I'd done a million times in the past 2 years. Pulled off her sleep sack as she jumped up and down. “Mommy, Mommy.” Something seemed weird. As I began to change her diaper, I was surprised to see a poop blowout. Then I realized it: I couldn't smell.

It happened to me. I'm one of those. She had come home from daycare with a fever about 10 days before. A few days later, I had what felt like a bad cold. In Ontario, there's no more free COVID testing unless you are part of a vulnerable population, and a single mother in a pandemic is no longer considered vulnerable enough. Earlier that day I had seen a United States–based friend's social media post about how COVID tests are being distributed through vending machines all over the University of California, Los Angeles campus. Having lived in California only a year and a half prior, the pictures of privilege hit me hard. Following provincial guidelines, I had to just go ahead and assume I had it.

I finished changing Sophie and took her to my room while I closed my eyes and played Cocomelon on my phone. Surviving our quarantine meant trying to get a little more half sleep before the day begins. Sophie had taken to looking at me and saying, “Mommy sleeping.” She wasn't kidding, and she definitely did some astute social commentary. More like “Mommy zombie.”

In 2017, I published a book that emerged from my own anxiety around growing up a “smelly immigrant,” or more specifically a “smelly Pakistani” (Ameeriar, 2017). The anxiety was so great that I would fight with my mother when she cooked South Asian food—food that now, 4 years after her death, I wish I could ask her to make. I carried Secret antiperspirant in my backpack in high school, constantly reapplying during the day during those anxious, sweaty years when we're learning to become adults.

The pandemic has been weird. It's been weird for everybody, and for me it's meant a radical shift in my relationship to my body. A body that still hasn't fully recovered from the experience of birth. Bodily scars have more or less healed, but the body I inhabit is no longer mine. Or no longer just mine. I share it. I swore I would stop breastfeeding when my daughter turned 1, but then the vaccine was coming and evidence seemed to support that antibodies could be passed to infants through breastmilk, so I didn't wean. Then I imagined a hard deadline at 2, but the booster was supposed to pass antibodies to protect from Omicron, and the vaccine wasn't approved yet for those under 5. So, I waited again. It's been a month since I was boosted. We got COVID anyway.

But the most radical thing that happened to me during the pandemic was that I stopped wearing deodorant. It just kind of happened. I was living in London, England, when I got pregnant. They don't have good deodorant there anyway, but once you start sharing your body, and the Apple News app learns you're pregnant, you start seeing horror stories about products and the damage they can do to the fetus. It's horrifying, but I felt a bit up against a wall. The United Kingdom doesn't have the same air-conditioning practices that North America does, and so I was sweaty. I would go to movies in the summer months, pregnant and uncomfortable, seeking air-conditioning, but the British don't turn it up very high. I remember several times leaving a theater along with an American or Australian seeking out an employee to ask them to turn it up. So I bought Tom's of Maine natural deodorant, which honestly was worse than not wearing deodorant at all because then I smelled like sweat and chemical lavender. I didn't intend to stop wearing deodorant, it just happened over time until one day I realized I wasn't and hadn't been for a long time. Even as an adult I used to anxiously buy deodorant, stocking up, with extra bottles in the closet. The anxiety followed me as I continued trying to be an adult past childhood and my sweaty teenage years.

Smell, as I've written elsewhere, is emblematic of non-belonging (Ameeriar, 2017). Martin Manalansan IV (2006) has discussed food smells as a basis of Othering immigrant bodies, and Aihwa Ong (2003) has written about how smells, unlike offensive bodies, cannot be contained, so the focus on offensive smells represents anxiety over managing refugee bodies in public space. Sareeta Amrute (2018) has beautifully written on the politics of disgust and the ways it is infused in everyday life and (2020) on “the sensate” to track the ways immigrants align, distance themselves from, and register the larger sociopolitical and economic contexts in which they are enfolded.

