Djelloul Marbrook Talks Poetry with Laurin Wolf

LW:  There are poems in this book that deal with identity in a very straightforward way, such as “Djelloul.” How do you tackle such personal subject matter and make the reader care?

DM:  I think issues of belonging, not belonging and alienation resonate in all of us. But I didn’t set out to write a book about these issues; I just happened to notice at some point that these matters played an important role in the totality of what I had written when I began to organize a book.

 We live in a culture in which some of us are working hard to make others of us feel less than American, less than patriotic. It’s the latest incarnation of nativism. We are being asked to forfeit our sense of belonging as the price of dissent. There is nothing new about this. So, until we somehow discover our common humanity in a personal way, we’re going to have to cope with efforts to alienate each other. It’s rather like a B-movie Nazi functionary asking for our papers.

I’m distrustful of memberships--clubs, societies, organized religions--because their intent is to leave out the rest of us. Doors are being shut on us. And yet I confess to having enjoyed the pleasures of various memberships. I was proud to serve in the Navy and remain proud of my service, for example. I suppose I consider that different from a club or a church or a society.

Our society likes to think of itself as a successful melting pot, but that’s facile. Yes, we are multi-ethnic. Look at our army; it looks like us, like our demographics. But look at the photos and videos of our politicians, our Wall Street poobahs; they don’t look like our demographics.

There is no useful way of talking around this. I had to be straightforward. I had to avoid simile and metaphor. The reason I stopped writing poetry in my thirties was that I saw that, while I knew a great deal about prosody and poetics, I didn’t want to be caught dead saying what I meant or meaning what I said. It was horrifying. I saw that I hid behind my poems, behind their devices. And then, as a newspaperman, I saw that journalism hides behinds concepts of balance and objectivity. It stunned me into silence. There is no objectivity, there is merely its semblance.

But immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001, as I was walking into the evening sun on 54th Street in Manhattan I said, You stupid, murderous bastards! I am not going to hold my peace. About anything. I didn’t want to protest the nihilism. Others could do that better. But creativity must get up in the face of nihilism. Killing a hundred nihilists is not as effective as writing one poem or making one painting, no matter what our politicians tell us. Does that mean I don’t think we have to defend ourselves? Of course not. But I’m old and I had been silent a long time, and suddenly I found myself writing poems again. So that was my answer to the simple-minded assassins.

LW: Identity is also explored in another dimension in the pieces that deal with place, “Far From Algiers” or “The Great Game,” which deals with the complexities of crossing cultures. Are these poems triggered by your own experiences or something else? What role do you feel identity plays in poetry overall and in your poetry specifically? In a broader sense, do you see yourself as an Arab-American poet or are they separate distinctions for you?

DM: My father was an Algerian Bedouin. My mother was an American artist of German and Polish descent. I could not pass for a member of her family and I never knew my father’s family. I was an extreme inconvenience to my mother’s family, but they did their best to handle it. This experience introduced me immediately to the problem of not looking as if you belong.

In a culture dominated by a WASP ethos, as it still is, however incongruous that now is, I grew up passing for a Jew, an Italian, an Hispanic, a Greek, almost anything but what I was. This was invaluable for walking a little way in someone else’s shoes. It rarely occurred to anyone I might be Arab, because they were as exotic to Americans in those days as they are now demonized. Moreover, I had Barack Obama’s experience of being perceived as that half of you which is visually dominant. I was half Arab and knew nothing about Arabs except what I read. My mother’s family had inculcated in me the suspicion that Arab was not going to be a good thing to be. It’s now pretty much a national policy, the predicament of needing Arab oil notwithstanding.

Another problem was that for a long time I really didn’t know what I was. My mother cooked up quite a few myths. At first she said I was French. But I wasn’t stupid, and I soon figured out that wasn’t true. Then she said my father had died of a hunting accident before I was born. That was my authorized story, or her story, until 1992, when I learned he had lived until 1978, had been married to a Scotswoman, and had simply chosen to stay with the Scotswoman after having a clandestine affair with my mother. Not a pretty story. I could hardly blame my mother for erasing him. It was such an Amazonian thing to do. As a writer, I approved. But as a child it was tough.

