Keep Safe the Body: On Leila Chatti's "Deluge"

Leila Chatti | Deluge | Copper Canyon Press | April 2020 | 74 Pages

I do not believe in this body as an afterthought, but nor do I believe in it as the altar upon which we must sacrifice our living. This is precisely the insistence of Leila Chatti’s debut collection, Deluge—a reenactment of that which we consider both sacred and profane. An exercise in simultaneity, Deluge imagines the implications of suspending what we think of as good or evil and instead masking the world in shades of gray. As Rebecca Solnit says, in her essay appearing in the New Yorker (Coyote)—“If the perfect is the enemy of the good, maybe imperfection is its friend,” this statement takes into consideration the failure to meet presuppositions and outmoded standards of worth. But whereas Rebecca Solnit observes failure in systems in the world, Chatti is interested in the failure of systems in the body.

This collection interests itself in removing the distance between the holy and the mundane, in attempt to elevate the ordinary and imperfect to the status of sacred, as in the poem opening the collection (Confession):

            …I admire this girl who cared

for a moment not about God

or His plans but her own

distinct life, this fiercer Mary who’d disappear

if it saved her, who’d howl to Hell

with salvation if it meant this pain,

the blessed adolescent who squatted

indignant in a desert, bearing His child

like a secret she never wanted to hear.

The poem considers the hesitation Mary, the mother of Jesus, must’ve felt upon the physical pain of delivering an infant, and her regret in agreeing to produce the human child that Christ was. It opens with an epigraph from the Qur’an—"Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” This poem serves as an entrance into the experience of femininity, its beauties and subterfuges along with that which is held in opposition to it.

Leila Chatti was raised in a mixed-religion home, one with a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, both being related lineages to “the book,” or rather those holding sacred relationships to the old testament scriptures and events (though taking different vantage points). There is a fraught history of feminine oppression within both traditions, taking into account their heteropatriarchal establishments. In these traditions the flood sent by God to cover all the earth is viewed as punishment for humanity’s misdeeds, in addition the act of bleeding is considered unholy in certain forms. The conglomerate of these two discouragements is precisely what happens to Chatti—a tumor in her early twenties causes her to begin bleeding regularly and profusely, what doctors referred to as a flood.

The speaker in the poems traces the history of blood in the body, beginning with her first period at age twelve (Mubtadiyah): “I had not been good / all my life but until this first vermilion drip / I lived unobserved, my sins not sins / because no one looked;” through her stay in the hospital due to the deluge of blood; her diagnosis with a tumor; and the surgery and following recovery (Waking After The Surgery):

…my self unlatched for a while as if it were

a dog I had simply released from its leash
or a balloon slipped loose from my grip

in a room with a low ceiling, my life
bouncing back within reach, my life

bounding toward me when called.

The poems are dazzling and transcendent, reaching beyond the body to excavate the inherent worth of perseverance, though not casually masquerading as hope for hope’s sake. This collection is a momentous treatise on grief without making beautiful the act of suffering. It is a multifaceted and nuanced consideration, using Mary along with religious iconography and scripture as its lodestar. The achievement of this book is in its expansion of the ways it is permissible for the body to fall short, coming to love the flawed operational mechanics we inhabit—carrying on in the same vein as such books like House is an Enigma by Emma Bolden, another tour-de-force of coming to feel at home in your body. What both of these books share is that they clasp onto the unholy and imperfect as that which leads us to survival, and learning to treasure that which we take for granted (Sarcoma): “…and he says something about life expectancy / but of course I expect my life, so plain I thought nothing would ever take it.” Deluge is an unspeakably gorgeous book, the most lyrically stunning and visceral debut collection I have come across since Richard Siken’s Crush.