Besaydoo: Poems

by Yalie Saweda Kamara

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639550319
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	01/09/2024
Series:	Jake Adam York Prize
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator, and researcher from Oakland, California. Selected as the 2022–2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term) and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration and the author of the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name and When the Living Sing. Kamara earned a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier Universityand resides in Cincinnati.

Read an Excerpt

Besaydoo

 

While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage

boys in the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reach

for each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first fat firecrackers of summer,

                                              

their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just beyond our sight. Moments

later, their Schwinns head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the

milky, John-Waters-mustache-thin foam on her upper lip, Wetin dem bin say?

 

Besaydoo? Nar English? she asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. Alright.

Be safe dude, I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yah, dem nar real padi,

she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call

 

thugs. Besaydoo. Besaydoo. Besaydoo, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones

after I leave California. Besaydoo, she says as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones

in newfound sobriety. Besaydoo, I say years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen

 

treatment at the ER. Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like

some word from deep in a somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we

saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous sun. Besaydoo.

 

Besaydoo, we say, Besaydoo, and split one more for the road. For all this struggle.

Tumble. Drown. Besaydoo, we say. To get on the good foot. We get off of the phone,

tight like the bulbous air of two palms that have just kissed.

 

Space

 

At the age of 7, a letter was plucked from my name

as a test to see who would catch the error. To see

 

who’d care enough to go search for the rest of

me.

 

For about 4 months, my name appeared as Yale

on the page.

 

A part of me wonders why some names are sweeter than others

and become the nectar that pools at the base of our memory.

 

Would anyone let ssabelle, Rchard, Elzabeth,

or Snclar escape from the 9^th letter of the alphabet?

 

Me and my broken name, less heavy than before,

began to float away to somewhere else.

 

No search party was sent to check between the

monkey bars, under the desks, my cubby,

 

or the palms of my hands. There was no red pen

to correct the flaw.

 

Nobody else played the game, so there’s no

record of the joyful sound that was made when

 

the long-lost me found the small, brown I.

 

Duttybox

 

It happened almost always just months after each birth: the baby,

brown, thick, dimpled, alive with coo and gurgle, would breathe

no more. No medical examiner could explain why, and the mother

would commemorate the passing with clockwork lament: 

 

a wail climbing up her throat hot and fierce as bile. Three times,

Mabinty Kanu lost her babies before they knew how walk or say

their own name. Doera learned how to stand by holding a wall,

Mahfereh could crawl in circles, and Yebu knew only how to sit up

 

by the end of his first and last rainy season. Mabinty stopped rubbing

her belly after it arrived again, the feeling of dread dragging its wet,

heavy tongue over her womb. It tasted her love for her unborn, too sweetsop

sugary to not take a bite, so she began to strain the juice from her own voice.

 

Duttybox, she started to call the unborn, named him trash, gliding her fingers

along the watermelon print of her stretch marks. Named him something to bitter

the blessing, to sour the amniotic fluid in which he floated, to rot the umbilical cord,

to wrap him in filth, in refuse, in utero. It worked. Duttybox swam through

 

Mabinty’s birth canal, a fake filthy so real, he was unwanted by the hand of the beyond.

How do you turn Death’s stomach?

 

Love a child who is never quite pulled from the trenches of dirt.

Rekia and Oscar and All of Their Sky Cousins

According to birdwatchers, sparrows are also known

as little brown jobs, because of how difficult it is

 

to identify them by species. It seems that for once,

 

a mass of brown bodies living in resounding

similarity will be the very thing that saves them.

 

Watch them fly with a preternatural ease—

as if they were born in the afterlife.

 

They glide slowly as they approach evening,

unaware that their kind is not meant to travel

 

alone, under the blueberry gauze of nightfall.

 

Sparrows are social birds: they make a rest stop

of the stretch of sky that separates this world

 

from the next. See strangers become kin:

 

a thousand birds chirp into each other’s

drying bullet wounds.

 

Sparrows enjoy group singing.

 

Which is to say that their sound is

a chorus soaked in molasses.

 

Which is a gospel.

 

Touching wing to wing, they constellate,

and keep the world ablaze.

 

Sparrows become sky cousins.

 

Family is derived from the word famulus,

which is a servant, oftentimes to a magician.

 

A star is defined as a luminous piece of plasma held

together by its own gravity. Which is a form of magic.

 

And to make melody from grief is a way

to serve each other’s heart.

 

But a dirge is heavy.

