Christina Kim
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Christina Kim’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
In an overwhelming 7-to-1 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Homer Plessy, laying out the legal foundation for segregation in the United States. There's little objectivity to how we interpret what we're smelling. Most smells aren't innately good, delicious, putrid, or even foul. And yet?
So next time you really like how something smells, ask yourself why. Start thinking about where you learned to like that smell and what that tells you about your history and identity. Coming up, how our sense of smell can help us understand what we can't always see, both in the past and the present.
This is Ernestine Dean. She's a South African musician and medicine woman who lived for a few years in Germany. That's where she smelled those roasted almonds, a scent that took her on a journey.
Ernestine may have been thousands of miles away from her childhood home in Cape Town. But in that moment, the smell of roasted nuts transported her.
It's something that's happened to a lot of us. We smell something and all of a sudden we're jolted out of where we are into a memory of a place or a person that almost feels real.
This is Rachel Herz again. She says the reason our smell memories are so evocative goes back to how our brain processes what we smell. When we smell something familiar, my grandma's perfume, say, or those almonds Ernestine Dean smelled in the German Christmas market, the parts of our brain that light up are also the areas that process our emotions, the amygdala, and our memories, the hippocampus.
Which is why today researchers are looking at whether or not smell can improve cognition, address PTSD, and stave off dementia. And it's also why smell triggers such emotional memories that enable us to momentarily travel across time and place.
Ernestine says she uses these certain smells to archive her memories.
Bookmarks that help her remember her family's history in South Africa during the decades-long era of apartheid as mixed-heritage, indigenous Khoi people.
Under apartheid, racial discrimination and segregation were completely legalized in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. And many, like Ernestine's family, had to abandon the homes they'd known their whole lives.
Between 1960 and 1980, an estimated 3.5 million Black and mixed-race South Africans were forced to leave their homes. Ernestine's family was part of that number. They lost their home in Constantia, a lush, fertile suburb of Cape Town, and were forced to relocate to the much drier Cape Flats and the suburban neighborhood called Grassy Park.
Ernestine was born after the forced removals, but she still inherited her family's deep sense of loss.
Ernestine inherited that grief, but she also inherited a connection to the land her family had to leave behind.
Several times a year, the whole family would go back to Constantia to bring dahlias and lilies to the tombstones in the family graveyard.
And those pinecones are what brings us back to the almonds that Ernestine smelled while visiting that German Christmas market many years later. The one that transported her back in time to her grandmother's kitchen in South Africa, to Grassy Park, and back to Constantia.
They'd roast the pine nuts, together with her grandmother, aunts and cousins, and make a traditional sweet dessert known as tamalecki.
Ernestine's smell-triggered memory was layered, complex. It was happy, it was sad. It was both a window into a childhood memory and a whole country's history. And at its core, it was an act of resistance. Because at the same time that Ernestine's family was making tamaleke, the brutal system of apartheid was literally obliterating her sense of smell.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the anti-apartheid movement was growing in Grassy Park. And the response by the South African apartheid government was fast. Riot police were a daily presence, and the air always smelled like burning tires and tear gas.
Tear gas is an assault on the senses. It's meant to disorient and dislocate. But in the face of that, Ernestine's family made sure she knew that the smell of pine cones, of rich, fertile earth, of dahlias and lilies, and of sweet tamaleke were part of her. That she and her family were more than burning tires and suffering.
It's been 30 years since the end of apartheid in South Africa. And until recently, Ernestine lived just a few blocks from where she grew up in Grassy Park. She still goes back to Constantia, only now she's bringing her three kids and passing the smells and rituals on to them.
Showing 61–80 of 90 · page 4 of 5
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