Do I regard myself as an Arab-American? No. I didn’t grow up in an Arab culture, not even an Arab immigrant culture. I know a great deal about Arab history through my own enterprise, but that’s not the same. I’m influenced by my story, but not by associations with Arabs. Like my stepfather, Dominick Guccione, I’m a patriot firmly rooted in the American experience, but I dislike chest-thumping, wrap-yourself-in-the-flag patriotism. I deem it cowardly nativism in disguise. I’m fascinated by Arab history and culture, but I’m equally fascinated by my stepfather’s Sicilian heritage, although his family was originally Florentine.

I think identity plays a profound role in our lives and in my own poetry. I wouldn’t have reflected so much on identity but for my rather odd experience in school. I was sent to a Christian Scientist boarding school on Long Island, where many of the children were English evacuees from Nazi bombing. West Islip, back in the forties, was a great deal more homogenous than it is today, so I grew up in an environment in which I didn’t look like most of the other children, not even the few African-Americans. But I talked like them and experienced the same formative ethos. Coming into Manhattan for prep school and college, I found myself in the midst of Dominick’s Sicilian culture, although he was well assimilated. There were more people who looked like me, although very few of them actually had my heritage. He liked to fondly call me Il Saraceno, the Arab. The Sicilians don’t look at the Arabs as the Dark Other, the way most Europeans do, because their racial memory is that Arab rule of Sicily was rather halcyon.

We judge each other by looks, however much we deny it. This accounts for our celebrity worship, our idolatry. And the dominant idea of good looks remains northern European, no matter how many African-Americans, Hispanics and others we have belatedly admitted to the club. Consider how easy it was for Lou Dobbs and others to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and then call it by another name, claiming it wasn’t racism but rather a thoughtful appraisal of economics. Yes, and I have a bridge to sell you.

We have a society in which young men and women who look like our society, our demographic profile, are dying for a ruling minority that doesn’t look like our profile. Why are we not alarmed?  Belonging and unbelonging comprise one of the greatest issues of our time, perhaps of any time. That’s why Alexander the Great’s vision of one Hellenic world was so grand and so bitter to the Macedonians. We’re still haunted by that vision and our own animus towards it. Alexander was the original one-worlder, a one-man UN, and look how eager his officers were to dismantle his dream when he was gone. They couldn’t tolerate a world in which everyone belonged. It threatened their Macedonianness, just as our North Europeanness, however inauthentic it is today, is threatened.

LW: In this journey to explore identity and how one fits in the world, a theme that resonates in several of the poems is birth. Poets often tackle the emotions of death. What is the attraction to writing about birth and being born? Where do these poems emanate from?

DM: As far as I can reconstruct it, my birth wasn’t auspicious. It’s likely that my father and his companion, Rose Fitzsimmons, were present at my birth in a hospital in Algiers on August 12, 1934. It couldn’t have been a joyous occasion. What happened next, I’m not sure. But about six months later my mother showed up in Brooklyn with this alien who resembled a dead chicken more than a child. She left me with my Grandma Hilda and my Aunt Dorothy, my mother’s younger sister. A doctor promptly announced that it was unlikely I would survive, but my grandmother decided nobody was going to die on her watch.

That’s a kind of preface to my answer to your third question. But the larger answer is that I have had to contend with post-traumatic stress most of my life. At first I thought the trauma that has shaped my life had to do with being molested at boarding school. But the more I thought about this the more it seemed to me likely that the trauma started much earlier. A baby tunes into the vibes around him. So there was the unhappy and betrayed Rose, the unhappy and betrayed Nita (my mother), and the unhappy and (charitably) confused Ben Aissa, my bio-dad, as a friend recently described him. How could the infant not have picked up on this scene? And how could it not have constituted trauma? This kid, after all, was a problem.

So that is the reason that birth plays a powerful role in my thinking. To say nothing of the fact that I believe in reincarnation, so I’ve had to ask myself what these circumstances signify.

I have written a great deal about old age and death, but not in this particular collection. I find old age and approaching death deeply clarifying. I conclude that life has been about becoming myself, acting according to my own nature and not according to how I should like to be perceived.

LW: The last poem in the book, “Hasan Ibn Al-Sabah” is an interesting ending poem. I am curious about the choice to end the manuscript with a poem about 11th century Muslim assassins.

