The Literary Palette of Djelloul Marbrook

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, July 26, 2011

If his books didn’t make it abundantly clear, Djelloul Marbrook’s driving directions to Germantown testify to his painterly eye and generous heart. “Our house is a pewter-blue English farmhouse surrounded by arbor vitae. Welcome!” he writes.

Inside, his wife Marilyn sets out an edible still-life: platters of cut figs, ripe brie, grapes. There are paintings on every wall. A few are by Hudson Valley artists Chris Metze and Jenny Nelson, or by Marbrook’s aunt, Irene Rice Pereira, but most were painted by his mother, Juanita Guccione. Both Pereira and Guccione were well-regarded 20th-century artists; their work graces the covers of Marbrook’s art-infused poetry collections, Brushstrokes and Glances (Deerbrook Editions, 2010) and Far from Algiers (Kent State University Press, 2008).

It’s a complex legacy, as Marbrook’s poem “My mother’s paintings” attests:

My hopes are lost in my mother’s paintings:
streets of cards, titanic women, eclipse:
lost in the pungent art of their creation,
covered over by brush and palette knife.

Who cares about them in that neighborhood?
Not even I do. They embarrass me,
they were so ill-made and quaint,

but I hear them whimpering in the night.

I am, God help me, the husband of this work
and must take better care of it
than I took of the hopes that haunt it;
now let them glisten in museums.

A conversation with Marbrook unfurls like a Mobius strip, twisting between life and art. By anyone’s lights, he has played many roles: outcast son of a renegade mother, Columbia student, Hell’s Kitchen bagman, seafarer, hard-drinking journalist, autodidact—and, at 73, award-winning poet. When Far from Algiers won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, judge Toi Derricotte wrote, “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.”

Marbrook’s origins were cloaked—even from him—in a cloud of myth. In 1930, art student and model Juanita Rice went to France to study painting. Finding the Parisian vie bohème too expensive, she traveled by tramp steamer to North Africa and spent four years painting among the Ouled Nail Bedouin tribe in eastern Algeria. “Unlike European orientalist artists—Delacroix, Matisse—she didn’t paint Arabs as exotics,” says Marbrook. “She lived with them.” Her adventures included accompanying a camel train across the Libyan desert on what proved to be a gun-running expedition, and falling in love with a wealthy Bedouin who died in a hunting accident—or so she claimed when she returned to New York in 1935 with his infant son Djelloul.

“She lied like hell,” Marbrook says bluntly. It would be decades before her fiction unraveled. In 1991, while exhibiting Guccione’s early paintings in Algeria, Marbrook learned that his missing father (who lived until 1978, leaving a widow and three other children) was Ben Aissa ben Mabrouk, the young lover of a wealthy Scotswoman who’d taken Juanita in when she was ill. “That’s how my mother repaid her kindness,” Marbrook says, shaking his head. “I look back on her as a lawless terrorist. The combination of beauty and talent—she felt licensed to act in ways most of us wouldn’t think to, or want to.”