 

They are too tired to ponder the strength

of their own bodies.

 

Instead, they sing like this isn’t death.

 

Table of 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

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Besaydoo

“In her first full length collection, Kamara writes about the life of a daughter of Sierra Leonean immigrants to America and evokes her world of Oakland, California with ecstatic attention and generosity.”—New York Times Book Review

“Yalie Saweda Kamara’s lucent poetry collection Besaydoo encircles matters of race, heritage, boundaries, and exchanging ‘worry for hope.’ [. . .] Eloquent, proud, and discerning, the poems of Besaydoo preserve the wary splendor of lived experience.”—Foreword Reviews 

"Yalie Saweda Kamara draws from her Sierra Leonean and Oakland roots to craft this powerful celebration of memory, kinship, and the nature of Black identity."—Brittle Paper 

“Besaydoo is a tapestry of history, longing, and discovery. In this poetry collection, Yalie Saweda Kamara draws on her identity as a daughter and Sierra Leonian living in the United States to weave past, present, and future together into an inspiring ode to the journey of life.”—BellaNaija 

“With playful fluency, Kamara creates a seamless tapestry, reveling in the rhythms of different languages as she threads her poems with Sierra Leonean Krio, English, and French. The collection’s title is a newly coined word synthesized from “be safe, dude,” spoken quickly. This gentle benediction, which Kamara musically repeats and layers, embodies the care that people extend to their families and their communities. VERDICT: This brief, quietly gorgeous audiobook reveals new meaning with every listen. A radiant addition to any poetry collection.”—Sarah Hashimoto, Library Journal, starred audiobook review

“I love this book. I mean, goddamn, I love this book. I love how hard it tries, how much it loves, how it reaches and wonders and how it bears its bewilderment. I love how it sings, and how it talks. I love what it does with its hurt and its sorrow and its loss and its longing. And I love, maybe most of all, that Besaydoo is a prayer, a prayer for all of us, which Yalie Saweda Kamara reminds us a book sometimes can be.”—Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights

“Yalie Saweda Kamara makes it clear that Besaydoo is made with a sound that can only be made with others—witnessing, living, trying to read. With exquisite attention and suppleness of mind, she writes a poetics of relation shimmering with simultaneity and wonder. This is a gorgeously fierce and tender work—deep, alongside, and ever with.”—aracelis girmay, author of the black maria

“Sometimes, neighborhood is nation. And for the diasporic Black body, the City of Oakland is like a Station of the Cross. In Besaydoo, Yalie Saweda Kamara offers a love song dedicated to her hometown, a place shaped by humor, heartbreak, and humiliation. This debut poetry collection stands alone for its scope and aesthetic dexterity. Here, Kamara is radiant, tender, and true.”—Amaud Jamaul Johnson, author of Red Summer

“Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo is a thrilling book of poems that begins and ends in Oakland, her hometown, ‘the bucktoothed city that made you wish you never wore braces,’ but is steeped in her family’s roots in Sierra Leone. Her perspective is international, multilingual (Krio and French), and her poems multi-layered, probing, joyous in their humor, serious about matters of the soul, and brilliantly inventive. They celebrate members of her family, especially her mother, but also various aunties. She extends that relationship to others, such as Aunty Nina, the singer Nina Simone, whose transformation of Bob Dylan’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ inspires Kamara to her own verbal music: ‘a twirl of / cocoa nib & bergamot; an acre / of semisweet tenor notes.’ Her moving poems embrace others and tell their stories, from Nia Wilson to Marshawn Lynch, passionately taking their sides, standing up for justice. The book ends with an astonishingly powerful sequence about Aunty X and the son who commits suicide outside her front door, a haunting story told through the lens of magical realism, echoing Kamara’s earlier insight that ‘The dead only die when the living refuse to sing for them.’ The title poem, though, sets the tone for the whole book, with its newly coined word that’s a benediction given to those she loves. Besaydoo embraces us all.”—John Philip Drury, author of The Teller’s Cage

“Refreshing and innovative, Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo, fearlessly  meets and challenges two contradictory ideals. With insistent rhythms and reasonings, her writing is rooted in her first-generation American experience. In some poems, we hear Krio words that resonate and evoke memory of Sierra Leone, in which I too long to taste Sierra Leone’s ‘krain-krain stew.’ In others, she captures both the joy and pain of the USA, particularly Oakland—‘a killing field they say’—while acknowledging the complexity of place: ‘and yes we mourn but let us celebrate too.’ Whether one knows Sierra Leone, Oakland, or this collection’s other locales, these poems are a pleasure to read, as they reveal Kamara’s life, her thoughts, and yes, her very identity.”—Anni Domingo, author of Breaking the Maafa Chain