DM:  I can’t give you a firm answer. I can only speculate. It seemed right. I made the decision in a kind of Joycean way. There was a stream of consciousness that ran from 9/11 to my recognition that Osama bin Laden is reminiscent of Hasan ibn al Sabah, the man whose hashish-eaters (hashasheen) gave us the word assassin. The Old Man of the Mountain, as he was called, sent out these hash heads to kill important leaders. In this way he controlled the politics of the Middle East and terrorized civilization. He lived in the mountains of Syria, as Bin Laden lives in Waziristan. The Sultan Baybars, who had dealt the Crusaders a fatal blow, went after Hasan and diminished his power but could not kill him. That job was left to the grandson of Genghis, Hulagu Khan, destroyer of Baghdad.

Our response to Bin Laden’s contemptible piece of work has shaped our post-9/11 society. Instead of doing what Baybars and Hulagu did—go after the source of the problem—we decided to try to police the ancient feud between Sunnis and Shias, lock up Iraqi oil, bring democracy to people who have other ideas, bust our budget, wave flags in each other’s faces, paint dissenters as un-American, and indulge ourselves in an orgy of nativism disguised as patriotism. In short, we went nuts.

So I guess that, having put together a book about alienation, it seemed appropriate to say something about a man who separated people from their senses--and about our own self-destructive response.

But I’m guessing. I like your question. I don’t like my answer. The short answer is I don’t know.

LW:  There are a few poems in this collection that play with white space and caesura. I am thinking particularly of “Catalysis” and “Second Moses.” Can you describe how you came to the decision to form these poems? Are the caesuras driven by subject matter or tone and rhythm?

DM:  I admire the poetry of C.P. Cavafy. I noticed that he used this form fairly often, in such poems as “Days of 1896.” I first noticed it in Rae Dalven’s translation when I was in my thirties. I studied W.H. Auden’s comments about Cavafy. I liked the form. I saw how it worked, how it sounded. I even asked people to read it to me in demotic Greek. It appealed to me as a young man because I was interested in structuralist poetry, that is, how poetry looks on the page. I had grown up among artists, and so it came naturally to me. I knew and liked The New York School. I was writing poems not unlike that school’s, but I was hiding behind their artfulness, their random energy. That’s the point at which I stopped writing poems.

But I kept studying Dalven’s translation, and by the time I started writing poems again in 2001 I understood why Cavafy had wanted these rivers of white, these secret rivers to dissect his poems. Of course it had something to do with the way he heard himself breathe when he wrote certain poems. It also involved a certain plosiveness in his poetic impulse that didn’t invariably inform all his work.

I was reading some Arab poetry in translation from medieval Spain when one of the poets spoke of the Guadalquivir River as the white hand of a woman opening her green robe. Something in my head made the connection with Cavafy’s use of that river of space running through his poems. There is no way to describe it as a logical connection. The Arab poem was simply a prompt that sent my mind in a certain direction. I like to think of the reader resting and regrouping in that white river, refreshing himself. It’s a way of walking or flying in chasms. More than that, certain ideas I want to express are broken-field runners. They stop and then sprint or leap over a chasm of incomprehension. The more I thought of this device the more I liked it. I used it for the poem “Second Moses” for two reasons. First, Moses de Leon was immersed in that Arab and Jewish poetry of medieval Spain. He was quite familiar with it. Second, he may have written the Zohar, the crown jewel of Qaballah, and it occurred to me that this particular poetic device is hermetic, arcane. I thought Moses de Leon might like it.

There was another reason. I saw that Cavafy had seen that some thoughts do not sustain themselves in a long line and yet the way in which you want to express them requires a long line, so this device enabled him to posit a two-part long line. I’m sure his metrical knowledge and his desire to speak in demotic Greek rather than classical Greek led him to this device. And this device suits the ongoing dialogue I hear in my head between a person named Djelloul and myself. I think this is the way Cavafy listened to himself, his authentic voice, before dressing and strolling down to his favorite café in Alexandria, before re-examining it.

LW:  What intrigues me most about this collection is the way you play with direct statement in the poems. I am thinking of lines like “I’m nostalgic for where I’m not / and sometimes have never been:” from “A Fitting Place.” You juxtapose direct statement with abstraction or philosophical inquiry. In a poetic culture that relies so heavily on the image to propel emotion, did you have to dispel some doubt when you put lines like “We didn’t say good-bye because / some horrors are a long time sinking in” that directly states emotion into your poems?

