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.
There is, instead, a joyful simultaneity--a liberating togetherness sustained by song..
There is no past nor present.
But in Besaydoo , there is no partition between the living and the dead.
She writes for a new America, where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourish.
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.
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.
A multitudinous witness.
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.
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.
A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies with a story pulsing in every blood cell.
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
