Topic
The Smell of Cities: Olfactory Urban Memory in Habib Selmi’s The Scents of Marie-Claire
Urban narratives have traditionally been analyzed through visual imagery and spatial representation, yet the lived experience of the city is deeply shaped by other senses, particularly smell. This paper explores the role of olfactory memory in Habib Selmi’s The Scents of Marie-Claire, arguing that scent functions as an intimate archive through which urban space is remembered, negotiated, and narrated. Drawing on the sensory history of Alain Corbin and the phenomenology of perception developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the paper examines how smell mediates the relationship between body, memory, and city. In Selmi’s novel, Paris is not constructed primarily through visual landmarks or architectural descriptions but through subtle olfactory encounters that emerge in moments of intimacy, desire, and estrangement. Scents associated with bodies, interiors, and urban movement transform the city into a sensory landscape where private memory intersects with public space. Through these olfactory traces, the narrative reveals hidden emotional geographies that escape the dominant visual mapping of the modern metropolis. By foregrounding smell as a narrative device, The Scents of Marie-Claire proposes an alternative sensory cartography of the city, one in which urban memory is experienced through the body rather than solely through sight. Situating Selmi’s novel within emerging scholarship in sensory studies and literary urban studies, this paper argues that olfactory memory offers a critical framework for understanding how contemporary literature reimagines the intimate textures of urban life.
Aliyah Alsaber (Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University)
Aliyah Alsaber is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University. Her research focuses on the role of nostalgia in the context of mass migration, particularly as it emerges in diasporic and cultural productions. She analyzes contemporary Arabic literature as well as works by minority writers in and from the Arab world, with a primary focus on Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies. Her work engages questions of memory, displacement, and belonging, and she is particularly interested in the concept of hauntology in diasporic spaces. Her current research projects seek to develop a conceptual framework for “un-belonging” in Arab diasporic literary and cinematic works, examining how nostalgia, memory, and fragmented identities shape narratives of migration and exile.