Besaydoo: Poems - Yalie Saweda Kamara

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara's Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home--as place, as people, as body, and as language. A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with a story pulsing in every blood cell. In Besaydoo, Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland, the Sierra Leonean in California, the girl straddling womanhood, the woman re-discovering herself. I am made from the obsession of detail, she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her mother's singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where everyone is broken, but trying. A multitudinous witness. Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languages--Krio, English, French, poetry's many dialects--to highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. I make myth for peace, she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means steadfast and opulent, and dangerous and infinite. She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish. But in Besaydoo , there is no partition between the living and the dead. There is no past nor present. There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity--a liberating togetherness sustained by song.