by Leila Chatti
SAINTE-BAUME
Holy Cave
In November, eight months after the surgery, I look out at everything dying and declare it
radiant. He takes my hand on the scarred slope of a mountain
named for Mary—not the mother of our non-savior but His
companion, woman of seven devils and a reputation, one who felt the press of a god’s
lips to her. We stand in the gilded shade of beeches, oaks,
leaves falling to our feet like gold shavings, and I am thinking
again of the blood that hasn’t come, the expected
blot and this morning’s bowl of clean water, my thighs pristine and every tree
from here to horizon sloughing red.
I wonder if it’s true, what’s said—if Mary, ferried across the sea, carried
a baby adrift in her, birthed the son of the son of God
in a Provençal cave, the walls slicked and its mouth
flooded with light. When we reach it, the grotto tucked in the cliff face
like an eye socket, I sink
into awe beyond language, I swallow its clotted silence. And when I enter
the mountain’s belly, descend the steps past soft
leak of limestone and quivering
votive flares, to reach the Rock of Consolation pitted
as a fruit stone and flanked by bronze
plaques, the unspoken names of the unborn carved into their surfaces
as if permanence could bring solace, at the center of the craggy rough-
hewn womb suddenly I am willing
to believe in any god offered, to think this hollow holy,
if it means possible the impossible children—the half deity, the half-beating heart, a fetus
budding in the barren plot—and when I tell him
pray, he sits with me before the simple cross in the dim light
of others’ griefs wavering at the altar, we fold
our hands not knowing how, bow our heads, Muslim and atheist fumbling in the dark
chapel of the earth, murmuring, God of Mary Mary of God if when
make it so
DELUGE
And behold: I, even I, did bring a flood. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And it was said: O heaven, desist! Oh I wish I had died. I’d try on death to find you. I wish sometimes that you were back inside me, in this darkness that grew you. 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. The little clouds shine in the sky like girls. Are you awake up there? If from so much afar you remember me, send a sign. But to suffer means God is near. (Astaghfirullah!) And the silence of God is God. I grew faint when I heard what God was planning; I was too afraid to look. All day the bleeding washed down my sides; at night darkly and helplessly my face, wet. Doom flooded my belly, an old debt. Once again pain and the unsayable, once again world. I carried emptiness in me like a drowned man’s mouth. I hurled myself into my grief like a dove, like snow on the dead. Angels don’t know whether they’re moving among the living or the dead. I still sing to you, almost fatal birds of the soul, knowing what you bring. I heard a voice beating among all that blood: try to live. As if there were a God. 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. All the limbs of me plead for the ache. I lie down like a sick sheep by the well. 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. La ’ilaha illallah. Nothing between us except this call, these flashes of lightning, and all that floats. I walk between miracle and confusion. I cannot walk an inch without trying to walk to God, I cannot move a finger without trying to touch God. Oh angels, keep the windows open. I will try hard not to be bad again. I will try hard not to be bad again. God, make me chaste, but not yet. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. I am the lily, gleaming white, upon which God has fixed his gaze. O perfect moon, O fathomless well. Moonlight in the kitchen is a sign of God. Calligraphy of blood on the sheet’s pallor. Be merciful when you cause roses to bloom from my blood. Myself the rose, ungodly as a child’s shriek. O blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere—batter my heart. There is only one heart in my body, have mercy on me. Something is in this night, oh Lord, have mercy on me. Aren’t you just as tired of the fear within me? 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. But we abandon one another. I’ve abandoned certain angers. I stepped out of my thoughts of death, walking and happily talking and laughing, and breathing. Language of blood like praise all over the body. I escaped from death—or is this the view from the precipice? You must be very close, the grass is shadowless. Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light. If I can let you go as trees let go their leaves, so casually, will there be pain? Yes. Will my desires still be unsatisfied? Yes. At the end of the nightmare of knowing, may I emerge, singing. Let me be tricked into believing that by what moves in me I might be saved. I know you, terrible joy, one whose love overcomes me, already with me when I think to call your name. There is still time to say what the two of us never dared. My tongue a dove. Says “infant…” Sometimes so quiet I don’t know it’s there. Mute with desire, I woke trembling. Hush says my drifting blood, cool stardust. 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.
