Deluge

by Leila Chatti

In her early twenties, Leila Chatti started bleeding and did not stop. Physicians referred to this bleeding as flooding. In the Qur’an, as in the Bible, the Flood was sent as punishment. The idea of disease as punishment drives this collection’s themes of shame, illness, grief, and gender, transmuting religious narratives through the lens of a young Arab-American woman suffering a taboo female affliction. Deluge investigates the childhood roots of faith and desire alongside their present day enactments. Chatti’s remarkably direct voice makes use of innovative poetic form to gaze unflinchingly at what she was taught to keep hidden. This powerful piece of life-writing depicts Chatti’s journey from diagnosis to surgery and remission in meticulous chronology that binds body to spirit and advocates for the salvation of both. Chatti blends personal narrative, religious imagery, and medical terminology in a chronicle of illness, womanhood, and faith.

Genres: Poetry, Religion, Feminism, Disability, Health, Memoir, Nonfiction

74 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 21, 2020

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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. / And I caught heaven in a plastic bag.

At the age of twenty-two, Leila Chatti began bleeding and did not stop. The deluge of blood and clotting and the clamor of accompanying pain were the result of a uterine tumor. This stunning and transformative debut collection by Chatti, a Tunisian-American poet, chronicles her two year journey of bewildering blood loss, through the spiral of a medical system dominated by double standards, and her reckoning of complicated faiths.

I read this from beginning to end as I would a literary thriller, my heart pounding with empathetic dread. Chatti's poems follow the chronology of her first haemhoroissa through to her diagnosis, surgery, and its aftermath with forms that range from the traditional ghazal or cento to a chopping across the page that symbolizes the process of morcellation, or a spiraling poem that gazes deep into the interior of a woman's body. The use of forms and structures is breathtaking and enliven the already vivid content and context of the narrative.

Woven throughout is a thoughtful and gracious examination of faith. Chatti evokes the Virgin Mary, the only woman to appear in the Holy Qur'an, a figure who bridges Islam and Christianity as a venerated impossibility. Chatti maintains a clear-eyed reverence for her Muslim faith, able to hold both its diminishment of women and shaming of menstruation and the comfort of devotion, prayer and surrender to a higher power in balance.

She captures the vulnerability of women on the gynecological stage: lying on an exam table, legs splayed, feet in stirrups, others' hands and instruments exploring deep inside a woman's greatest source of pleasure and pain. As a woman who has experienced similar trauma with an ovarian tumor, uterine fibroids and years of brutal menstrual cycles, I cried and raged along with Chatti, felt her fear, anger and shame at the helplessness over my own body and those who pushed me in all the wrong directions as I sought healing.

Her use of language is intoxicating. As a wordsmith, she is deft and expansive, forthright and luscious.

Flew home for Christmas, plane niveous as a dove. The window’s bleed hole haloed, a nimbus of tinselly frost. Leaned feebly against the pane. The cities rutilant, scarred by streets. The lakes spattered black and viscous. The sky blushing as if shamed. from "Menorrhagia"

I kept a running list of words I had not seen, or had never bothered to learn: glaucous benthic chthonic maundering terrene afflated niveous

This is one of the most haunting, rewarding and astonishing poetry collections as I've read. A young poet with incredible range: we have much to look forward to from Leila Chatti's future work.

[Basia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leila Chatti is a master weaver. Fierce and astute, Chatti stitches together aesthetics, motifs, and stories of women of Islam and Catholicism, creating a meticulous overlay that does not cloak but instead complements contemporary girl- and womanhood, particularly when bodily functions and reproductive illnesses of girlhood and womanhood engender a kind of exile. Deluge emerges from this place of exile and asks, what does it mean to be cast out from a mosque or from motherhood, and thrust into a realm where your body is expected to bend to tactless doctors who treat care as a noun but not a verb? What shape does love—religious or romantic—take when it sits alongside illness? What is it when your will is usurped by God's, when your religion is surrender?

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

often i find poetry collections oriented too tightly around one central idea run themselves into the ground, but here, in hands as capable as leila chatti's, the limited scope of her subject matter deepened and enriched the ideas (menstruation, spirituality/religion, the health care system) rather than spreading them thin. this was so so gorgeous.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living. God filled me as a woman fills a pitcher. God as steep, blue water I vanish into, and leave no shadow. Blue be it: this blue heaven.”

[Alex Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suffering has been on my mind lately. Not as an active thought, but more like a passive lens. It crops up in my daily devotions, entangles itself in conversations with my housemates, and rears its head in people's stories of faith and unfaith. One thought I keep struggling with is the fact that if you don't grapple with the fact that there is suffering in this world and the belief that God loves everyone and is perfect and perfectly in control, you aren't letting your faith grow. That's a difficult one for me because I prefer to sidestep the question unless I'm going through suffering, and then I am merely crying out to God rather than questioning why he is letting it happen to me.

