Far From Algiers

Djelloul Marbrook

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781612775944
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"How honored I am—how lucky—to have been able to choose this superb first book by Djelloul Marbrook that honors a lifetime of hidden achievement.... Sometimes the poems seem utterly symbolic, surreal; they are philosophical, historical, psychological, political, and spiritual. The genius is in the many ways these poems can be read. I kept being rewarded by new awarenesses of the poet's intentions, by the breadth and scope of the manuscript. As I read, I felt more and more that it was impossible that this was a first book. It seemed the writer knew exactly what to say, and, more importantly, exactly what to leave out."
—Toi Derricotte, judge

"In a dizzying and divisive time, it's beautiful to see how Djelloul Marbrook's wise and flinty poems outfox the Furies of exile, prejudice, and longing. Succinct, aphoristic, rich with the poet's resilient clarity in the face of a knockabout world, Far from Algiers is a remarkable and distinctive debut."
—Cyrus Cassells

"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

Djelloul Marbrook started writing poems in Manhattan when he was fourteen. In his thirties he abandoned poetry after publishing a few poems in small journals, but he never stopped reading and studying poetry. Then at age sixty-seven, appalled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the poet within awakened. Stuffing sky-blue notebooks in his pockets, Marbrook began walking around Manhattan determined to affirm his beloved home in the wake of the nihilistic attacks. Far from Algiers emerged from hundreds of poems he has 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.

1

CLIMATE CONTROL

Stuff the mailboxes and night repositories
against my attempts to insert
flat evidence of my belonging here.

I’m as sick of wanting to get in
as I am of wanting to be heard.
I was born with one of those faces that say

Trust me, you don’t want to hear it.
Bad enough listening to myself,
who needs you to confirm the news?

My climate’s not suitable for growing
the fruit expected of your tree
and I see you have no patience for experiment.

I’ve misunderstood great men in useful ways
in the natural course of an alien life,
so why would I quarrel with locked doors?

BITCHY NURSE

(Algiers, August 12, 1934)

If I’m not talking to you,
if this isn’t how I talk to me,
that leaves the little bastard
who started tagging along
after my cold welcome in Algiers.

The French nurse bitched
the kid needed milk and a name.
A little welcome would be nice,
but she kept that to herself
because they were distracted

by the opera of themselves,
the cliché the three of them
had painted on the world,
red and squawking graffiti
never meant to be foreground.

That’s the cast, everyone else
is an understudy bound
by the uninspired script.
I don’t encourage them because
I’ve heard what they have to say.

But you, you’re different,
listening as if someone
has something to say.

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.

FAR FROM ALGIERS

An unnamed race slips by
ethnographer and xenophobe,
roiling bowels and hackles,
electrifying space.

Genomes tell us nothing
about our overlords;
we know we’re an underclass
to these corsairs and otherlings.

They break our doors at night,
take our wives and children,
foul our consensus with ideas
and scat full sail on glassy seas.

Though we take them to our beds
they’re unwelcome in our churches;
they profane our certainties
and stir up gifts renounced.

South of every guarded circle
is a Barbary where our rules
stand on their heads and dance
to tunes of turbans and scimitars.

Their ships fly no flags until
it’s far too late and we’re engaged
in the kind of bloodiness youth
prays for to spite the social good.

Every simpleminded day
guards against kidnappers,
every complacency has its dey
fat on ransom in some Algiers.

If there were no Barbary Coast
to haunt our dreams and genes
we’d eat potatoes, bed our cousins
and be as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• 1
• 2
• 3