LEILA CHATTI
A Tunisian-American dual citizen, Leila Chatti has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati as a Provost Fellow.
Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris
Your first full-length manuscript was released earlier this year by Copper Canyon Press. How was writing a full-length manuscript different than writing a chapbook? At what point did you know you were working on a full-length book?
It’s interesting you ask that, because I discovered I was writing a book — Deluge — when trying to instead put together a chapbook! I made a New Year’s Resolution in 2016 to write a chapbook, and that Spring sat down to look over what poems I had that were linked. I realized I had a number of health and Mary poems from my MFA thesis (I had graduated the spring earlier, in 2015) — a lot of health and Mary poems. I brought them to Dorianne Laux, who I was living with at the time, and told her, puzzled, I was nearly at a chapbook’s page limit but felt I had only just begun saying what I wanted to say. She looked over what I had, laughed, and told me it wasn’t a chapbook, it was my book. Which was mortifying to me, because I thought no one would want to publish (or read) a book about uterine illness. I felt a great deal of pressure about the first book, but she was right, I had stumbled into my first book (I had thought it would come years later, that I had time to keep playing around), and I devoted myself to the project that would become Deluge.
I did, ultimately, end up also writing a chapbook that year — Tunsiya/Amrikiya was written in tandem with Deluge, beginning as well with poems from my MFA thesis and new material written over the course of 2016. The chapbook felt like more of a sprint; when I decided to really try to meet my resolution — I’d fallen into despair, and accompanying writer’s block, following the presidential election — it was a week until the end of the year. I used that deadline as a motivating force, and sat down at my kitchen table for a week to write the remaining poems I needed to flesh out the manuscript. I could maintain that pace because it was only a week, and I only needed a few more pages. I was able to push myself because I didn’t have to keep it very long.
A book, though, is a different beast. I couldn’t run through Deluge — the writing of it spanned from 2013 to 2018, five years. Some of that work was more concentrated than others (2016 and 2017 were when most of the book was written), but the entire process needed that much time. I needed time to research and time to think, as well as, of course, time to write the poems themselves. I also needed time to pass, as distance from what I was writing about; some of the poems in Deluge were written while I was sick, but I needed space from my illness — time after the final surgery — to process what I had experienced and write poems from that new knowledge. You can’t rush that.
Deluge required a more labor-intensive process for me. With Tunsiya/Amrikiya, I knew my subject backwards and forwards; it’s a chapbook about myself and where I come from, the things I know best. Deluge, on the other hand, was about me, but also about things larger than myself — I was interested in how my story fit into a broader context of gender, power, faith, and shame, and understanding those complexities required research. I read a lot while writing the book. I was also more attentive to balance, because the book had many threads that required careful navigating and structuring, or else the book would feel slow, or cramped, or messy. Tunsiya/Amrikiya didn’t have so many threads, and so was simpler to put together when it came time to organize the poems. Organizing Deluge was a whole ordeal; I had charts, coding systems, you name it. The metaphor I kept thinking of as I was trying to navigate the final stretch of the book was that it was like trying to land a very large plane on a very narrow runway. The hardest part of putting the book together came when I knew I had written 90% of the book — finishing it, sticking the landing, was daunting and difficult. There was just so much to handle, and I had to be very thoughtful about it.
Deluge, Copper Canyon Press, 2020
In your poem “Portrait of the Illness as a Nightmare,” you use the setting of a dream to write about illness and God. Would you please tell me more about your decision to use a dream to talk about those topics, rather than a setting rooted in the physical world?
That poem actually came from a prompt! My friend Rebecca Bornstein gave me the following words:
- model
- momentary
- deceive
- strings
- drown
- ruler
- doorbell
- round
- swim
- nightmare
I’m not sure all of them made it into the final poem, but a lot are there! Using a prompt was helpful at unearthing some elements of my experience I hadn’t brought to my full awareness yet (this is just one reason for why I am very fond of prompts). I had often heard, when I would tell someone of my experience, “God, that must have been a nightmare!” That one word — nightmare — brought it all up. Nightmares can tell us quite a lot about what we’re feeling and thinking. They communicate well our obsessions and fears. A nightmare ended up being the perfect setting to describe the surreal landscape of my waking hours. If you’ve ever been sick and had to navigate the medical world, so much of it is truly terrifying and absurd! You are asked to do things you would never do elsewhere, often deeply vulnerable and painful things, in a setting that is alien. It’s dissociative in the way dreams are often dissociative. There’s often a sense of powerlessness, which is always an essential element of my nightmares. One thing that was useful in using a nightmare as the framework of the poem was how it allowed things to shift — that’s how dreams work, right, what is one thing morphs into something else, just like that. I could leap from scene to scene, image to image, because dreams work that way. It was a really effective way to construct a portrait — almost pointillist, many points making up the whole.
In the same poem, you use the second person singular, which, for me, made it easier to imagine myself in the dream. How do you feel about empathy in poetry, especially pertaining to experiences as personal as illness and religion?
