Deluge: noun, a severe flood; or verb, to inundate with a great quantity of something. Both definitions imply a means to engulf, to overwhelm. Leila Chatti’s debut body of work, an exploration of the female body as site of both the pious and the monstrous, as historic keeper of burdening secrets that have now been laid bare, certainly achieves this effect. Having survived a horrific illness in her early twenties, the significant symptom being heavy and excessive bleeding, Chatti uses the experience to connect the medical and the spiritual using a bold but precise approach in her writing. The bridge’s foundation is fashioned by a gendered anachronist use of Mary in a number of Chatti’s poems; she performs as a kind of antithesis to Chatti’s own experience—a blessed woman, who contained her body and acted as vessel for greater purposes, while Chatti’s own uncooperative body remains “unchosen.” The relationship between them contributes to the grand, personal scope of the work; it positions Chatti as one of many women throughout history, from her own supposed failure to Mary’s questionable success and beyond, to undergo the challenge of reconciling a greater faith with the intimacies of one’s own body.
According to what she’s been taught—by God, by society, by men in power and those without, by other women—to exist as a woman is already to encroach sin. As a young teenager, this was already clear: “knew that a soon-to-be / woman was the second worst thing / in the world after a woman.” To exist outwardly, to have individual desires, passions, and needs, is to entreat blasphemy, after all, “to be a mother was to be the only / permissible form of a woman, the begrudging / exception to the rule of our worth- / lessness.” The need for reproduction, to ensure the continuation of a living, dominating line of men, is the only avenue women are allowed to have expression beyond themselves, but this is no sanctuary, as described in “Mary Speaks”: “Perhaps I’d have been / better off / to be wary, but I’d been waiting so long / to hear God speak—I hadn’t thought to think / of what he might tell me.” The loneliness, then, of being a woman, of being without physical and spiritual companionship, may be what drives women to these cyclic, unfulfilling fates. To exist in opposition to this expected idleness, as Chatti does, “a woman suffering / because a woman wanted,” questions these presumptions of passivity. Succinctly put, “I’ve known men but never a god / that bled and lived. But I did.” The trauma of her illness has instilled not shame, but a sense of worth that defies the nature of powerful doctrine.
Deluge is a complicated work; Chatti’s words constantly prod, writhe, and elude. After the flood that is her illness, she is emptied, consumed—”who wants a sucker / that’s already been licked?” But when Mary gives birth, “her incarmined / hellward crown slicked / as if with lust”, it serves as “reassurance / that one can truly suffer...by the blade of God’s command, / and still be loved by God / and, more importantly, love Him back.” To be the very image of ideal womanhood as mother, yet embody the contemptuous characteristics she supposedly must endure punishment for—”the idea of disease as punishment”—both Chatti and Mary manifest the complexities of living in women’s bodies while retaining a hold on their faith.
To revel in these nuances, even contradictions, is to experience Chatti’s work, to “look out at everything dying and declare it / radiant.” In a way, to witness this meditation on pain and near death brings the comfort of life into clearer focus.
Copper Canyon Press, 2020
