Look for Djelloul’s poems in the October 2006 issue of Mid-American Review, available in the best bookstores.

Our national story that we’re an egalitarian society won’t stand up to cross-examination. The entire middle class is crashing into the chasm between rich and poor. The media moguls have convinced us that we don’t want news, we want infotainment. The idea stinks of greed. They know perfectly well infotainment is cheap, news is expensive to gather. But the idea is as addictive as meth. It hooks us on celebrities: spoiled brats we wouldn’t want to dinner, people who live obscenely selfish lives, the sort of people we hope our kids won’t grow up to be. And once we’re hooked on celebrity, blindness sets in—blindness to the real heroes in our midst. Ourselves. The frail, neglected elderly trying to face the end with dignity, the kid coping with the school bully, the farmers squeezed by developers and agribusiness, the little homeowner and shopkeeper bullied by eminent domain, the men and women staring disease in the face, the families forced to hold down two and three jobs to keep up a semblance of middle class prosperity, the contrarians who oppose wars or relentless tax breaks for those who least need them, the dissenters of every stripe whom the government is now trying to smother.

We’re the heroes of our national story, not the loudmouths in
government or the know-it-alls in the media. We need to take back our story. We need to take it out of the hands of liars and stooges. We need to tell them that we know life is not another Japanese gameboard. We need to tell them that no matter how many games dispatch humanoids like ninepins we know that death is real and that our foreign policy should be based on our ideals and not the greed and callousness of a handful of rajahs who’ve already had too much of everything.

Since when do we have to prove our love of our men and women in uniform by kissing the heinies of liars who send them to war under phony pretenses to make their cronies rich? Since when do we have to prove our patriotism by hocking our smarts and shutting our mouths? We’re the patriots and the heroes. We don’t need fat cats telling us who’s who and what’s what. Every time you go to a nursing home or a gas station or the market or the landfill you see heroes, and they’re not yakking at you from pulpits and rostrums, they’re not trying to dope you on infotainment. They’re just doing what heroes always do, facing up and soldiering on.

Societies get into trouble when they turn blind eyes to their real heroes and start thinking they’re guys who talk out of the sides of their mouths like our vice president or dispatch hundreds of disposable extras like California’s governor or talk around the bush until we get migraines like certain Democratic presidential candidates we know.

We’re the heroes, working, getting downsized, seeing our dreams exported, getting told to climb a telephone tree, being buried under paperwork, falling sick and not having the money to get well, shipped off to die for empty suits whose own sons and daughters are safe at home. We, the invisibles, we’re our heroes, and the worst fear of the mucky-mucks is that we’ll wake up and see ourselves in the mirror.

The latest issue of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (Vol. II, Issue 1) is available and is now indexed in Google Books. You can order your copy from http://www.arabesquespress.org. The theme of this issue is place. Future themes will be identity and the new romance.

I think a lot about how writers write. Some bounce on the trampoline. Some like the company of Jack Daniels or the St. Pauli Girl. Some write all night and sleep all day. Some stand, some drape themselves around. I stuff notepads in my pockets and walk around, stopping under awnings and lampposts. Then I transcribe my notes into the computer. But only when they’re cold, because when they’re still hot I understand them, but when they’re cold they sometimes don’t resemble any known language. Worse yet, I sometimes can’t imagine what I was thinking.

But that’s all blather compared to what I really think I’m doing. I think I’m talking to this guy named Djelloul who’s a whole lot savvier than I am. He makes more sense than I do. He keeps me from getting caught up in my own lunacies. He’s not as paranoid as I am. In fact, he’s not paranoid at all. He talks more respectfully than I do, and better yet, he listens. I feel so grateful for his demeanor that I always ask him for permission to speak, the way I remember doing in the Navy. He’s a superior officer.

Now what I’ve just said is a bit of a problem if you’ve read much psychology. Looks like the makings of a psychotic break, right? A fragmenting persona—the first in a series of people renting the same head. And I’m not going to argue with that notion, because I figure I’m never a stone’s throw away from being a nutcase. In fact, I’m very likely a well disguised nutcase right now, masquerading as an average guy. You could say this nice stranger named Djelloul showed up when I was a kid to keep me company through the rough spots—there were some ugly ones.