I think it’s hard to experience a nightmare unless you’re the one in it — someone telling you their nightmare isn’t the same thing as experiencing one yourself. The immediacy, presence, in a nightmare is what makes it so terrifying; recalled afterward, at a distance, it holds less power, shifts in recollection to something milder, an unpleasant dream. The use of “you” felt, then, necessary — I needed the reader to be the one to whom the poem happened. I believe empathy is essential to poetry, and is certainly central to my practice writing it; if a poem lacks empathy, it isn’t doing the work. It’s artifice. I read poetry from an empathetic impulse as well. I want to understand myself and others better, and I believe poetry is a particularly effective and potent medium for that. Sometimes I turn to poetry to see my experience reflected, but I also read to understand the lives of others. The exact circumstances of my book may not be necessarily “relatable” to every reader, but everyone has experienced pain, and longing, and shame, and doubt. What is personal is honest, and what is honest is true, and what is true carries the universal.
You make multiple references to visual art in the titles of some of your poems, like “Portrait of the Illness as a Nightmare,” “Still Life with Hemorrhage,” and “Landscape with Bleeding Woman.” What do you make of the impulse to compare these stories and experiences to visual art?
The primary reason is that I wanted to elevate my experience to the status of “high art.” I had been told earlier in my career that no editor would be interested in my poems because they were too “graphic,” too (female) body-focused. Instead of shying away from the realities of my experience or cloaking its specifics in vague language, I decided to lean into making my experience more visible, to linger in image by imagining the experience as an image. I was also influenced by the religious paintings I studied while thinking about Mary. I kept clippings of paintings above my desk and in my files, and frequently went to museums to look at them for inspiration — scenarios I might lift to investigate Mary’s experience further. I ended up doing the opposite, transposing my experience into imagined paintings, to better understand myself.
In “Etiology” and “Odalisque (Polaroid Taken One Day Before the Surgery),” you play with the power of information and knowing. For example, in the latter poem, you write, “You want / the particulars; I deny you / the particulars.,” and in the former, you’ve blacked out a key word/words in the poem. Would you please tell me more about the power in knowing, both for your speaker and as a writer who chooses to divulge only certain information to the reader?
This is a great question. I tell my students that I know a poem is finished when I learn something I didn’t know before. There has to be, in writing it, a moment of epiphany, and it has to be genuine. I enter my poems not knowing where they will go or what they will teach me. I came to writing because it helped me unearth my innermost thoughts and feelings, yes, but more importantly because it was — is — how I process those thoughts and feelings, and move bit by bit into self-knowledge. I also only choose to publish poems when I think someone else may gain something useful from them. However, despite this, I still want to keep some things to myself. I am a deeply private person, which makes my profession a bit difficult at times. There are periods where I can’t bring myself to write because I don’t want to know myself, and I certainly don’t want to share any of that knowledge with anyone else. Writing Deluge was a very vulnerable experience, and that vulnerability continues now that it is out in the world being read. I knew I had to be honest, or else the book wouldn’t do what it needed to do, for myself or for anyone else. But I also wanted to keep some things unsaid. Those poems hint a bit toward that struggle — the impulse to know and not know, to reveal and to hide.
Many of your poems throughout Deluge take up looking and what it means to be looked at. Furthermore, they connect the act of looking with judgment. How do you reconcile looking and being looked at as both lifesaving (as in “Awrah”) and damning (as in “Mubtadiyah”)?
This question ties in well with my thoughts to the question above. The experience of ongoing illness involves a great deal of uncomfortable exposure. I spent two years constantly examined and touched. I became quite dissociative to handle the extreme vulnerability it required, and the more it happened, the more surreal the experience became — humbling myself, baring myself before doctor after doctor, doctors who saw more of me than any lover has or could, seeing even inside me, like gods. This was very strange for me to experience, as I was raised in a religion that specifically forbids women from being looked at. There were two powerful forces at play — shame, and a desire to be healed, saved. I hated the looking, and needed the looking, and felt powerless and humiliated and desperate and deeply grateful.
The last poem in the collection, “Deluge,” is made up of lines borrowed from other sources. The book deals with extremely personal topics such as illness and religion, but ends in a kind of chorus. Is it fair to say that you’ve found intellectual or emotional community, or at least validation, through reading and sharing these works?
I love thinking of “Deluge” as a chorus; that feels very appropriate. The book came from a very private writing process — I didn’t share many poem drafts while I was writing, and I kept the most personal poems (“Hymen” and “Awrah”) unpublished. I was skittish and wary, afraid of revealing myself and being judged or dismissed. I had no idea the doors Deluge would open for me, and how many people it would connect me to. Shame is an isolating force; it convinces you that you are alone in your experience, and that you deserve to be. Shame is a liar. In publishing these poems, and then the book, I discovered there are so many people who have experienced some element of what I have — commonalities in religious upbringings, in grappling with misogyny, in illness, in desire, in doubt, and, of course, in shame. We are more alike than we realize, particularly in the ways we are wounded. Talking about the wound helps heal it. This is the good seeing — to be seen clearly, and to see yourself in another.
Buy Deluge
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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.