NOTES
MUBTADIYAH: The Book of Deeds, documented by two angels, is a record of a person’s actions, used by God on the Day of Judgment to determine whether the person will enter heaven or hell. Upon the first sign of puberty, the recording begins.
MENORRHAGIA: “True, if I cut it it will bleed, like a can of cherries.”—D.H. Lawrence HYMEN is in conversation with the poem “Ode to the Hymen” by Sharon Olds.
HAEMORRHOISSA is the Greek term used in the New Testament to refer to the “woman with the issue of blood.”
ZINA is an Islamic legal term for illicit sexual relations, most commonly referring to fornication or adultery. The Qur’an states, “Nor come nigh to zina: for it is a shameful deed and an evil, opening the road to other evils” (17:32).
THE HANDSOME YOUNG DOCTOR, WHO IS VERY CONCERNED and MORCELLATION are written with deep gratitude for Dr. Amy J. Reed for her activism on the dangers of power morcellation. Previously, the risk of the dissemination of uterine sarcoma via morcellation was thought to be 1 in 10,000. After Dr. Reed’s activism, the FDA. revised this risk to 1 in 350, and banned the use of power morcellation in the vast majority of uterine fibroid surgeries. Dr. Reed died of uterine sarcoma in 2017.
AWRAH
In Islam, menstruating women are forbidden to touch the Qur’an, pray, enter the mosque, and have sexual intercourse, among other things.
“And indeed We have created man, and We know what his own self whispers to him. And We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.”—The Holy Qur’an, 50:16
“Repent means, ‘The pain again.’”—Anne Carson, Nox
“The idea of disease as punishment yielded the idea that a disease could be a particularly appropriate and just punishment.”—Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
In Islam, awrah refers to what should be covered or hidden. The most well-known practice of this is the hijab, a head-covering that some Muslim women wear to hide their hair in public. Women are expected to cover the majority of their bodies, apart from their hands and feet, in loose clothing. The Qur’an also instructs women to lower their gaze and walk modestly. Some believ
e awrah extends beyond this to include a woman’s voice, particularly if a woman is speaking softly, loudly, alluringly, or is singing.
“Women, being socialized to attend more to their physical appearance, are more likely than men to have health-care providers assume they are not in pain if they look more physically attractive.”—Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain”
“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.”—Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
“Cancer is now in the service of a simplistic view of the world that can turn paranoid. The disease is often experienced as a form of demonic possession—tumors are ‘malignant’ or ‘benign,’ like forces—and many terrified cancer patients are disposed to seek out faith healers, to be exorcised.”—Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
“Cancer is a demonic pregnancy.”—Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
“And you, flower of pain, offer me other possibilities, become motherhood.”—Adonis, “Body”
Mary is the only woman named in the Qur’an.
“God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”—Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib
“Woman is man’s equal only when she makes her life a perpetual offering, as that of man is perpetual action.”—Honoré de Balzac, Béatrix
“You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law.”—Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women
“I have not left behind me any fitnah [tribulation/trial/temptation] more harmful to men than women.”—the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)
“I was shown Hell and I have never seen anything more terrifying than it. And I saw that the majority of its people are women.”—the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him)
“[The woman] is also more shameless and false, more readily deceived, and more mindful of injury, more watchful, more idle, and on the whole less excitable than the male.”—Aristotle, The History of Animals
“‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’”—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
“The female is a misbegotten male.”—Aristotle
“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten.”—St. Thomas Aquinas
“Finally : woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant—woman needs strength in order to cleave to it; she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
“It is sad to think that woman, the relative being who can live only as a member of a couple, is often more alone than a man.”—Jules Michelet
“And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex,’ by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex—absolute sex, no less.”—Julien Benda, Le rapport d’Uriel
“But first we must ask: what is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero’, says one, ‘woman is a womb’.”—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
“Woman is a pain that never goes away.”—Menander
“my black bag of desire”—Lucille Clifton, “poem to my uterus”
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are singing like a school girl.
You are not torn.
