Besaydoo

“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