Deluge by Leila Chatti
Reviewed by Irène Mathieu
Leila Chatti’s debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) is life-giving in its stirring portrayal of what it means to have a female body, an ill body, a body that bleeds and bleeds and won’t stop. I say “life-giving” because Deluge insists on pointing out how bleeding is the source of life, even while it is a source of shame for so many.
Deluge unfolds in four sections. The first two are primarily dedicated to describing the speaker’s mysterious, prolonged uterine bleeding. The third section describes the speaker’s surgery to remove a benign tumor that was causing the bleeding. The final section is a lengthy, multilingual, etymological rabbit hole that springs from the speaker’s various experiences that teach her how her body is coded in our culture--“good goods / unless we’re unwrapped,” a “body / obscured,” “some thing damaged,” “[a] novelty. A gimcrack,” at once hypervisible and invisible in the labyrinth of language.
Having a body is always a lesson in the futility of control; our bodies all falter and eventually expire, despite our best efforts at heading off the inevitable. The particular falterings and functionings of the female body carry the additional baggage of shame, and Chatti traces an historical arc of female shame from the Qur’anic era to the present day. She weaves the intersection of the shame and uncontrollability of the female body in the poem “Mother”:
What I wanted, always, to be:
in control. And I knew this was
impossible, just as I knew, even then, that
to be a mother was to be the only
permissible form of a woman, the begrudging
exception to the rule of our worth-
lessness.
These lines capture how a woman’s worth is so often measured by her ability to be a mother, to serve in a mothering role. In the final line break of “worth- / lessness,” Chatti introduces the idea of “worth” only to dash it in the following line. Even becoming a mother confers only “begrudging” worth. Chatti’s speaker is acutely aware of her body’s limitations--a lack of control, and a worth conferred only by what it can do in relation to others.
The presence in the book of the Virgin Mary, the only woman named in the Qur’an, and other religious figures, such as Haemorrhoissa, a bleeding woman healed by Jesus in the New Testament, lends Deluge a sheen of antiquity, as if it were a sacred text or a book of mythology. In some poems, Chatti not only references religious figures but also uses language that evokes a religious text. In “Zina” she writes, “(9) You my Lord. (8) Verily, I mistook him for / (11) God, (10) I invoked another.” Each phrase in “Zina” is numbered non-sequentially, so that reading the poem according to the numbering system is periphrastic and mildly laborious, much like reading a religious text written in antiquated language. The collection contains delightful and surprising anachronism, such as the image of the Virgin Mary reading a Cosmo magazine in a doctor’s office waiting room along with the speaker.
Central to Deluge is the idea of powerlessness over one’s own body, a powerlessness that Chatti compares throughout the book to the Virgin Mary’s experience. Indeed, both Mary and the speaker undergo a kind of immaculate conception. In “Myomectomy,” the first poem in Deluge’s third section, the speaker says of her surgery, “the tumor emerged, eager, as if to be / born – bald creature with no father / and no future. Savior of no one.” Toward the end of this section, in the poem “Exegesis,” Chatti writes, “[a]nd God knows best. If He calls a curse a blessing / then so it is.” Medical professionals occupy god-like positions through the poems in these sections--in “Myomectomy” “[t]hey entered, innominate / doctors, their hands blue / as sky.” Post-operatively, “[t]he doctor’s voice / sudden in the empty room like the voice of God” gives the speaker “the word: benign.” I’m struck by the gender of the lingering physician who pops up to converse with the speaker “as I’m told one day a husband might,” the doctor “an expert / in his field” (from “Awrah”). In Deluge, God and doctors are the only beings with control, the omnipotence of God nearly inseparable from the authority of a physician, and both beings are always men.
The lengthy poem “Awrah,” in the fourth section, is a meditation on Arabic and English words--or lack thereof--for “woman” and the experience of having a female body. The phrase “a little pressure” is repeated insistently--at one point, eight times in a row--in a conflation of invasive medical examination and sexual assault. In Deluge, Chatti suggests that pain is both a punishment and a precondition of womanhood: “[a]fter a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says you deserve that which has happened to you.” (from “Angel”). And in “Awrah,” Chatti writes,
To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply Your pain; in pain, your desire will rule over you.’
Or this is how I remember it. Some things get damaged when handed down. Some things
get damaged when handled. I am handled by so many men I begin to believe myself a thing,
my self some thing damaged.
Aesthetically, Deluge is flush with extraordinary imagery. In “Menorrhagia” Chatti writes, “[t]he cities rutilant, scarred by streets. / The lakes spattered black and viscous. The sky blushing as if shamed.” In many of the poems, form becomes an extension of image, such as in “Tumor,” which is written in a spiral that forces the reader to turn the book around and around to read it, resulting in disorientation and vague dizziness. Like an actual tumor, the poem is a lesion among otherwise traditional, left-to-right-oriented pieces. It intimidates, forces a sort of slowing, exhausts and disorients, and impresses with its singular and uncomfortable beauty. The final, titular poem is a lengthy cento that covers more than a page with dense text, a flood of lines that washes over the reader, words from a set of texts and writers that span centuries and continents. The poem sweeps you up in its undulations – an experiential nod to the flood at the heart of this book.
