A Rousing Review of Djelloul Marbrook’s, Far From Algiers
by Deborah Poe
I first met Djelloul Marbrook at Anne Gorrick’s Cadmium Text Series, in Kingston NY. Marbrook bought my book at the event, and we spoke at length of poetry. When I ran into him quite by accident at AWP, I was delighted and bought a copy of Far From Algiers. Between the bus stop just in front of the conference center and my hotel room, I was well into the first third of the book. Here was a book for me so conceptually compelling that I stayed in my hotel room to finish it, missing an event not too far from my hotel.
Far From Algiers is an apt title. The collection meditates continually on belonging. It is a book infused with the kinds of questions about belonging that are frequently related to migration, immigration, displacement and exile. To leave it at that would be a gross oversimplification of the book. While so often mainstream news dehumanizes an “other,” by presenting narratives devoid of histories or humanity, Marbrook’s collection re-inhabits these spaces through his art. In terms of territory, dispossession, and the subjugated subject, Marbrook humanizes questions of home, belonging, possession and dispossession. In this way, the book can be said to offer a means of literary, even political, resistance.
Marbrook opens the book with “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.
Already the element of belonging is as clear as it is conflicted. Marbrook illustrates this strain formally by way of diction. The tension between the use of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon words is worth noting. Musical, fluid and polysyllabic—words with origins in the romance languages—contact with monosyllabic, direct words. Marbrook’s weaving of these etymologically contrasting words mirrors the multiplicity (the disparate “belongings”) inherent in our language and in our “roots.”
Contemporary artists and writers have a responsibility to rethink thinking itself in the context of pervasive discursive practices that systematically reject difference and subsequently reject justice to an “other.” Marbrook embraces this responsibility by being not indifferent but abundantly aware of grounds of the sociopolitical practices that lead to subjugation and oppression. In the title poem “Far From Algiers,” Marbrook utilizes France’s colonization of Algeria to critique not only Europe’s colonialism in northern Africa but the inherent problems of nationalism, occupation and marginalization—unfortunate by-products of ongoing imperialism. Marbrook writes:
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…
Every simpleminded day
guards against kidnappers,
every complacency has its dey
fat on ransom in some Algiers.
Marbrook’s work offers resistance to the dominant discourse—white, male, middle-class, adult, heterosexual—a less traditional project that rethinks negative political imperatives a product of the subjected subject, compartmentalization, and accommodation of oppressed constituencies on which that dominant discourse relies. Here is a poetics that critiques, sometimes acerbically, the value of History, Truth and dominating ideologies that produce exile in the wake of imperialism.
It is a not-at-homeness inherent in the human predicament to which Marbrook undoubtedly responds. In Far From Algiers, home is contested space and dispossession of land, but it is also a consideration of how bodies manifest themselves in language and space, writing and distance. The poem “Port of Entry” illustrates:
I imagine death an empty place
where we get used to what we’ve got
and put on what we knew all along.
My guess is we can’t get our names
past immigration, much less
all we’ve pretended to be.
I sleep these days smiling to think
how we’ll fly in that lightened state
needing no paper, being beyond words.
In her foreword to Far From Algiers, Toi Derricotte writes “the poems…hold many layers. They make the mind want to participate.” Indeed this is one of the reasons I was so drawn to Marbrook’s book. Readers can connect conceptually with the notion of belonging. It’s an ache with which most people can identify. Yet the book is complicated formally through moves between an “inside” and an “outside,” a voice close as a neighbor’s ear and as far-away as an “alien.” Language is abstract and then grounded in the concrete, conversational and then distant, literal and then allusive.
Far From Algiers frequently appeals to sensation by weaving abstract concepts with images (metaphorical and literal). In “Climate Control,” it is the paths by which distant correspondence occurs (the mailboxes, the repositories), a climate “not suitable for growing/ the fruit of your tree” and a “quarrel with locked doors.” Here, as is the case throughout the question, Marbrook illustrates the nagging questions of belonging, the sickening feeling of being left out and the struggle of an “alien life.”
Formally echoing a crux of belonging, poems are both conversational and distant. In the poem “Djelloul,” the speaker allows us to overhear past conversations when people have presumably asked “What kind of a name is that?” We are made privy not only to these conversations but also to the meditations of the speaker after being asked such an insulting question. The speaker confronts the very violence of language—language that so frequently legitimizes violence and extols American exceptionalism—as he considers:
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…
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.
The name is situated culturally or between worlds, haunted by the ghostly trace of the Saracen in Provence. But, perhaps more importantly, the speaker shows us how naming is used to alienate, and even deport, thousands of citizens. Because a name is linked to deportation, the message in the cognitive gaps between lines is disturbing—racial profiling and racism in highly nationalistic times (i.e. the Bush administration) might come to mind. Yet the poem also makes the connection between terrorists and scientists, between singers and cashiers. Naming, like the yearning for belonging, is something all humans share.
A retired journalist, Marbrook understands the responsibility of language, of literature and of the arts. One of the formal ways in which this is clear in the collection is Marbrook’s keen attentiveness to language that is both literal and allusive. The last poem of the collection, is “Hasan Ibn Al-Sabah,” titled, as the epigraph informs us, for the “Lord of the assassins” in eleventh-century Persia. I include the whole poem here, because I think it communicates much of what I discuss above.
Exile is a twofold problem:
no one eludes it and
mourned land disappears.
So while I hoped to complain,
I’ve nothing to complain about
except the poignant delusion
that some of us belong and
must be vigilant for those
who live among us in disguise.
We need the assassins
to exonerate what we do,
to make it seem less awful.
Hasan ibn al-Sabah lives
in our churches on Sunday,
in mosques and synogogues.
We can’t describe his face
because we wear it while
we hunt the foreign devils.
The speaker begins directly and literally—exile is a two-fold problem, no one can elude it. Home slips and slips through the fingertips of an “exile.” A fairly direct rejection of any person’s ability to belong is also clear. Yet Hasan ibn al-Sabah is symbolic in the sense that within the context of this poem we are nudged to consider our own hypocrisy, the other on whom we blame our nation’s problems and political conflict rearing its ugly head over and over again.
Far From Algiers provides cultural, social and historical context frequently left to the wayside in mainstream media. Marbrook understands the necessity of re-humanizing human experience that is otherwise marginalized.
There is a quote I invariably return to when considering questions of belonging and home. In Reflections on Exile Edward Said wrote:
We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy…The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. 185
Marbrook’s collection is important, because it takes notions of home and belonging and peers at them for the paradox that they inherently present. Too much belonging, with deepening roots, and one is perhaps narrow, closed, dogmatic (not free). An absence of belonging, freedom, creates a yearning, a sense of lost opportunities, a loneliness without belonging. This is not to suggest that Marbrook builds some binary system on the page between freedom and belonging. Marbrook examines safe and familiar territory—a safe and familiar territory that continues to betray the marginalized in America. Marbrook digs into the world in which we live, indicating the range of belonging, negotiating spaces between. In other words, Marbrook takes part in strategic nomadic thinking, or oppositional thinking attuned to exile. In “Familiarity,” he writes:
I know no one,
no one knows me.
There in that limbo
I live precariously.
In that “limbo” of living “precariously,” Marbrook moves in the spaces between to cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience, and to encounter limits of ideological paradigms.
Djelloul Marbrook: Far From Algiers
72 pages. Kent State University Press 2008.
Paper. $14. Audio CD $16. ISBN 978-0-87338-987-7.
