Light Piercing Water - Interview with the American poet Djelloul Marbrook

Interview with the American poet Djelloul Marbrook, on the release of his new novel ‘Light Piercing Water’ by Mira Publishing House in April 2012.

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Djelloul Marbrook is a prize-winning poet. He was born in 1934 in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American painter. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, New York, where he graduated from Dwight School and attended Columbia. He then served in the U.S. Navy and went on to a career as a newspaper reporter and editor.
His first poetry collection, Far From Algiers (2008, Kent State University Press), won the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry. His second poetry book, Brushstrokes and Glances (2011, Deerbrook Editions, 2011) also won critical acclaim. His books of fiction include Saraceno (2012, Bliss Plot Press), Artemisia s Wolf (2011, Prakash Books Ltd.), and Alice Miller s Room (1999, Online Originals).
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Q1. The more I read about you and your writings, while preparing for this interview, the more difficult I find it to pick up a starting point to introduce you to your new audience.. But let us start with your name, which has indeed puzzled me since I first saw it (I couldn’t read it then) until you told me the Arabic origin of it. So, how do people react to it, and have you ever thought of changing it?

No, I haven’t thought of changing it. Yes, it has caused me a great deal of trouble. In boarding schools kids called me Jello, Jules, Jewel, anything. Some people have always refused to pronounce or spell it correctly, and I have learned slowly to interpret that as a mark of disrespect. My mother’s family, German and Polish, never learned to spell it correctly. Only in her old age did my mother begin to spell it properly. My uncle called me Jaloo. Only my Aunt Irene, a famous artist, spelled and spoke it correctly. But, interestingly, I never ran into that problem in the Navy. Officers always made the extra effort to say the name properly. But when I went to work as a newspaperman my first editor simply said, You can’t have that name. Nobody will remember it, nobody will be able to say it, and it won’t fit on a line of type. In all three instances he was wrong. I sat there thinking, If it was good enough for the United States Navy, why isn’t it good enough for you? But I needed the job and I kept silent. He invented the name Del, and it stuck. Everybody thought my name was Delmar or Delbert. There is a poem in Far From Algiers about this.

Q2. When—at which age—did you start researching your origin, as half Arab, half American? And how did the American half respond?

At a very early age. I sensed my mother wasn’t telling me the truth about my origins. I wondered if I might be half French, for example, since the French then occupied Algeria and my name is a French spelling of an Arabic name. In the same way that Ellis Island turned my stepfather’s name from Domenico Giovanni into Dominick John. In college I studied Arab history. I’m an autodidact, and I can’t remember the great number of books I’ve read about the Arabs. The truth arrived very late in my life, by accident, in 1992. I had arranged with the U.S. Information Agency to send an exhibition to Algeria of the paintings my mother had made there in the ‘30s. Two Algerian curator s, both women, became deeply interested in my mother’s work. They came to America to interview her. I met with them in Washington and we spoke with the help of a State Department translator. I noticed a tattoo on one of the women’s hands and I told her I had seen that in one of my mother’s paintings. Yes, she said, it’s an Oulad Nail tribal marking. Oh, I said, my mother lived with the Oulad Nail.

When one of the curators got back to Bou Saada—she was then the curator of Le Musée Etienne Dinet in Bou Saada—she called me and said, I would like to introduce you to your family. I was nonplussed. I learned I had a stepmother, two half-brothers and a half-sister. My mother had always told everyone my father, Ben Aissa ben Mabrouk, died while I was an infant. He lived until 1978, marrying a wealthy Scotswoman who lived in Bou Saada and after she died marryied the orphan girl he and his wife had taken in. She is still alive. I have been wondering what to make of all this ever since. My surname, Marbrook, is an Anglicization of Mabrouk, a common Arab surname.

