About the Book
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.
About the Author:
Yalie Saweda Kamara is the author of
Besaydoo, winner of the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize. She is
a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California and the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the National Book Critics Circle, and
Callaloo. Kamara's poetry, fiction, interviews, and translations have been published in
The Adroit Journal,
Callaloo,
Black Camera,
Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. She is the Director of Creative Youth Leadership at WordPlay Cincy and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati.
