Full Description
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.
The Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks.
Contents
Oakland as Home. Home as Myth
U Can't Touch This
Lessons on Rhotacizing: A Shibboleth
Mother's Rules
Besaydoo
A Brief Biography of My Name
Ode
Space
Eating Malombo Fruit in Freetown, 1989
Duttybox
Resurrection
A Haiku for the Bus: 54 Fruitvale Bart Station/Merritt College
Grab Bag (May 1998)
Sweet Baby Fabulist
I Ask My Brother Jonathan to Write About Oakland, and He Describes His Room
Marshawn
Rekia and Oscar and All of Their Sky Cousins
Le Champ Lexical #1: L'espoir [en 2020 c'est]
Because my mother says don't repeat this, you must know
Souvenir
Pest Control
A Haiku for the Train: Ligne 7/Corneuve-Villejuif
Soumission Chimique
Tell Me More, Ms. Angie
Bloomington, Part I
Elegy for My Two Step
Metaphors for My Two Step
A Golden Shovel for My Friend Michael Chan
A Mouthful
Listening to Nina Simone Sing "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues"
Thurible
A Poem for My Uncle
Three Days Before My Baptism
Repast in the Diversity Center
A Haiku Love Letter for Gabby Douglas
Visiting Nia Wilson's Memorial Site
How To Write an Ekphrastic Poem About a Nia Wilson Memorial Portrait
Memorializing Nia Wilson: 100 Blessings
A Nia for Ayana
Wahala: A Curse Has Many Heads.
In the year that the trash took itself out,
Split Infinity
In Our New Home
Ulotrichous
During lunch, Ms. Anne says
Aubade For Every Room in Which My Mother Sings
New America
Freeborn
American Beech
Aunty X's dream door has
Aunty X Becomes a Unit of Light
