Meditating on the Many Facets of Womanhood: a Review of Leila Chatti’s Deluge
Deluge
Leila Chatti
Copper Canyon Press
April 2020
ISBN-13: 978-1556595899
74 pages
Reviewed by Mandana Chaffa
Leila Chatti’s debut collection of poems is mesmerizing for its narrative flow, illuminating language, stark imagery and altogether powerful voice.
The centering narrative of the collection is how “In the twenty-second year of my life, in the twelfth month, on the fifteenth day of the month, / all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.” But to limit this book to one woman’s experience of a uterine tumor that caused uncontrollable bleeding would be akin to calling King Lear a play about retirement.
Mary—the Mary of the Bible, and the Mary of the Holy Qu’ran—plays a prominent role in this collection. That Mary is mentioned in the Holy Qu’ran more than in the New Testament and as “the one chosen by God above all women of all nations” will be novel for some readers. In the confines of this collection, she is guide, model, example of God’s miracles, and, also, of his neglect. Chatti—the daughter of a Catholic mother and Tunisian father—understandably has a fascination with Mary that goes far beyond her symbolic value as an object of prayer. This is a multifaceted Mary through which the poet battles the centuries-old depiction of woman as a vessel, a helpmate, with chasteness as the primary achievement. From “Awrah”:
When trying to ascertain a name for my condition—not the illness, but
the subsequent obsession with the Mother of Sorrows, Sanctissima, Star
of the Sea—I collect words like pearls, roll them over my tongue, relish
the sounds they make, knowing they do not
serve me. Mariolatry, parthenolatry: worship of the Virgin Mary, of virgins collectively. (It’s not worship
that I feel, wanting to slip into a new skin like slipping
into a bed with fresh, cool sheets.)…
And:
…I stare not to humiliate her but for reassurance
that one can truly suffer, can bleed
and bleed as if gutted
by the blade of God’s command,
and still be loved by God
and, more importantly, love Him back.
How many expectations, rituals, and aspects of language are designed to sequester women from society, and worse, from their inner voice? In “Etiology,” Chatti blacks out a key word throughout the piece—eminently clear to this reader, and likely to others—that has shadowed women since Eve in order to demean, quiet and control. This poem—muscular and visual—reflects how the poet’s erasure of the word works to countermand the centuries of eradicating women who didn’t fall into line.
More benign yet no less diminishing is how modern medicine so often relegates the female to object, painfully and perfectly expressed in a section in “Intake Form:” “Say, is that your boyfriend, I’m going to ask / him some questions, okay? I’m just going to ask him some questions about your bleeding, okay? Just / clear some things up, okay?”
In “Mother,” Chatti neatly weaves her feelings about womanhood—colored by the limiting expectations of patriarchies and religion—with the desire for autonomy, and the mounting determination to be more than her reproductive organs. The end, when the tumor balloons “like hope,” is an unexpected and beautiful turn:
So if you asked me again,
twenty-three, I’d tell you the worst thing
you could be is not a woman but
barren, the industry shut down and the parts
missing, malformed. And I’d tell you the shame of it:
the feminine failure, its ache
a reminder—at the center the tumor
ballooning, like hope.
It's a rare modern poet who so directly—and eloquently—examines her relationship to God and faith. Chatti accomplishes this handily; throughout the book we see her connection change, initially with the desire to be the ideal supplicant, but then as equal conversant, as one who asks questions. It is here that we see the power of womanhood, fighting against conventional—male-driven—narratives.
In many cultures, a sacrifice is demanded to prove fealty to the Gods, and this literal blood sacrifice is the writer’s own, through which she emerges reborn, and most essentially herself. The covenant she has with poetry is as fierce and eternal as her spiritual faith, and in this setting she is the creator, one who asks nothing of the reader except to commune at the altar of language.
In “Mary Speaks”: “I’d been waiting so long / to hear God speak—I hadn’t thought to think // of what he might tell me.”
And later, more assuredly, in “Annunciation”:
…All night I listen
for you listening. If there
is something you need
to tell me, God, you must
tell it to me
yourself.
The duplication of certain titles throughout the collection—three poems titled “Annunciation” and two titled “Deluge”—hints at the repetitions related to worship, to prayers we offer again and again, to our Gods and to ourselves. God may not always directly respond to our narrator, but poetry does.
The Arabic word “Awrah”—which Chatti defines in the poem of the same name as “nakedness, taboo; that which is prohibited / from public view. // From the root meaning defectiveness, weakness, imperfection, / blemish.”—is a magnificent nine-page epic poem spinning with musings, quotations, medical commentary, and diversity of form. It encompasses all of the themes of the collection both succinctly and expansively, a feat of assured, lyric, and altogether memorable writing:
My hair awrah, so I covered it.
My skin awrah, so I covered it.
The sound of my voice awrah, so I swallowed it.
The sound of my feet awrah, so I stood so still I vanished, just to be sure.
And it includes a devastating 86-word definition of woman, which begins: “9/10ths of desire. Man’s equal only when she makes her life a perpetual offering.”
This collection is a full-throated denial of such falsehoods and restrictions.
Reading this book, one considers how societal structures can support and, also, encage us. The narrator of these poems exhibits so much faith in family, in religion, in medicine, but gradually, victoriously, ensures that her faith in herself supersedes all else. “Why do I worship that which does not hear and does not see and will not benefit me at all? I change in vows, and in devotion.” Establishing a fully developed “I” is as critical as the removal of the tumor that has led to this Deluge, and the strength of the collection as a whole is based upon this clear-eyed, wholehearted awakening, this stirring covenant with the self.
At its core, Deluge is a meditation on the many facets of womanhood, and Chatti’s devotions are visible on every page. Her search for agency, her determination to write her own narrative and refusal to be relegated as a nameless female bystander of others’ stories, whether by religion, culture, or convention, is transfixing. There are pleas and hopes and passions in these poems, hymns to the wonder of language, how words can contain worlds, how letters on a page can be arranged to express what it is to be flawed, continually striving, aching with love and loss and always, perfectly human.
Leila Chatti (@laypay) is a Tunisian-American poet and author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar, and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing & Publishing. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Mandana Chaffa (@recycledgiraffe) is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters that will launch in spring 2021, an Assistant Managing Editor at Split/Lip Press and a Daily Editor at Chicago Review of Books. Her essay “1,916 Days” is in My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora, (University of Texas Press, 2020) and she edited Roshi Rouzbehani’s limited-edition illustrated biography collection, 50 Inspiring Iranian Women (2020). Her writing has also appeared or is forthcoming in the Ploughshares Blog, Chicago Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote, Rain Taxi, The Adroit Journal, Jacket2, and elsewhere. Born in Tehran, Iran, Mandana lives in New York.