Interview / Mary-Alice Daniel
Mary-Alice Daniel
Editor Lauren Brazeal Garza: This year, The Account Magazine was honored and excited to sit down with Mary-Alice Daniel, winner of the 2022 Yale Younger Poet’s prize for her searing collection, Mass for Shut-ins. Daniels offered insight and inspiration as she spoke about her various approaches to writing her haunting poetic debut.
Within the first few lines of your collection, Mass for Shut-ins the speaker declares, “Your house isn’t haunted – you’re just lonely,” which introduces us to a voice that isn’t afraid to speak startling truths, wrenching from us any delusions of comfort we might cling to within these poems. How did you approach authorial voice within Mass for Shut-ins? Did you begin to write with a particular tenor in mind? Or did the tone find you?
Spirits in multiple valences haunt the landscapes or dreamscapes I create: an umbra of earthly vice and unearthly totems. My poetic choices center 2 things: emphasis & momentum. I want to call the right amount of attention to something (subtlety or not=tone). Speed: compression, lineation, relaxing register, stumbling up a reader or letting them get there faster. Different usage of word, different singular, grammar that’s slightly wrong/“off”. Do I want to surprise them? Or let them down? Or set them up?
Much of the collection works to understand a great contradiction: humanity’s lack of control over the universe despite our monumental efforts to do so. How did these ideas influence the collection? Did one, in particular, nag at you as you wrote?
My poems harness and unleash a holy mess of conflicting cultures & spirit worlds: Islam, Christianity, magic. They perform cultural excavations and experiments—reseeing region, religion, race. I delve into a millennium of oral history from my Islamic Fulani tribe, along with our indigenous animism—both in conflict with the Evangelical gospel I was raised to revere. I venture through invisible fields of spiritual warfare in my poems. They aren’t autobiographical; they are phantasmal. My world-building weaves familial lore and folkways; new media and mass culture; science, pseudoscience, and syncretism.
My poems naturally encounter supernatural systems. Growing up, I was cautioned that expressing negativity invites curses. You incite your own unluck. There is “power” in the tongue, where poison can entice malignant entities into this dimension. While writing Mass for Shut-Ins, always in the back of my mind was my transgression of this superstition. Tempted by taboo, I write about uncontrollable human impulses—to hurt ourselves and each other—indulging my lifelong flirtation with all that is off-limits. My books mull over my apocalyptic paranoia, my looming death(s), and the Hells I predict I’m heading to, soon. Briefly, I’m anchored—to this body that daily fights decay; to this sunny/sinful city of angels. Then I remember that my body is Black; my Los Angeles is an anti-paradise; my medications may cause madness.
In a similar vein, ideas of morality frequently appear in this collection but are often juxtaposed against a world indifferent to them—or at the very least, intent on ignoring them. The speaker seems both bound to and disenchanted by religion and spirituality. Can you tell us a little about these ideas in your work?
Dreamscapes host—and hold hostage—mutant/machine plus flesh/disease, human/demon, science/miracle, mercy/hellfire. The atmosphere is charged by folk mythology and syncretism. My ethnic Fulani tribe is essentially synonymous with Islam, but I was raised by Evangelical parents in a sphere of fundamentalism and apocalyptic paranoia. Alongside such extremes, the indigenous beliefs of Nigeria survive—within my family, seen in the centering of superstition, the credence in curses. Per an occult Nigerian ritual, a willing human vessel may be possessed by a pantheon of spirits. Spirits populate my writing, their presence presenting the prospect of being haunted or hunted. Inhuman inhabitants prowl about: godlings, ghosts, bots, birds, major or minor saints. Poetry is invocation—opposite of exorcism. I invite the otherwordly inside.
Throughout my manuscript, we encounter the spirits of iconic female figures—the fallen woman; the Bell Witch; the “ultra-black” goddess Kali; Santa Muerte, the death saint; Mary, Virgin Queen of Heaven; an aging, light-phobic Hollywood actress; Christina the Astonishing (the patron saint against insanity); an anthropomorphic she-goat; a spacegirl; a pillar of salt. On each of my many, many moons lives a lady.
You often reference Los Angeles, where you lived while part of this collection was written; and West Africa — Nigeria, specifically, where you were born. Place plays a fundamental role within these poems— though mostly as spaces the speaker orients themselves on the periphery of. In these poems, there is no “home” and nowhere is safe. What do terms like home, place, and setting mean to you as a poet?
The term “uncanny” is derived from its direct opposite in German, heimlich, meaning “homelike” or “native.” The uncanny unsettles the home—it turns eerie and intrusive. I am a nomad of many homes and no home; naturally, my poetry charts far valleys of the uncanny.
Today, my research targets egregious gaps and errors in West Africa’s historic and written record. I do this out of necessity. The glaring lack of useful documents published about my native land proves both frustrating and generative. So ignored is that terrain that the maps inside my memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing (HarperCollins/Ecco 2022), had to be drawn by an illustrator: my publisher and I found nothing marking the locations I mention. Every time I review the body of literature from my overlooked region, I am astonished by the distortion in its reporting and representation. The scarce available materials are typically dated; derogatory; limited in detail; lacking in depth. At first dismayed by our erasure, I realized an expansive, ongoing opportunity to counter erosion. To incarnate my own inheritance.
Whenever we speak the name of a place, we become participants in its storyline. While a PhD student at USC, I sought to understand my adopted environs. I am drawn to desert, assimilating from a similar clime. The setting of La La Land lent a surreality to my scholarship. The etymology of the name of the state alludes to Calafia, the queen of a fictional island inhabited exclusively by black-skinned women: a fantasy territory invented in a 16th-century Spanish novel. Her character recurs in my work: a focal figure in my doctoral dissertation and memoir—a muse.
My kaleidoscopic book braids a sequence of essays—each sets a scene nested in Nigeria’s diaspora. Afro-Palestine; Ukraine; the textile districts in Guangzhou; sampietrini cobblestone streets in Sicily; Texas; Thailand; Morocco; the Americas, where our indigenous spirituality survived transatlantic slave trade, remade into the misunderstood Santería, Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Hoodoo. As the progeny of pastoralists, I have odysseyed the world. My book relates African assimilation and adaptation—via personal encounters. Wherever Nigerians go, we animate a corpus of culture.
Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. She held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College and turns to her third and fourth books of poetry/prose as a scholar at Princeton University.