‘COASTLINE’

to “fit” anywhere.

Two examples: Daniel belongs to either her mother’s tribe, the nomadic Fulani, or her father’s, the Longuda, depending on which view of tradition you follow — but she grows up outside of London speaking a blend of English and Hausa, the dominant language of West Africa. Her parents are Christians, a rarity in their dominantly Muslim homeland. When her father eventually declares himself an atheist, she is relieved to leave their dreaded family prayer sessions behind, though she must still contend with her mother’s belief in the religiosity of the family cat, Boo, evidenced by his habit of hanging around when people are praying.

Daniel, whose debut poetry collection is forthcoming in March 2023, is what’s known as a “third-culture kid,” a diplomatic term given to those who come of age outside of their parents’ culture. This disequilibrium can lead to an identity in triplicate: the culture of one’s birth and one’s lived experience, linked by a nebulous space that’s informed by, yet separate from, both. “Coastline” is primarily concerned with the implications

of this third self, while navigating family values and the tactless inquisitions of strangers.

With so many miles to her name, Daniel is a master of place and mood. She forgoes the usual categorization of countries in favor of her own uniquely broad perspective: the inside-outsider, equipped with a poet’s unclouded ability to see. We find Daniel’s Nigeria in crawling traffic, power outages and wedding rituals. England is good chocolate, a dusty rented house filled with someone else’s knickknacks, and the sour apples gathered from a neighbor’s roof. Pockets of diaspora arise in the gregarious, joyous tenor of overlapping conversations in a room (“We love the sound of the human voice,” she writes of her Nigerian community) and her mother’s repertoire of West African comforts, from egusi to moin moin and nightly batches of long-grain rice. America is isolation and adaptation, race and, eventually, freedom found in the sundrenched patchwork of Southern California, imbued with its own lore.

Humans have developed endless adages around this desire to feel rooted (“home is where the heart is,” that sort of thing), if not in a place, then in one’s self. But when the self is defined against a backdrop of wildly disparate places, it can be hard to discern what is true and what is merely reaction.

In Daniel’s view, the validity of the self is more than a matter of claiming or being claimed. It can mean an ancestral pull to a place, but not a full-blown connection. A sense of belonging, of home, can stem from something other than roots. In a moment that valorizes fealty to one’s culture, “Coastline” is gloriously fluid, willing to challenge that which might appear as a given.

A COASTLINE IS AN IMMEASURABLE THING: A MEMOIR ACROSS THREE CONTINENTS

Mary-Alice Daniel Mary-Alice Daniel’s memoir explores identity and culture.