The poem “Annunciation” (in the third section; there are several poems that share this title) is a triptych, which generates at least four possible readings and also conjures an image of the religious triptych paintings of early Christian art. Chatti makes beautiful work out of a milieu of shame and the bodily terror of ceaseless bleeding. In this sense, Deluge is itself an act of resistance against this shame and fear, an insistence on the human body’s ability to create beauty despite its own physical limitations and social strictures. A central strength is the intimate relationship between the speaker and her partner, who appears most tenderly in the poem “Remission.” The only man in the book whose interactions are kind, healing, and free of shame, “he carries me: lifts me from the bed as though I might / be further injured by his touch, or as if afraid it might be painful / for him to touch me.”
As a physician, I’m reminded of the importance of celebrating resiliency in a profession that trains its practitioners to diagnose that which is wrong, bad, or painful first, and relies on a dependent relationship between doctor and patient, in which the doctor holds the power and agency. True partnership, which medical education has recently begun to emphasize, necessitates a genuine sharing of agency and power in a therapeutic patient-doctor relationship. It requires an understanding of how patients’ unique experiential knowledge is a critical ingredient in their own healing, however that might be defined. Even the dichotomy of “patient/not patient” or “sick/not sick” is false; Deluge insists on reminding us that to have a (female) body is to inherently struggle against the shame and “imperfections” of the body itself - uncontrollable desires, bleeding, (in)fertility, and more.
To trouble the traditional positionality of “patients” as wounded and powerless is a poetic project that calls to mind Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, Bettina Judd’s Patient, Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations, and other recent collections that wrest back agency and power in the face of disease and death. These works complicate binary notions of “health” and “illness,” and challenge the stigma and assumptions about people who face disease. Like these works, Deluge doesn’t purport to overcome the imperfections of the body; rather, it proffers something to celebrate while we all grapple with our own mortality.
Leila Chatti’s debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) is life-giving in its stirring portrayal of what it means to have a female body, an ill body, a body that bleeds and bleeds and won’t stop. I say “life-giving” because Deluge insists on pointing out how bleeding is the source of life, even while it is a source of shame for so many.
Deluge unfolds in four sections. The first two are primarily dedicated to describing the speaker’s mysterious, prolonged uterine bleeding. The third section describes the speaker’s surgery to remove a benign tumor that was causing the bleeding. The final section is a lengthy, multilingual, etymological rabbit hole that springs from the speaker’s various experiences that teach her how her body is coded in our culture--“good goods / unless we’re unwrapped,” a “body / obscured,” “some thing damaged,” “[a] novelty. A gimcrack,” at once hypervisible and invisible in the labyrinth of language.
Having a body is always a lesson in the futility of control; our bodies all falter and eventually expire, despite our best efforts at heading off the inevitable. The particular falterings and functionings of the female body carry the additional baggage of shame, and Chatti traces an historical arc of female shame from the Qur’anic era to the present day. She weaves the intersection of the shame and uncontrollability of the female body in the poem “Mother”:
What I wanted, always, to be:
in control. And I knew this was
impossible, just as I knew, even then, that
to be a mother was to be the only
permissible form of a woman, the begrudging
exception to the rule of our worth-
lessness.
These lines capture how a woman’s worth is so often measured by her ability to be a mother, to serve in a mothering role. In the final line break of “worth- / lessness,” Chatti introduces the idea of “worth” only to dash it in the following line. Even becoming a mother confers only “begrudging” worth. Chatti’s speaker is acutely aware of her body’s limitations--a lack of control, and a worth conferred only by what it can do in relation to others.
The presence in the book of the Virgin Mary, the only woman named in the Qur’an, and other religious figures, such as Haemorrhoissa, a bleeding woman healed by Jesus in the New Testament, lends Deluge a sheen of antiquity, as if it were a sacred text or a book of mythology. In some poems, Chatti not only references religious figures but also uses language that evokes a religious text. In “Zina” she writes, “(9) You my Lord. (8) Verily, I mistook him for / (11) God, (10) I invoked another.” Each phrase in “Zina” is numbered non-sequentially, so that reading the poem according to the numbering system is periphrastic and mildly laborious, much like reading a religious text written in antiquated language. The collection contains delightful and surprising anachronism, such as the image of the Virgin Mary reading a Cosmo magazine in a doctor’s office waiting room along with the speaker.
