Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize Yalie Saweda Kamaras Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to homeas place as people as body and as languageA griot is a historian a living repository of communal legacies with quota story pulsing in every blood cellquot In Besaydoo Kamara serves as griot for the Freeborn in Oakland the Sierra Leonean in California the girl straddling womanhood the woman rediscovering herself amp8220I am made from the obsession of detailamp8221 she writes setting scenes from her own multifaceted legacy in sharp relief the memory of her motheramp8217s singing savory stacks of lumpia a church where amp8220everyone is broken but tryingamp8221 A multitudinous witnessamp160Kamara psalms from the nexus of many languagesamp8212Krio English French poetryamp8217s many dialectsamp8212to highlight mechanisms not just for survival but for abundance amp8220I make myth for peaceamp8221 she writes as well as for loss for delight for kinship and most of all for a country where Black means amp8220steadfast and opulentamp8221 and amp8220dangerous and infiniteamp8221 She writes for a new America where praise is plentiful and Black lives flourishBut in Besaydoo there is no partition between the living and the dead There is no past nor present There is instead a joyful simultaneityamp8212a liberating togetherness sustained by songTheamp160Besaydoo audiobook read by Yalie Saweda Kamara is available everywhere you listen to audiobooks
