Contributor’s Marginalia: Bruce Beasley on “Morcellation” by Leila Chatti

1.
The brutal, relentless ironies of Leila Chatti’s “Morcellation” proliferate: from language to medicine to theology. The more we slice the poem into pieces, the more insidious, the more dangerous, the more terrifying, its mortal confrontation becomes.

In 2014 the FDA recommended against the use of morcellation in laparascopic surgery (in, for instance, hysterectomy) out of concern that the act of morcellating (or slicing into small pieces like morsels) a tumor might unintentionally spread malignant tissue. “Like God, / the terror is in knowing / it could be / malignant, could be / everywhere and all / at once.”

Is God omniscient, omnipotent, and malignant? Unseeable and malign as a cancer?

2.
The ironies and their accompanying wordplays of “Morcellation” encompass the fragmentation of the body (“Less / invasive / the doctor says. / To break into / pieces”), its fallibility, by way of the proliferation, fragmentation, and fallibility of the language we use to talk about it. Word mutates from word as cell from cell. God’s omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence become similitudes for the malignant spread of cancerous tissue. The poem’s very form—lines sliced into halves or thirds—embodies the self-severing and self-violation in morcellation’s dissection and removal of overgrown or diseased tissue.

3.
Morsels are delectable mouthfuls. A morsel is a “treat or tidbit” as my unabridged dictionary has it, and “very appetizing” and “delightful.” Morsels are not tumors. The word morsel comes to us from Latin mordere, to bite. Old French mors (a bite) ≠ Latin mors, death. Pay no attention (pay attention) to the fact that morsels begins and tumors end with mors. From alpha to omega. The Latin for death is decidedly not the root of morsel. But words too have bodies, and so can be morcellated, sliced into deadly morsels.

4.
When thinking of morsels do not think: morbid, mordant, moribund, mortal, mortuary. Pay no attention to the fact that morsel appears beside them in a corps of words derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root *mer, meaning “to rub away; harm.” It’s no one’s fault if the mortal and the morsel overgrow one another and cannot be kept separate.

5.
“I keep mistaking / blood/ for song.” There is no etymological connection between wounding and lyricism, between bleeding and singing, but there is between this poem we’re reading and surgery and tumor and cancer. Ignore the fact that blood in French is sang. Leila Chatti’s “Morcellation” is a poem about all sorts of mistakes: cellular, medical, linguistic, formal, epistemological, theological. Even in their (deliberate) mistakes—misheard homonyms, spurious etymologies—each word in Chatti’s poem is a perfectly formed morsel.

6.
“I keep mistaking,” Chatti writes, “…God / as something / owed to me.”

Dieu ≠ due.
Due: owing, my dictionary says, as a natural or moral right. “Thou owest God a death,” says Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.

Cancer’s mistranslation of cell to replicated cell.

7.
Emerson famously divided the world into Me and Not-Me. Encountering the grotesquely named procedure of morcellation asks Chatti’s speaker to decide: which of the tissues in my body (Mon corps) are Me? “Little morsels, / little slits // (for me) to come out of / (myself).”

If the self is outside the self, where and what is the self?

For Emerson, in Nature, even the body belonged to one’s Not-Me. My body. My corps. Corps (French for body) ≠ corpse. Except that, irrevocably, it does.

8.
Are homonyms mistakes? Mistranslation of sound for meaning? Are homonyms like tumors: radical cellular difference disguised as overgrowth of the same?

9.
“But the tumor lacks language / and so, in this way, is / infallible, and so / a little / like God.” What an unbiteable morsel is that sentence, containing more paradoxes, complexities, and brilliantly compressed ideas than any passage in a poem I’ve read in a while. Is the tumor’s incommunicable hunger a sign of infallibility? Is God, like that tumor, hungry for self-replication and beyond speech?
Is language itself the opposite of the divine: fallibility, sign of the Fall? In the story of Babel it is. Languages as scattering and confusion and dispersal. Language as morcellated, divided, sliced apart and separated.

10.
“Morcellation,” in thirty slices of grouped syllables, has enormous questions of language, theology, subjectivity, disease to dissect. It wants to know about the ways in which cells and words and selves mutate. Its three columns overgrow one another like tissue spreading from organ to organ. The relation of diseased tissue to healthy tissue, of tissues to body, of body to self, of self to language, of self and language to God, of bodily pleasure to bodily mortality, of poetry to injury (sing to sang): all this in seventeen mordant, morcellated, and devastating lines.