“Besaydoo as poem, Besaydoo as book, Besaydoo as worldview melts me in delicious and curative ways. Yalie Saweda Kamara’s Besaydoo traverses acrobatics of liberatory reclamations, language as home, riotous celebrations, gospels of magic and chorus, odes, body as dirge, haikus where a bus becomes an altar for Truth, soliloquy of addiction, polyvocality, family faith dynamics, and fierce love poems to Oakland, beloveds, Blackness, Agatha Kamara, Nina Simone, Gabby Douglas, places, memories, and more. The voices fight against the detrimental culling of white supremacy and Empire with the knowing, ‘I will be misread / and misheard’ and what that means for descendants of migration, where voices sift through what ‘grief means in the hyphen of my African and American throat’ and ‘the constant expectation of wounds.’ Kamara writes, ‘the long-lost me found the small, brown I’ and asks, ‘What hand guided me through an evening of one thousand/ almost deaths?’ These voices understand that one is not alone—when one is a conduit of those who came before, to pave the way—in an ancestral lineage where past is pulsatingly present. Kamara’s poetry crushes the heart—then makes you hold the fractals in your trembling hand, while gently guiding your fingers to stitch each node, each valve, each vessel, each chamber back into the chest cavity until you realize, this heart—this plurality of hearts—can never be destroyed. Kamara writes ‘something about praise being messy’ and I bring this praise with me, as I incant Kamara’s Besaydoo for each of us into the inevitable mess.”—Felicia Zamora, author of I Always Carry My Bones

"This is a thunderclap of a collection — so vast in scope, so powerful of voice, so nuanced, so gorgeously evocative that it leaves you wrung out, astounded, and certain that Yalie Saweda Kamara is inimitable and indispensable.”—Dave Eggers, author of The Every

"The meaning of the word Besaydoo is, at the same time, secret and public. It is a shared code—a blessing for those who know. And so is this book with the same name. Yalie Saweda Kamara has built a bridge between Sierra Leone and Oakland, or, even more truly, she has become the bridge between cultures, languages, family, and history. This is a fascinating collection of poetry that explores the joy, sadness, and confusion of being a first-generation American. It is a book with shocking moments expressed with luminous intelligence, variant music, and changing poetic structures—a masterfully crafted debut.  Thanks to Besaydoo Yalie Saweda Kamara is now part of the literary tradition of both the United States and Sierra Leone. Her word belongs everywhere, and everything belongs to her poems."—Manuel Iris, author of The parting present/Lo que se irá

Praise for When the Living Sing

“When The Living Sing is a stunning and lush collection, teeming with bright music. Here, the mouth is a doorway and a dirge to what beckons and consumes the speaker’s tongue declaring, ‘I become a lyre bird mimicking their sound, unsure of what grief means in the hyphen of my African and American throat.’ Here, the ‘pulpy lava bullet’ of the malombo fruit tethers memory to family in Sierra Leone and Oakland, California. Here, the elegy is housed in the sanctuary of praise by traversing the distances woven with slices of Krio, Black death, and always finding joy amidst sorrow. Yalie Saweda Kamara is a poet with a gorgeous and wild imagination that conjures the ‘opal hue of God’s touch’ and the ‘blueberry gauze of nightfall.’ I never wanted the chapbook to end.”—Tiana Clark, author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

“A luminescent collection. To read Yalie Saweda Kamara’s first book is to welcome a wholly original new voice into the American chorus—a searching, joyful, wry, aching voice—and know she will be heard from as long as she has breath.”—Dave Eggers, author of The Every

Praise for A Brief Biography of My Name

“There are moments in Yalie Kamara’s A Brief Biography of My Name where the words disappear, leaving the reader with nothing but feeling, and the sound of their own breathing. Subjects of her poems grab the mike, speaking back to her. Her poems cross the distance between the poet’s memory and the reader’s mind, creating an intimacy that is not always pleasurable, even if always truthful...Kamara’s voice emanates from the pages, recalling the oral origins of poetry; an affirmation of community; a sound that crumbles defenses and rationality; sure as a drum, as an instrument; from the opening poem until the last line dies into the silence that birthed it. This is life, given a proper and delicious weight.”—Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, writer and performance artist, author of Original Skin

From the Publisher