My mother’s brother never accepted me as a family member. I was a foreigner. I don’t think my mother ever fully accepted the idea of me as an American either. But the Navy did, and that did a lot for my sense of belonging. That said, belonging and unbelonging have always been major issues for me. I remain, in my mind, an outsider, “the other.” And that is the role the West has assigned the Arabs. There’s a 13th Century French tapestry depicting the Arabs, the Saracens (People of the Dawn) with horns and tails. The Saracens were amused by their demonization at the hands of the Franks and wore the horns and tails into battle to mock them.

I owe to my stepfather, Dominick, not only my good education but also my sense of fitting in and belonging. His Sicilian-American family never regarded me as my uncle did. Their attitude was that if I was Dominick’s son, I was a member of their family. The Sicilians, distinct from other Europeans, have a more hospitable view of the Arabs. In their collective unconscious they remember Saracen rule as ا, and their culture reflects the Saracen period. My novella Saraceno is a kind of tribute to that connection.

Q3. How did these findings shape your relationship with your mother the artist, your career as a journalist and with yourself as an American?

I waited a long time to tell my mother that I knew she had lied about my origin. It was only a few years before her death in ’99 that I told her that I knew, and her response confirmed to me the nativism that I had encountered without fully naming it. I told her Ben Aissa had gone on to father two more sons and a daughter. She was silent for a time and then she asked me if they were blue-eyed. I was so disconcert ed by her response that I ended the conversation.

My relationship with my mother hinged on my love of art and my respect for her as an artist. I don’t think I could have been anything that would have particularly pleased her. The breakdown of her illicit relationship with my father embittered her, and I was a continual reminder of that disappointment in her life. But she inculcated in me a love of art, and so our relationship was largely about art. It was the only common ground we found, and I think we both cherished it. I had immense respect for her as an artist, and I think this put me in a strange position, because I wished for her that she hadn’t had a child to hamper her career as an artist. And I think in some ways the women in Light Piercing Water evolve from that precise and very strange spot.

Q4. How, then, did all this influence your poetry and fiction writing?

Profoundly. Not the fact of being half Arab, no—but the question of who belongs and who doesn’t and how one is so superficially perceived. I’m an American. I have absolutely no doubt of this. I love my country, however much I might disagree with its policies from time to time. I have faith in it. But I grew up wondering who I was and where I belonged, and that of course inevitably shapes one’s work and sensibility. And the fact that I have learned so much about Arab civilization inevitably enters my writing, just as my intimate knowledge of the American Sicilians influences my writing, as in my novella, Saraceno. In fact, in Saraceno I explored the influences of the Arabs on Sicilian life. My newspaper career was largely as a reporter and editor in hometown America, and it was local reporting that appealed to me, because I regarded Washington as theatre. All news is ultimately local. This commitment of mine to hometown America gave me a privileged view of our foibles and our virtues as a people, as did my service in the Navy.

Q5. Why did you choose a protagonist of Arab origin to your latest novel, Guest Boy? Do you see Bo Cavalieri in any parts of your life? Will Americans be able to see him in their everyday lives?

Bo Cavalieri’s given name is Amir, but he is called Bo after boatswain or bosun in reference to his maritime career. Like me, he is very much influenced by the Sicilians, too, and, of course, by the sea. In some ways Bo is the person I would have liked to be; in some ways he is me. He is, in any event, a person anyone who has sought to be true to himself or herself will recognize as a companion. I think that’s important, because the memorable people we encounter in fiction become our companions. But I didn’t really set out to create his character or tell his story. Back in the late ‘80s I was researching the history of maritime charts and discovered a trove of information that directed me to the history of rutters—the journals of sea captains—and charts, and that led me inevitably to Arab celestial navigation and Arab shipbuilding and Arab maritime prowess. I was enthralled, utterly lost in the research, and I didn’t care if I ever came back. I just wanted to keep researching. But at some point characters began talking to me, and I began asking them who they were. I had already created the character of Billy Salviati in Saraceno, and I think somehow he began to morph into Bo Cavalieri. And then the other characters appeared. Adeline Compton, whom I immediately loved, and Margaret Wadeleigh, whom I recognized from several women I had known in my life, starting with my first childhood love, Dolores Wadeley, an East Anglian girl who was at boarding school with me during World War II. I started listening to these characters, and more appeared. I started taking notes, but no sooner would I direct their stories than they would correct me and tell me where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. I never thought a novel would or could emerge from this because the characters were simply too authoritative for me to invite them into a plot. But the plot emerged the more I listened to them. So, for me, writing is listening—respectfully, without an agenda. In some ways, Light Piercing Water is a series of course corrections and their consequences.

