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Born in French-ruled Algiers, raised in New York, Djelloul Marbrook is a lifelong professional writer who didn’t bring poetry and fiction to the public until he had reached senior citizen status—an elder of the tribe sharing the wisdom he’s gained. |
Djelloul Marbrook
On the surface, his debut poetry collection, Far From Algiers, is a beguiling mix of wry confession, Arabian atmospherics, touching personal history, esoteric knowledge, and absolutely current socio-political commentary, all riding a vehicle of language driven by a master. Clearly, its chief currency is the universal yearning to belong.
Untitled from rory dubois on Vimeo.
Djelloul Marbrook worked for many years as a reporter and editor for newspapers including the Providence Journal, Elmira Star-Gazette, Baltimore Sun, Winston-Salem Journal, Washington Star, and others. His book of poems, Far from Algiers (Kent State University Press, 2008) won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His story “Artists' Hill,” from an unpublished novel, won the Literal Latté fiction prize in 2008. Recent poems have been accepted by American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Oberon, Reed, Hot Metal Bridge, The Same, The Ledge, Istanbul Literary Review, Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal, Damazine, Attic and Perpetuum Mobile. His fiction has also been published by Prima Materia (Woodstock, NY), Breakfast All Day (UK and France), Online Originals (London), and Potomac Review (Washington, DC). He lives in New York’s mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn. Some of his poems and thoughts about writing may be heard at From The Fishouse, an audio archive of emerging poets.
Djelloul Marbrook began writing poems in Manhattan at age fourteen. In his thirties, he abandoned poetry after publishing poems in small journals but never stopped reading and studying poetry. At age sixty-seven, appalled by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he began walking around Manhattan with sky-blue notebooks stuffed in his pockets, determined to affirm his beloved home in the wake of the attacks. His 2007 Stan and Tom Wick award winner, Far from Algiers (Kent State University Press, 2008), emerged from hundreds of poems composed in the years since.
Marbrook’s voice speaks to anyone who has ever had doubts about belonging. Born in Algiers to an American artist and a Bedouin father and arriving in America as a gravely ill infant, Marbrook has contemplated this issue throughout his life. Far from Algiers explores “belonging” in a society that is in denial about its own nativist sentiments. It speaks of the struggle to belong in a culture that pays lip service to assimilation but does not fully accept anyone perceived as “foreign.” Marbrook examines this issue with unflinching honesty. Anyone rejected by a family member or neighbor or coworker will relate to these well-crafted and moving poems.
“Djelloul Marbrook, ‘a highly skilled outsider,’ bursts into poetry with this splendid first book, which brings together the energy of a young poet with the wisdom of long experience.”—Edward Hirsch
Far From Algiers, reviewed by Aiden O’Reilly, The Stoneybatter Files, Dublin, Ireland
These poems have something of the teenager’s self-absorption about them. This is not meant in any negative sense – maturity and knowing who you are is vastly over-rated. The keen concern with the watching self in these poems rests on top of a whole career – two careers in fact. The poet has served in the navy and was a journalist for many years. The resemblance to a teenager’s thought is disconcerting, testimony to the resilient bonds that connect us to our formative years.
The history of nations is this all-too-human fear played out on a giant stage. The otherness of a different culture means its inferiority, and at the same time, its looming menace. In his classic 1978 book Orientalism, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said argued that a long tradition of false and romanticized images of Asia and the Middle East in Western culture had served as an implicit justification for Europe’s and the United States’ colonial and imperial ambitions. In 1980 he said, “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists.” The truth of his argument has become crystal clear in the years since 9/11/01, the date that propelled Marbrook toward this publication and the prize it deserved.
The poems tell us that, soon after his cold welcome in Algiers, it was into the dark tangle of American orientalism that Djelloul fell, with a foreign name and the compounding factor of being fatherless, his sire a Bedouin whom he never met. The middle two stanzas of his poem Sinistral may be a snapshot of the collection:
There is only my djinni to lead me
through the loud exhibitionism of the world.
Only my djinni affirms
groups are to keep us out.
Being born somebody’s bastard
made me everyone’s. I went
about the work of finding
the idea of belonging strange.
A subversive streak tints a few pages with mischievous color. He knows the underside of our gated-community malady, and what it needs for healing. From the book’s title poem:
South of every guarded circle
is a Barbary where our rules
stand on their heads and dance
to tunes of turbans and scimitars.
Marbrook turns an explication of his name into the double-edged blade that he wields everywhere in these poems: the exquisitely beautiful image balanced against the ache of cultural and personal schism. The last stanza of Djelloul reads:
What kind of name is that?
The name of a Saracen lancer
ghosting in the dusk of Provence
and the name of a citizen deported
a thousand times a year.
In the poem Autobiography Marbrook chillingly describes the splitting of a young soul into the parts necessary to survive. He disowns himself: I left the little bastard and never looked back, I left because clearly it was being done by “them” anyway. On the question of where he should be put, …the safest place was clearly in harm’s way.
There my father, coming to his senses, would come to find me.
He never did, but late in life I found his child
cowering in a corner and picked him up and calmed him.
Carl Jung proposed that every person has a story, and when derangement occurs, it is because the personal story has been denied or rejected. Healing and integration comes when the person discovers or rediscovers his or her own personal story. He suggested that what passes for normality often was the very force which shattered the personality of the patient—that trying to be “normal,” when this violates our inner nature, is itself a form of pathology. “I use the term ‘individuation,’” Jung wrote, “to denote the process by which a person becomes a psychological ‘in-dividual,’ that is, a separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole.”
The narrative woven through the empty spaces of Djelloul Marbrook’s poems is the story of a man’s individuation. It is the story of a falling-apart and a re-assembly. It is the story of years of stumbling and years of self-study, years of learning to whom to be true. It is the story of a journey from a birth that was both foreign and unwanted to a maturity that understands what happened, and has made a truce with the past.
In a remarkable confluence of Saharan vistas and Manhattan streets, he raises the heartbreakingly personal to the rarified plane of the universal, even to an invocation of supreme unity. From The Flutes of the Djinn:
Abhor the misshapenness of words
and make this gnosis your heart:
everything is a facet of the same jewel.
Far from Algiers, indeed.
One of authors poems:
Djelloul
What kind of a name is that?
I invite you to notice that
is the sound of deportation.
My name is not contagious.
Is quarantine necessary?
Wouldn't exile be better?
I remember I'm from nowhere
but a spurt in thoughtless dark:
you've nowhere to send me.
It's French, I could say. Who knows
the difference? The difference is that
it's Arabic with French panache.
Jeh-lool, go on, try it.
Terrorists bear the name, scientists
and singers, and a few cashiers
can even say it without help
because they've turned their battlements
into condominia of hope.
What kind of name is that?
The name of a Saracen lancer
ghosting in the dusk of Provence
and the name of a citizen deported
a thousand times a year.
Djelloul Marbrook
Click Here to Listen to the Radio Interview
Click here to learn more about the author
AlgerianAmericans.com January 01 2010
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