DM: I think that’s dangerous for an “emerging” poet, but I’m emerging in old age and very little seems as dangerous to me as it used to feel. The concrete image, memorialized in William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow, is the reigning icon, and there is an awful lot of poetry about grandma’s spectacles, divorce, life on the farm, etc. It’s called accessible poetry because its subjects are familiar, but it is experienced in unique ways by each poet. So in this environment to write speculative, metaphysical, philosophical poems often seems presumptuous, as if no one should feel so full of himself as to do that anymore. I understand this. I have no prejudices here. But I felt that direct speech, vernacular speech, avoiding simile, would enable me to make a few less than discreet inquiries into such matters. I felt my age might license me. Younger poets often feel it’s safer to stick to imagery because they fear some hyperliterate critic taking them to task for overreaching, for being uppity, pretentiously abstract. That’s too bad. There should be no critical tyrannies in literature, although of course there are.  Poetry is what you can get away with. If it works, it works, and no amount of vogue or critical dogma will change that.

Take the case of Ohio’s own Hart Crane. When I was a young man in school the pervasive view was that he had overreached, was too obscure, inaccessible. He was openly called a failed poet. But today we find much to admire in his adventurousness. Influential literary thinkers have their day, and it’s often a bit too bright, but poems have long tails, like paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art right now is offering a huge Giorgio Morandi retrospective. He has been relatively unknown in North America, although he died as recently as 1964. When critical hooplah and plain luck of the draw subside, certain artists always emerge and we say, Where were they? They were there all along, but they somehow didn’t fit into the scheme of things at the time. Some of them were no good at networking, as we like to say nowadays. Some of them rode the wrong horse in the wrong direction, as with the Fascist artists. Some of them failed to attract influential advocates because of their personalities. Some of them, like Morandi, couldn’t be bothered with the taste-making establishment. Lucky for him he intrigued powerful advocates like Roberto Longhi. 

LW:  How does being a former newspaper editor help with your poetry?

DM:  Newspaper experience counted in many ways. A reporter doesn’t use many similes, what ifs, as ifs. A reporter doesn’t get too speculative. There is always the fear of coming off as hifalutin, albeit critics usually have no such fears.  Newspapering teaches you to get to the point fast, to identify BS when you see or hear it, and persevere in the question that has been brushed off. Newspaper people are used to being made fools of by people who don’t want to talk straight, and you can use that experience of being the fool in poetry. Foolishness plays an important role in poetry, and it comes across best, I think, when you talk straight. Besides, I fool around a lot in my head. My internal dialogue is often ridiculous, silly and self-mocking. And newspapering is often about deflating monstrous egos, not that newspaper people don’t indulge those selfsame egos. Letting the air out is a big part of journalism, and I like to do it in poems, too. 

I spent a lot of time writing headlines (they’re getting pretty illiterate these days), and that’s good training in the economy of words. It’s good training in reexamining the Anglo-Saxon roots of the language. Anglo-Saxon makes for better headlines than the more latinate Anglo-Norman. There is simply more sock in the Anglo-Saxon. But sometimes a more latinate word is exquisite and can’t be forfeited. I don’t care for dicta or dogma in language any more than I care for it in society. Why should we allow ourselves to be bullied by anyone else’s notions? 

I started in journalism when newspapers were still setting type with hot lead. Each letter or word or line was a separate piece of cast metal, a work of art. It had a weight, a feel, a gleam. This experience of working with compositors--the guys who put the lead into the page--influences me. I think of words as something in my hand, something in my pocket, something with edges and beautiful curvatures and shadows and glints. I weigh them. Most of them end up in overset, as unused type used to be called, but they all spent a moment in the palm of my hand, they were all considered, and they all influenced my final decision. I don’t consider them dead and buried because I didn’t choose them, just as I don’t consider the dead or anything they felt as gone and lost. I believe that what Alexander the Great and C.P. Cavafy thought and felt is alive in me, and all I have to do is accept it. So I respect the words I didn’t use as much as the ones I did use. And, besides, I don’t think a poem is ever done, but it occasionally needs a rest from its maker, who is quite capable of brutalizing it. In a real way poetry is, for me, about respect, prayerfulness, as well as celebration and inquiry.