Leila Chatti dives into suffering in a particularly visceral way: describing the illness that caused her to bleed non-stop. She struggles with this bleeding, sometimes seeing it as a reversal of the Virgin birth, sometimes as retribution for sex outside of marriage, sometimes as a way to draw closer to God. While many of the poems fascinated me with their resonate and gritty spirituality, the ending poem "Deluge" where Chatti borrows lines from other poets is a magnus opus for looking at suffering as a believer.

She may be Mulism (I believe?) and I may be Christian, but Chatti is one of the rare authors who lives out their faith so authentically that I find myself in the struggles and even challenged by some ideas. I am grateful for her vulnerability to write about this experience, which I'm sure was bound up in shame and grief and anger for a long time. I'm looking forward to reading more.

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lamest critiques of poetry are always “I personally didn’t relate to this”

Which you see a lot of in the lower ratings of this book.

This is brilliant poetry. Regardless of if you “relate” or not. This is brilliant and powerful and intelligent writing. If I’m ever half the writer Chatti is, y’all better watch out. What a moving evocative collection at the border between faith, doubt, womanhood, and illness.

[Yukti · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so moved by this book. I took my time and savored each poem. When it began with "From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord", I knew it was going to break me. This book should be assigned reading to every woman. As Leila goes along questioning the ideas of being a woman and all it comprises whilst dealing with the abnormalities, the shame, the emptiness and the fullness that are assigned as moral duties, I began to slowly unravel my life. There is so much pain and confusion that we keep hidden inside of us because we do not know how to vocalize it and to whom. Even saying the words to other women diminishes what we feel as we feel ourselves surrendering in a fight.

As a collection of poems, I have never read so many inventive poems tied together so well. I highly recommend this book to whoever is interested in exploring and understanding disease, guilt, grief, shame and womanhood.

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

this got so many wow’s out of me i cannot give it anything but 5 stars. gorgeously constructed and the language was so tight and surprising. i connected to this on a very personal level so perhaps i’m a bit biased but! certainly one of the most neatly threaded collections i’ve ever read

[Charlotte Caine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d been waiting so long / to hear God speak—I hadn’t thought to think / of what he might tell me.

I think this is my favorite collection. Ever.

[i · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, devoured this – poetry on womanhood, illness, desire, taboo, and grief against a beautifully woven backdrop of religious imagery and musings. Incredibly moving and I connected so deeply with the words. The poems about Mary were especially captivating. A new favourite, this will stick with me for a while.

“If Your word is Your will
and Your will is all,
collude with me”

—

“I can sense, the faithless
man who draws toward me
through shadow, knowing
who I am, what I can’t be.”

—

“In Arabic, blood becomes dam, so with my two tongues I conjure both flood and its obstacle.”

[julie | eggmama · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[The voice] follows, speaking, as if from a frosty bag of peas in the freezer aisle, speaking, while I am on my knees, scrubbing the bathroom floor, trying to love a man."

"I was always emptying and it was all the same wound, the same blood, the same breaking. I've rubies, like the evening. The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper. The sea keeps rocking in and I want to talk. I am that clumsy human on the shore loving you."

I came across Chatti's poems "Morcellation" and "February Letter to Ghost Mother" in a literary journal (I can't remember which) and really liked them. "February Letter to Ghost Mother" especially always makes me cry. So I bought her full-length collection, and wow, I'm glad I did. It is so good, it is so good, it is so good :(

Beautiful, aching language. The perfect confluence of poetry and science/medical terms. Womanhood, faith, mortality.

My favorites were:
- Mary Speaks
- Menorrhagia
- Angel
- Night Ghazal
- Remission
- Deluge

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A breathtaking poetry collection that deals with nothing less than the soul of the female body. The author's experiences of mysterious pain and "flooding" really resonated with me in a year that I experienced mysterious internal/menstrual pain - the mystery, the medical disbelief, the flattening way pain operates on life itself. These poems are exquisite and give a sense of narrative while also interrogating the author's relationship to religion and her faith in her own perceptions. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to revel in the many experiences of the female body and all that accompanies it.

[naviya · Rating 5 out of 5]

-holy shit this was so overwhelming and brilliant
-reading this was a bodily experience, it was painful
-the connections bw faith, womanhood and birth/death were *chef's kiss*, it's so dense i absolutely must read this again
-the poet weaves in and out of embodiment and then dissociation, and each time it is slow but it is shocking and asphyxiating
-my faves: confession, tumor, deluge, landscape with bleeding woman, annunciation

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will definitely be reading this again and again.

[Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a new favorite, one that will last my lifetime.
I remember expressing to a friend how, having grown up submerged in a certain subculture, I believed at one time that God must not love me very much, to have made me a woman.
Leila Chatti writes with honesty, grit, boldness, and vivacious spirit the words I needed to hear when that dark thought took root in my heart.
As a Muslim woman whose sarcoma left her bleeding profusely and eventually unable to have children, Chatti explores the societal and religious expectations and taboos regarding women, female bodies, menstruation, and infertility.
Chatti's faith shines through the words, though not untested or unchallenged, and she emerges from the deluge with a strong sense of self, pointed and relevant commentary on womanhood, and identification with women in Scripture whose difficulties parallel her own, specifically Mary.
Her recurring image and poetic obsession of blood is compared to decline in autumn, figs and other fruit, and water, among other powerful images. Chatti does what good poets do, forcing you to rethink your view of something you believed was familiar; in this case, my own female body, my handling of the overlap of grief and faith, and my womanhood.
My faith and my grief are different from the poet's, but her book has changed my life. I am grateful for Deluge, and I am grateful for Leila Chatti. Most importantly, I am grateful for the kindness of Christ and how He loves the historically unloved and unimportant, how He lifts them up and elevates their status in Him.

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.

[Carly Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A completely rapturous read, DELUGE is a book that brings the lyric, psalmic quality of poems to us to praise the body for its wonders, its terrors, and the journey that brought the poems toward us (just like the religious texts--here, learn from my tale, and find what speaks to you of being human and woman).

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am the tree that trembles and trembles. Undermined by blood, visible to anyone, I run to death, and death meets me as fast. Or, death heard my steps and fled, troubled. Before and after death I loved you, and between I saw nothing but..

All I'm saying is Arab people have this poetry thing down.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chatti reckons with so many aspects of womanhood and cancer that I struggle to verbalize myself. Her discussion of "the flood" (biblical & personal) so interesting!! The poems about Mary are amazing. Easily a new favorite of mine.

[Zara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really beautiful, heavy (slight blood pun intended - sorry), and upsetting poetry about illness (and also: God, Mary, Jesus, blood, womanhood, sex, desire, Islam, Christianity... you know, the usual). Lots of reminders about what NOT to teach my daughter about her body.

[Bryce Emley · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I've known men but never a god / that bled and lived. But I did."

[Karla Strand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tunisian American poet Leila Chatti’s powerful poems center her faith, illness, embodiment, shame and womanhood. This is a collection to be reckoned with.

[Valentine Wheeler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was absolutely spectacular and I’m going to have to think about it for a long time.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

so incredible and I cried reading it on an airplane

[Maria]

Truth be told, I like Mary a little better
when I imagine her like this, crouched
and cursing, a boy-God pushing on
her cervix

[...]

the blessed adolescent who squatted
indignant in a desert, bearing His child
like a secret she never wanted to hear.

- from Confession

I’d been raised, a good
girl, to house

my tongue in my mouth, to be hospitable
toward strangers, suspicious of

no one. 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.

- from Mary Speaks

And God said, good

is a woman with fruit

in her womb and not

in her hand

And God said, sin

And God did not say, forgive

- from Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room

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.

- from Mother

It says God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.

- from Angel

I’m not stupid--
I know how it works.

But there was a time when
she was just some virgin nobody, too,

small purse of her womb
and her ordinary eggs

waiting like loose pearls.

- from 14, Sunday School, 3 Days Late

Because I am bleeding, for two years I do not touch the word of God, do not enter His house, do not sing His favorite songs, by which I mean pray. I understand the blood as exile and cry out from the island it makes of me.

- from Awrah

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very marvelously executed collection. Its singular preoccupation--the speaker's experience of a tumor in her uterus, the pain/bleeding that results and positioning this traumatic experience in conversation with her Islamic faith, with the depiction of and idea of Mary, mother of Jesus--is wonderfully explored. The poems are urgent but finely wrought. There is a deep sense of control in this book as it explores the uncontrollable parts of life--the nature of and evolution of faith, the surrender of the body to medical experts, the experience of womanhood in a religious and bodily context. Strong, riveting work.

[natàlia · Rating 5 out of 5]

i would just cry and cry and cry, and cry, and then that would be a flood. seriously. i cried so much. as in, i cried a lot, but also, i cried so many things. this is one of the most moving books i have ever read. unbelievably violent, brilliant, beautiful. absolutely mind-blowing and breathtaking. a gathering of possibilities. a little blanket in which to drown forever.

[Lo Celeste Riddell · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW. I am speechless. this collection is absolutely incredible and I will definitely be returning to it. WOW

my favorites:

- Sarcoma
- Litany While Reading Scripture in the Gynecologic Oncology Waiting Room
- Hymen
- Zina
- Nulligravida Nocturne
- Annunciation (p. 56)
- Remission
- Exegesis
- Awrah

[Mia DuMars · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this one and it’s one I could see myself returning to. The elements of religion, and chronic illness were so well written and the language throughout was beautifully spun. This felt like a masterclass in poetry.

[Ren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, raw, vulnerable. A wonderful description of femininity colored in tragedy, strength, and love. A wonderful read that sometimes is inspired by religious figures. Overall, I am so happy to have discovered Chatti and will definitely be reading more of her work!

[Katie Karnehm-Esh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly beautiful, painful book about female suffering. I love Chatti's work and the way she writes about the body.

[rachbruck]

“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.”