Sweet weight,
in celebration of the woman I am
and of the soul of the woman I am
and of the central creature and its delight
I sing for you. I dare to live.
—Anne Sexton, from “In Celebration of My Uterus”
“The womb is like an animal within an animal.”—Aretaeus
And when I saw you, in a textbook
of anatomy, full frontal, I saw
a feral unseeing creature, like a she-ram
with great fallopian horns.
—Sharon Olds, from “Ode to the Female Reproductive System”
“O my accursèd womb, the bed of death!”—William Shakespeare, Richard III
“Womb, black. Blackening, as a snake you coil, and as a serpent you hiss, and as a lion you roar, and as a lamb, lie down.”—inscription on ancient Byzantine amulets
DELUGE
This poem is made up of lines borrowed from (in order of first appearance): the Bible, the Holy Qur’an, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Donne, Jean Valentine, Carl Phillips, Thomas Merton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Etel Adnan, Anna Kamienska, Carolyn Forché, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Amina Saïd, Pablo Neruda, Kadia Molodowsky, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Adonis, Edna St. Vincent Millay, St. Augustine, William Blake, Hildegard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Anne Carson, Mahmoud Darwish, Sylvia Plath, Franz Wright, Paul Celan, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Nazim Hikmet, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Mary Oliver, May Sarton, Alicia Ostriker, Deborah Digges, Jane Kenyon, Chana Bloch, Mary Szybist, Marie Howe, Margaret Atwood, Rumi.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All thanks be to God—I have been greatly blessed.
I am indebted to all the doctors and nurses who cared for me, but especially Dr. Craig J. Sobolewski: thank you.
I am deeply grateful to the organizations and institutions who provided me with the vital time and support to write this book: the Creative Writing Program at North Carolina State University, the Munster Literature Centre, the Quest Writer’s Conference, Dickinson House, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, the Key West Literary Seminar, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Thank you, Michael Wiegers, for being kind to me when I was first entering this literary world, and for believing in this book all these years later. I am enormously thankful to the entire Copper Canyon Press team for everything they’ve done for me. It has been a great privilege and joy to work with you.
There would be no book without the endless guidance and encouragement of my many teachers and mentors; in particular Mary Szybist, Joy Harjo, Anita Skeen, Marianne Forman, Stephen Esquith, Joseph Millar, Kim Addonizio, Gregory Pardlo, Sophia Starmack, Caryl Pagel, and Hilary Plum. There are not words enough for my poetry “mama,” Dorianne Laux—thank you for everything you’ve given me, for everything you are.
Thank you, too, to my friends who have taught—and loved—me so much: Emily Rose Cole, Philip Matthews, Tiana Clark, Tia Clark, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Marta Evans, Tyree Daye, Tayler Heuston, Marty Saunders, Dylan Weir, and Rebekah Hewitt. Thank you, Anders Carlson-Wee and Ross White, for your advice and cheerleading. Thank you especially to Rebecca Bornstein, Carlene Kucharczyk, Chelsea Krieg, Laura Thorp, and Allison DeVille for lifting me up during the hardest time.
Michael Deagler, thank you for believing in me, always.
To my best editor, collaborator, friend: thank you for that brain of yours that understands everything, including this brain of mine.
To my family, blood and chosen: all my love.
Bryce Emley, Erin Willie, and Samuel Piccone—your friendship is my greatest blessing and delight.
Henrik—thank you for staying by my side, through all of it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, 2018) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place, and the Key West Literary Seminar; grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation; and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative
Writing, and Cleveland State University, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Publishing and Writing. Her poems have received awards from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest and its annual poetry contests, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is the consulting poetry editor for the Raleigh Review and her work appears in Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is originally from East Lansing, Michigan, and currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
Also by Leila Chatti
Tunsiya/Amrikiya
Ebb
Copyright 2020 by Leila Chatti
All rights reserved
Cover art: Sedira Zineb, Self Portraits or The Virgin Mary, 2000. Copyright Sedira Zineb. All rights reserved, ARS, New York / DACS, London / Artimage 2019. Image courtesy of kamel mennour, Paris.
ISBN: 978-1-55659-589-9
eISBN: 978-1-61932-220-2
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