Central to Deluge is the idea of powerlessness over one’s own body, a powerlessness that Chatti compares throughout the book to the Virgin Mary’s experience. Indeed, both Mary and the speaker undergo a kind of immaculate conception. In “Myomectomy,” the first poem in Deluge’s third section, the speaker says of her surgery, “the tumor emerged, eager, as if to be / born – bald creature with no father / and no future. Savior of no one.” Toward the end of this section, in the poem “Exegesis,” Chatti writes, “[a]nd God knows best. If He calls a curse a blessing / then so it is.” Medical professionals occupy god-like positions through the poems in these sections--in “Myomectomy” “[t]hey entered, innominate / doctors, their hands blue / as sky.” Post-operatively, “[t]he doctor’s voice / sudden in the empty room like the voice of God” gives the speaker “the word: benign.” I’m struck by the gender of the lingering physician who pops up to converse with the speaker “as I’m told one day a husband might,” the doctor “an expert / in his field” (from “Awrah”). In Deluge, God and doctors are the only beings with control, the omnipotence of God nearly inseparable from the authority of a physician, and both beings are always men.
The lengthy poem “Awrah,” in the fourth section, is a meditation on Arabic and English words--or lack thereof--for “woman” and the experience of having a female body. The phrase “a little pressure” is repeated insistently--at one point, eight times in a row--in a conflation of invasive medical examination and sexual assault. In Deluge, Chatti suggests that pain is both a punishment and a precondition of womanhood: “[a]fter a month of asking, suddenly, a voice. It says you deserve that which has happened to you.” (from “Angel”). And in “Awrah,” Chatti writes,
To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply Your pain; in pain, your desire will rule over you.’
Or this is how I remember it. Some things get damaged when handed down. Some things
get damaged when handled. I am handled by so many men I begin to believe myself a thing,
my self some thing damaged.
Aesthetically, Deluge is flush with extraordinary imagery. In “Menorrhagia” Chatti writes, “[t]he cities rutilant, scarred by streets. / The lakes spattered black and viscous. The sky blushing as if shamed.” In many of the poems, form becomes an extension of image, such as in “Tumor,” which is written in a spiral that forces the reader to turn the book around and around to read it, resulting in disorientation and vague dizziness. Like an actual tumor, the poem is a lesion among otherwise traditional, left-to-right-oriented pieces. It intimidates, forces a sort of slowing, exhausts and disorients, and impresses with its singular and uncomfortable beauty. The final, titular poem is a lengthy cento that covers more than a page with dense text, a flood of lines that washes over the reader, words from a set of texts and writers that span centuries and continents. The poem sweeps you up in its undulations – an experiential nod to the flood at the heart of this book.
The poem “Annunciation” (in the third section; there are several poems that share this title) is a triptych, which generates at least four possible readings and also conjures an image of the religious triptych paintings of early Christian art. Chatti makes beautiful work out of a milieu of shame and the bodily terror of ceaseless bleeding. In this sense, Deluge is itself an act of resistance against this shame and fear, an insistence on the human body’s ability to create beauty despite its own physical limitations and social strictures. A central strength is the intimate relationship between the speaker and her partner, who appears most tenderly in the poem “Remission.” The only man in the book whose interactions are kind, healing, and free of shame, “he carries me: lifts me from the bed as though I might / be further injured by his touch, or as if afraid it might be painful / for him to touch me.”
As a physician, I’m reminded of the importance of celebrating resiliency in a profession that trains its practitioners to diagnose that which is wrong, bad, or painful first, and relies on a dependent relationship between doctor and patient, in which the doctor holds the power and agency. True partnership, which medical education has recently begun to emphasize, necessitates a genuine sharing of agency and power in a therapeutic patient-doctor relationship. It requires an understanding of how patients’ unique experiential knowledge is a critical ingredient in their own healing, however that might be defined. Even the dichotomy of “patient/not patient” or “sick/not sick” is false; Deluge insists on reminding us that to have a (female) body is to inherently struggle against the shame and “imperfections” of the body itself - uncontrollable desires, bleeding, (in)fertility, and more.
To trouble the traditional positionality of “patients” as wounded and powerless is a poetic project that calls to mind Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, Bettina Judd’s Patient, Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations, and other recent collections that wrest back agency and power in the face of disease and death. These works complicate binary notions of “health” and “illness,” and challenge the stigma and assumptions about people who face disease. Like these works, Deluge doesn’t purport to overcome the imperfections of the body; rather, it proffers something to celebrate while we all grapple with our own mortality.
Dr. Irène P. Mathieu is a pediatrician and writer. She is the author of Grand Marronage (Switchback Books, 2019), orogeny (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017), and the galaxy of origins (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Narrative, Boston Review, Southern Humanities Review, Callaloo, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Irène is on the editorial boards of Muzzle Magazine and the Journal of General Internal Medicine's humanities section. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, Callaloo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Irène is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Virginia, where she serves as an affiliate faculty member of UVA’s Center for Health Humanities & Ethics.