ML: In Sensorium is a powerful exploration of your identity as a queer, Bangladeshi Muslim femme. Perfuming is a wordless, boundless, borderless, liquid and sensuous version of all that I am interested in writing. I want to write toward freedom and solidarity, a world where class, caste, race, religion, gender, ability, sexuality and color is not weaponized against us.

My people died for their liberation, and also enacted violence in the name of it-working with the complex, the contradictory turns me on as a writer. I'm interested in exploring the raw messiness of sex and sexuality and spirituality, the way desire and annihilation are intertwined, unraveling toxic inheritances of colonialism-borders, white supremacy war, nation-states and nationalism, capitalism. The way we are disregarded by the dominant culture is simply not real-it is violently upheld-and I want us to be free. I have always wanted to show the power of our interconnected quests for liberation, our queerness, our beauty, our artistic and intellectual endeavors. I am a writer, but I've been a community organizer, a domestic violence advocate, a youth theater arts educator-I have always centered my work on brown-skinned queer and femme people. I wanted to evoke these specific spiritual, religious and cultural lineages of Bangladesh-Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim-in a single breath. Tanaïs: Let's start with my name, or renaming, I should say, Tanaïs, a portmanteau of my birth name, Tanwi Nandini Islam, which tells you a lot if you know what you're listening for. Muri Lelu: For those who aren’t yet familiar with you or haven’t read your books In Sensorium: Notes For My People or Bright Lines , how would you introduce yourself and your work?

In sensorium notes for my people