Overview
Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamaraās Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to homeāas place, as people, as body, and as language.
A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with āa story pulsing in every blood cell.ā 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. āI am made from the obsession of detail,ā she writes, setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief: the memory of her motherās singing, savory stacks of lumpia, a church where āeveryone is broken, but trying.ā A multitudinous witness.
Ā Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languagesāKrio, English, French, poetryās many dialectsāto highlight mechanisms not just for survival, but for abundance. āI make myth for peace,ā she writes, as well as for loss, for delight, for kinship, and most of all for a country where Black means āsteadfast and opulent,ā and ādangerous and infinite.ā 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 simultaneityāa liberating togetherness sustained by song.
TheĀ Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda KamaraĀ will be available everywhere you listen to audiobooks on January 9, 2024.
This book title, Besaydoo (Poems), ISBN: 9781639550319, by Yalie Saweda Kamara, published by Milkweed Editions (January 9, 2024) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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