Q6. I recall a joke I heard after 9/11 about a young man who ran to rescue a girl from an aggressive bulldog in Central Park in Manhattan. A policeman arrived to thank the man, saying, ‘Well, tomorrow, the newspapers will write: A brave New Yorker rescued a girl from an aggressive bulldog attack.’ The young man, said: ‘But I’m not a New Yorker.’ The policeman said: ‘Well, they will say a brave American …’ The man said, ‘But I’m not American either.’ The policeman said, ‘Who are you then?’ ‘I’m an Arab,’ said the young man. The policeman said, ‘Well, the newspaper will say an Arab terrorist killed an innocent bulldog in Central Park.’ How long will this image of Arabs stay in American minds? And, aside from the politics, does literature have a role in changing this image?

I don’t think most people think of me as an Arab, and I don’t think of myself or anybody else in ethnic terms. I don’t give a damn about that. But as a newspaperman I certainly relate to the joke. And it’s sort of classic, if you know New York cops. They’re famous for their laconic humor. Tourists, especially the French for some reason, often remark about it. They live in a city with seven major newspapers, some of them pretty irresponsible, and they know anything they do or don’t do can and will be twisted. They know they can’t win. The terrorist attacks did terrible damage to Arab-American relations, already poisoned by AIPAC and their evangelical allies. Stereotypical thinking is a global problem, not an American problem. We say the Average American, the Average Arab, the Average Briton, but nobody is an average. It’s just another way of pigeonholing and ghettoizing.

Q7. In the ‘70s, Marlon Brando rejected his Oscar award for his role in The Godfather, to highlight the poor treatment of the Native American in the film industry. Are you trying to reverse the American view of Arabs in American literature? Do you think the era of activism in the 60s and 70s may be duplicated?

No, I’m not. I’m telling a story about Americans, English people, Omanis, Algerians, Scots, Irish, a story of nobility in the most daunting circumstances. But in the course of telling these stories I am building bridges between the cultures from which they come. The three central cultures in the trilogy are American, English and Arab. French culture, insofar as it plays a role in the Maghreb, is also at work in the trilogy.

Q8. What would you say to your new audience in the Middle East, who will read your trilogy Light Piercing Water in Arabic?

In the West it is common to think of Arab and Islamic civilization as something distinct and apart, something exotic and foreign. This is not true, and Light Piercing Water, as its odyssean story unfolds, shows many of the indispensable ties. Arab history is also part of the history of the West. The Arabs, for example, rescued much of the classical world for the West, after early Christian zealots defaced and even obliterated it. The Arabs, adopting the Indian concept of zero, developed it to the point where mathematics could soar over common arithmetic and eventually make the space age possible. Medieval Arab, Berber and Jewish poetry in Andalusia is a direct progenitor of modern Anglophone and Francophone poetry. The Arabs opened sea routes, revolutionized the ordinary sailing rig, supplanting the limited square sail with the lateen rig. They made huge advances in medicine and field surgery, instilling us with the idea of antisepsis. The list is very long, and I make use of these facts and also of misconceptions as I tell the story of an American seafarer, a British mathematician, a British conservator of ancient musical instruments, a Chechen arms dealer, a retired IRA bomber, an old Omani sultan, two British explorer-writers, and many others. When I think of this project, which took many years of research and rewriting, I sometimes imagine crystal bridges, not unlike the Moorish bridges of Andalusia, between the Arab, English and American worlds.

I hope Middle East and Maghreb readers will remember Bo Cavalieri as they might remember Sindbad or Odysseus—and for many of the same reasons.

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