On Deluge by Leila Chatti

Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 2020. 98 pages. $17.00.

Fellini’s La Dolce Vita opens with two helicopters flying over the ruined viaducts and fields at the poor outskirts of Rome: the first carries an enormous statue of Christ below it, on its way to Saint Peter’s Square; the second contains journalists, including the film’s hero, Marcello Mastroianni. A sense of religious ecstasy—as children run and point excitedly, in a kind of visual poem alluding to the second coming—seems imminent, but Fellini more than balances it with real-world details, such as the heavy awkwardness of the statue and the blasé expression of Mastroianni, who stops to flirt with women in bikinis on a rooftop.

Similarly, the poems in Leila Chatti’s Deluge can be seen as flying two “helicopters,” one sacred, the other secular: the Virgin Mary and the cancer patient; the impressionable child and the world-weary adult; her own Muslim faith and the atheism of her partner, Henrik; the spiritual rapture of Rumi and the clear-eyed rationality of Susan Sontag.

Chatti leaves a generous trail of bread crumbs—or, in this case, a stream of blood—for an empathetic reader to follow. The story is: a young Tunisian American girl with a Catholic mother and Muslim father inherits the assumptions about gender and identity from her two cultures, such as the Qur’an, which describes menstruation as “harm” and menstruating women as “impure.” The young speaker identifies with the Virgin Mary, the only woman named in the Qur’an. She processes information mystically, not practically: speaking to God directly, assuming He will take care of her. At twenty-two, the speaker begins bleeding profusely. She has a grapefruit-sized tumor. Sarcoma? Cancer? As she bleeds, she wonders if God actually does have a special plan for her, as he did for Mary. She undergoes a successful operation; the tumor is benign, she survives.

Deluge, employing a first-person chronological narrative, starts with a pious exclamation, “From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord,” setting the reverent tone for the book. Many of the poems contain trance-like Blakean visions. In “Annunciation,” the speaker in her hospital bed imagines herself as Mary hearing a voice: “a hum of light / like a supernal // language. . . .” As she suffers, a more secular voice emerges. She begins to see herself and her fallible body unsentimentally: “At the center // of the scene: a woman on a mattress / on the floor. Her arms cast out // as if preparing to fly / or as if pinned, savior // or specimen.” Slowly, she relinquishes the idea that God is a deus ex machina. Her nonreligious revelation is that she is neither savior nor specimen, but just human.

As a young Arab American woman, she had learned to make herself small: to hide her hair, her skin, her voice. Although being a woman and a sexual being in her culture seem to be tied to having children with a God-fearing man, many of the most tender moments in Deluge occur with Henrik, a “faithless / man.”

He touches me.
Reaches across our mattress

on the floor like a raft, adrift in night’s black
gulf. Headlights glide over the opposite wall.

Gilded. Quick. His hands
cresting the waves of my hips.

In the dark, I leak
more darkness. Inside,

an endless well. I know
now, deep within myself, myself

as harmed. Know deeper
the man I love

will never harm me. He’s no god
but good

to me. Like blood, the night
comes and comes and

comes. I was taught
for years a touch like this

was fruitless, a sin
to love when love couldn’t

root as proof. His
hands on my hips despite,

moored. If asked,
I’d make the trade—give up the inconceivable

heaven for a warmth
I can sense, the faithless

man who draws toward me
through shadow, knowing

who I am, what I can’t be.

Feeling his “hands / cresting the waves of my hips,” the speaker seems to question the notion that it’s wrong—“a sin / to love when love couldn’t // root as proof”—to touch where the purpose is not procreation. Little by little, she shifts from expectations of an “inconceivable // heaven” to “a warmth / I can sense.”

As Sontag says in Illness as Metaphor, “Having a tumor generally arouses some feelings of shame….Far from revealing anything spiritual, it reveals that the body is, all too woefully, just the body.” For a woman expecting to be infused by the spirit of God, a tumor—“orphan planet of the dead, motherless stone, God of No and Never”—is a rude epiphany. Rather than divinity, there’s a surprising new emptiness within: “my blood, / which now seethes and conspires and appears / on MRI scans like a black eye or a crop circle / or the earth’s eager void.”

The sheer volume of blood emerging from her takes her by surprise: “twenty-two and suddenly // gushing, as if a dam had burst or a thundercloud / deep inside the storm of me, the flood / like a horse loosed from its stable. . . .” The Mary-haunted speaker even gives birth to a figurative child of blood: “And from beneath / the tumor emerged, eager, as if to be / born—bald creature with no father / and no future. Savior of no one.” By not looking away, the speaker outlasts the panic and opens to a more compassionate understanding of what it means to live in a human body. After her ordeal, making peace with blood, she even begins “to seek out any sanguine / fruit like kin . . . / feast on pomegranates, blood / oranges, raspberries, cherries, plums.”

The final poem, “Deluge”—a block of quotations, religious and secular, without quotation marks—delivers one last flood. It carries the mystical sound which has reverberated throughout the book: placing the shameless (e.g., Blake: “the nakedness of woman is the work of God”) beside the devout. The powerful final lines, by Rilke and Rumi and the Qur’an and the Bible, seem to emerge from one throat: “My blood alive with voices, made of longing—pieces of cloud dissolved in sunlight. And the water abated, and the matter was ended. I could go back to being who I was. And the angel departed from me.” We readers have already been washed in a tide of blood by Chatti’s candid and breathless poems. This final tide of ecstatic literature niftily carries both poet and reader out of the text, back to our lives.

While both La Dolce Vita and Deluge portray a person questioning their faith, they end up in different places. In Fellini’s famous last scene, Mastroianni is at a party on the beach at dawn, when they discover a dead manta ray on the sand. It’s hard not to see this “monster,” as they call it, as the final response to the existential questions Mastroianni has been asking throughout the film. If the reference to the second coming at the outset is a question, this dead fish is the answer.

Earlier, while hemorrhaging blood, Chatti’s speaker has an ominous conversation with an angel who says, “God has plans for you. It says I didn’t say they were good.” By the end of Deluge, Chatti, unlike Fellini, seems to retain her faith in God’s plan. In “Sainte-Baume,” she and Henrik enter a French cave where they pray: “bow our heads, Muslim and atheist fumbling in the dark / chapel of the earth. . . .” She doesn’t tell us what she sees in the dark, but—as if anticipating the reader’s inevitable question, Does she still believe in God after the horrors she’s been through?—begins her acknowledgments page unequivocally: “All thanks be to God—I have been greatly blessed.”