But there’s another way of looking at it. Back in the 12th Century in Spain, when the Moors ruled most of it, there was a man named Muhammed Ali ibn Arabi. He was a Sufi, a mystic, and he had an idea about the creative imagination. The idea was that between you and God you could call something worthy into being by the power of the creative imagination. Ibn Arabi gave man a crucial role in the workings of the universe. Man, he said, is God’s co-operant. If this interests you at all, please don’t take my feeble explanation for the whole of it. Ibn Arabi is well worth your study. Once I’d read him I thought that any time I try to make sense of anything, any time I try to say something well, anytime I try to write a poem or a story, I’m God’s co-operant. And in that case why can’t this comforter named Djelloul be God’s emissary?

Now this too is dangerous ground, the psychologists will tell you,
because it’s grandiose, and when we’re grandiose and pompous we’re cockeyed. It’s me giving myself airs. But I persist in thinking it’s not so grandiose if I think that when I write I’m praying, and when I’m praying I’m working. And when I’m not doing that I’m busy driving myself crazy.

The publication of Saraceno and responses to it have prompted me to think a great deal about the nature of crime. I spent most of my life thinking I knew what crime is. Now I wonder. I hear, we all hear, a lot from the pulpit and the rostrum about abortion, stem cell research, right to life, family values, the war on drugs, but what do we hear about greed? You know, one of the seven deadly sins, the legal crime that’s destroying our hard-won middle class, destroying families by forcing them to stretch themselves too thin just to survive, depriving sick people of medicine, causing the immigration problem.
What do we hear from the fulminators and their patsies about that? And for that matter, what do we hear from the press about greed? It’s the pariah story. Sure, we hear about obscene CEO salaries and Wall Street swindles, but we don’t hear that greed is an ever-growing plague that has already ravaged us, we don’t hear about anybody scurrying to do something about it, the way we expect leaders to protect us from avian flu or porous borders or Osama bin Ladin and his cowardly ilk. Why is that, I wonder? Could it be that our ever-centralizing and ever-diminishing media are owned by the bottom-liners who’d fire their grandfathers to make a quarterly report look good and who’d cook their books if they had to? Not only do the demagogues and talking heads not want to blow hard about greed, the media aren’t interested in it either. Is there a cure? Maybe. Maybe citizen journalists in the blogosphere will run this issue up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.
When I was a reporter I used to marvel at the elephant in the room whenever we reported labor-management disputes. Nobody ever raised the issue of what is a moral, ethical profit margin. The reason they never raised it is, I think, because we have all acquiesced to it being as much as a pirate can steal. Did we expend our blood and national treasure fighting communism only to see an unbridled, piratical global capitalism gobble upour dreams for a better life? Is that what the war on communism was about? Making the CEO of Exxon filthy rich while most of us can’t afford to pay for gas? And where are all the preachers and their political allies on this one? Anybody hear them?
Well, that’s my thought for this rainy day. Don’t know if I feel any better, but maybe that’s because I paid $3.14 for gas this morning.
—DM

Djelloul corresponds with young journalism students in his role as mentor/editor at The Student Operated Press. He also writes occasional columns about journalism which are posted on the SOP website.

Djelloul is the English language editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review. The latest issue features the Irish poet Fred Johnston and Americans Jefferson Holdridge, Earl J. Wilcox and Daniel Pendergrass. His interview of the California poet Molly Fisk is featured. Three of his poems are in the previous issue.

“Saraceno is an electric tone-poem straight from a world we only think we understand. An heir to George V. Higgins and David Mamet, Djelloul Marbrook writes dialogue that not only entertains with an intoxicating clickety-clack, but also packs a truth about low-life mob culture “The Sopranos” only hints at. You can practically smell the anisette and filling-station coffee.”

“…a good ear for crackling dialogue… I love Marbrook’s crude, raw music of the streets. The notes are authentic and on target…”

“This lyrical and violent, funny and sad, hot and cool novella haunts us. Try it.”

“Haunting… when I finished, I kept remembering pieces.”

“…an admirable first novel.”

“…a mature artist whose rich body of work is finally coming to light.”

Interview on Reader Views explores the origins of Saraceno.

Judyth Piazza, editor-in-chief of the innovative Student Operated Press, interviews Djelloul at TheSOP.org (under Main menu on left, click on Audio Interviews).