Besaydoo: Poems (Jake Adam York Prize) - Softcover

Saweda Kamara, Yalie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1639550313 ISBN 13: 9781639550319

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2024

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 University and resides in Cincinnati.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1639550313
• ISBN 13: 9781639550319
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96