“Funk is the modern interpretation of our ancestors screaming through us from Africa, through the pain of slavery, through Jim Crow. It’s black excellence, and it’s niggah shit.”
Norwood Fisher
Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James
“You can learn a lot from your scent,” says the “singingyogini” and “holistic wombwoman” on a recent Instagram post. She went on to discuss the historically racist and sexist frameworks that vilified women’s natural smells—smells that come from armpit and vagina hair, in particular. As she spoke, it made me reflect on an incident that happened a few years ago and that not only can we learn a lot from our scents, but we can learn even more from how people react to them.
I was on a class trip in Italy, and while many of the students and professors spent their weekends in Florence, Milan, and Bologna, I chose to hang out in the small town of Fiuggi where we were staying—strolling and eating dark chocolate gelato when the town closed down in the afternoon, staring longingly through the glass of the local wine shop that didn’t open until the day before I left, sipping the local cesanese wine, strolling through the profumerie that smelled of wild lavender and jasmine.
There was a student who hadn’t joined the others on their Italian adventures. He was from Cameroon, and we talked about his life there—his beautiful, two-story home in the main city, his brothers and sisters and the many businesses they ran—mostly clothing stores. We’ll call him Khem.
At dinner, it was clear that the students didn’t want to sit next to Khem, squirming in their seats, trying to find reasons to move from the part of the table where he and I sat.
“I don’t know what to do,” the host professor said to me during an emergency meeting she called about what had turned into an offline cancel crusade before “cancel culture” existed.
“The students are complaining about his smell,” she said,panicked. “I’m not sure what to do.”
She went on to explain that when she first moved to The United States from Italy, she, too, had to adjust to America’s ideas surrounding bathing, cleanliness, and what smells good.
“Tell him that,” I said. “That way he won’t feel isolated and alone.”
My roommate who was also from Miami, specifically Hialeah, was outraged and very vocal about her disdain for Khem’s smell. “He stinks,” she exclaimed while we were in the room. “Why doesn’t he take a shower? How can you stand it?”
I remember Khem’s smell. He smelled of sweating skin, the flea markets I grew up frequenting—women with fleshy arms and brilliant, paisley-print tie-heads selling plantain and saltfish. He smelled like the jitneys I took to school. He smelled like men who road on the backs of pick-up trucks, the sun settled above them like flaming Panama hats. He smelled like life—unmasked by jarring storebought perfumes and antiperspirants that for days, exterminate any hint of one’s natural scent.
“Where I come from, people judge you for who you are. In America, people judge you by how you smell,” Khem said to mein his new, more acceptable scent—one that was more vacant, one that left room for people to plant their oppressive narratives about civil and appropriate while supporting institutions and ideologies that are unabashedly uncivil, the cesspools of inhumanity that still keep farm workers in the vineyards grossly underpaid and vulnerable to sickness and diseases because of exposure to pesticides. I recently listened to some of these farm workers share their stories during an online forum. I wondered, but what of the smell of those labored hands and wilting wombs that pick grapes that turn into juice that do not hold such smells but only the comforting scent of manufactured decency.
Khem’s new smell was that of a kind of absence like the giant, womanly palm trees that canopied my backyard and snake-like creeping vines that stuck to the wall, suddenly ripped from their roots when the new owners bought the property. No warning to us, as tenants, just the stench of concrete where there was once soil and dirt and lizards.
In the culture of wine, stank can be a good thing. I remember those Burgundian pinot noir descriptions of old—wet cellar, barnyard, forest floor. These were all unfamiliar scents to this wild Jamaican-American raised on these urban Miamistreets where mama smelled like yellow yam and green banana, spirits swaying through avocado and ackee trees, key lime lizards like tiny, mythical creatures slithering through the natty Cerasee bush. I grew up around the smell of boys in baggie jeans and gold fronts and tambourines sweaty with Sundays. Foreheads dripping with Pompeian olive oil—blessed over and over again by the church women who wore white on Sunday after they spent the week working one, two, three jobs. Curry goat seasoned on Saturday, so Jesus gets a proper meal on Sunday. What did Beyoncé call it? Hot-sauce-in-my-bag swag.
I wondered how Khem received the news of his terrorizing, offensive smell, and if he longed for the familiar smells of his native Cameroon. I realized that what has sustained me in this complicated wine culture is that over time, I have learned to trust this intuitive understanding that wine is familiar. It doesn’t exist in a universe onto itself, but it is as earthly and familiar as music and lovemaking.
I remember when I first allowed myself to write notes like “morning after armpit funk” or “lovemaking” in my many, many wine journals. Everything from those southern Rhône wines and Stellenbosch pinots to that volcanic soil Aglianico. Their notescaptured moments of exquisite pleasure, and I wanted to see those words on the page.
But there’s this internal passage of permission that I have long shut down though sometimes I think it does open up again—this strange, narrow portal—putrid with the need for permission, wreaking with the stench of having felt diminishedand the inner-cruelty of wanting to be accepted by those who will never, ever see beyond their own peculiar familiar. My dear friend, Carol, describes this as a contorting of the self to fit into these strange, narrow portals that are meant to break wings andsmother the spirit with all its inglorious scents.
When I buy wine for my own pleasure, it’s usually red and these days with the ravenous heat, there’s been countless chillable reds and sparkling reds. But I promised Bianca at Paradis—a natural wine and literature gathering space for the funky that I would sip more whites. Then I discovered or perhaps, rediscovered Moscatel de Alexandria. Even as I begin to type these words, an excitement is forming on my skin like the anticipation of that kiss you’ve fantasizing about that’s finally about to happen.
Moscatel de Alexandria is intoxicating. It’s the passion fruitI bought at a market in Tulum and the Moroccan orange blossomoil my friend sells from her village. It’s the sweet plantain at the West Indian market in Miami Gardens my mother used to drag me to almost every day. It’s yellow yam and boniato and fleshy women who sell them. It’s Haitian pineapple in Port-au-Prince. It’s the natty Caribbean gardens where mothers plant lemongrassand papaya and odes of protection and prosperity. It’s dancing so close, you become one specimen, scents blending into one feral being.
Bodegas Y Vinedos Pigar’s 2020 Ancestral MussKat is all of these things. Pet nat-style, the wine is made in Valencia, Spain, on the eastern coast overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.Hand harvested, spontaneous yeast fermentation with skins for five days in stainless steel tanks. It’s organic and all the things.
I did a little research and learned that Moscatel de Alexandria originated in “North Africa and spread around the Mediterranean from the port of Alexandria, Egypt, possibly during the Roman Empire.” We so infrequently hear about Africa’s connection to wine’s complicated history, but somehow, I knew this soil was familiar.
“Our sweat contains pheromones to attract the mates that is right for us and repels those who aren’t.” So says the singing yogini and holistic wombwoman. Could that be true for wine? The bottles we like and the bottles we don’t. The people we love sipping with and the ones we don’t. Could that be true for howwe perceive our own scents when not drowned in all the bottles we use to mask what we dare not smell?