But what difference did the pandemic make to our ideas of smell? What would it mean if we continued not to smell—would it lead to greater equality? What would it mean if we couldn't smell other people? We live our lives on social media, especially these days and I'm a member of about a million mom groups, including one for working moms in Toronto that I joined during the pandemic. Not the best time for an international move. I read a post a few weeks ago where a white Canadian woman said she was putting together a workshop for international students on Canadian workplace etiquette and was wondering if any professional people had advice. She asked specifically for examples of cultural differences causing confusion or misunderstanding. There were 91 comments. Numerous white women responded by saying food at lunchtime. Story after story of people complaining that the food someone in their workplace was bringing “had a VERY strong smell,” to quote one post, and that other workers couldn't stay in the same area. Others pushed back on that kind of comment, saying food is cultural and that Canadians are closed-minded. Another woman chimed in that her 5-year-old niece in the United States was bullied for bringing South Asian food to school and refused to eat lunch for a week. Someone posted advice on looking at one's own privilege when one is uncomfortable with food smells. Someone invoked “hot climate cultures” and “cold climate cultures.” Someone mentioned perfumes and others hygiene for new immigrants (!). One woman said that her husband has had to have “difficult conversations” with employees regarding their hygiene, especially, she says, if he knows it's a “cultural behavior.” For the love of God.

In that same thread, some women of color themselves recommended nicknames or changing names to mask where you're from, making yourself once again into someone who won't be discriminated against. In the mid-2000s, I did my dissertation fieldwork that formed the basis of my book on smell. I went with women to job-finding seminars in which they were told not to show up “smelling like foreign food,” and yet at the same time within the same organizations were expected to participate in cultural festivals where the same foods and food smells that were so reviled were celebrated. The more things change, huh.

Being forced to stay inside, being quarantined, having the outside parts of our world shut down, did nothing to quell these enduring ideas about smell and Otherness. And that to me is the central failure, that these smells and comportments are just dystopic fantasy projections of an imagined threat, a peril threatening the white workplace. We could imagine a world in which smells are erased, in the style of a science fiction story like Blindness by José Saramago (1997) in which there is a mass epidemic of blindness that creates social chaos. Rather than creating a utopian space in which we transcend such differences because they seemingly no longer exist, I argue that differences would still matter because smell is just a guise for a deeper feeling, a disgust and fear, fear of the Other, fear of losing power.

Smell is about morality and moralizing, about constructing visions, dreams, images, selves. It's tied to class, race, gender, everything. It's a medium through which people judge others, as evidenced by that disturbing thread on the local moms at work page. Remember, we're defining the self and Other through difference (Low, 2005). Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott (1994) have discussed smell and savagery and, to reference Koichi Iwabuchi (2002), what's called on for workers in the global market is the sweet scent of Asian modernity, which it turns out after all these years is still no scent at all. I digress—I spend most of my time with a tiny human only learning to talk who is more interested in animal sounds than what I have to say about smells.

As I said earlier, my body is no longer my own. I'm often partially clothed, running from one room to another. I'm always quietly strategizing my morning, like how to streamline getting dressed with fewer tears, mine and hers. It's hard to get a small human body ready as well as my own, and I'm only changing from one set of pajamas to sweats, but if I don't do it, I don't know. I need to do it. I can no longer control when I can go to the bathroom. We live in a small house in a super-white neighborhood. A good neighborhood for kids, I had thought, but the problem with living in the good neighborhood with all the stuff is all the darn privileged people. Our bathroom is on the second floor, and during these quarantine days I have to calculate when I can go: before I get her when she first wakes, when I change her to nap, while she naps (if she naps), while she's in the high chair for meals, or after she goes to bed. Emergencies are not allowed.

Losing a sense while trying to navigate parenthood, which is such a sensorial experience, has been weird. The most freakish thing has been that I can't smell her. I yearned for my lost smell to smell her small body. My tiny roommate of the past 2 years. Kids produce smells to make us love them. Or something. I'm not that kind of a scientist. Today I leaned in really close to the peach popsicle she insisted on eating, even though it's −15°C. A faint blush of something. Got it, but dull. I smelled three things today: peach popsicle, faint poop from what should have been intense poop, and my armpit. I checked again.

The connection between the senses and mothering speaks to the embodied experience of not only motherhood but close relations of all kinds where fluid and touch are exchanged and relied upon as a life source. The cultural marking of COVID also has a role to play in what a body is and becomes. Here, I've tried to interweave and contrast body, baby, and food smells as culturally defined.

This has been kind of a fever dream of a piece of writing, and I apologize for that. And as a single mom alone with a newborn–infant–toddler who doesn't talk much yet. But here we are, 2-plus years into an unending pandemic, and I can't smell. I hope it comes back.