Besaydoo
by Yalie Saweda Kamara
(Milkweed Editions, 2024) Reviewed by Deborah Bacharach
You know that delicious shock when sounds you can almost understand suddenly transform into words? Like when you realize “Besaydoo” means “Be safe dude.” We discover this, as does the speaker’s mother, in the title poem of Yalie Saweda Kamara’s award-winning first book. The speaker and her mother then adopt this phrase as their mantra: “Besaydoo, we whisper to each other across the country. Like / some word from deep in somewhere too newborn-pure for the outdoors, but we / saw those two boys do it, in broad daylight, under a decadent, ruinous sun. Besaydoo.” Kamara is a Sierra Leonean-American writer and a native of Oakland, California. In a wide range of poetic forms, she explores the ruinous and tender.
This book is wider and taller than average. It has to be. Kamara’s line lengths range from the five-syllable lines of haiku to lines that reach 33 syllables. The ten-page poem “Aunty X Becomes a Unit of Light,” begins “While looking in the mirror, my Aunty X surveys her head, wondering if her alopecia has been a / lifelong exercise in losing parts of herself,” a line that spans the entire page, and a sentence that goes even longer. These long lines appear both in poems that have the feel and shape of a lyric essay, as well as those where the line length ranges wildly between, and within, stanzas.
The long line length lets Kamara set a conversational tone and teaches us to read as we might a narrative, paying attention to character, setting, and plot development. Her shorter lines serve in a different way. In “A Poem for my Uncle,” she writes:
My uncle came back from the dead the color of
a strobe light, float-walked above
the church’s maroon carpet pressing
into the pulse of every living thing in the sanctuary.
Ending a line “the color of” heightens anticipation. The color of what? And we have to wait for the answer. Putting “a strobe light, float-walked above” as its own line multiplies meanings: both the uncle (as part of the sentence) and the strobe light (from the stand-alone line) get to float-walk. And the short lines slow the reader down and ask them to focus on the imagery, the sounds (pressing, pulse) as well as the overall meaning of the sentence. In her wide-ranging use of lines, it’s like Kamara is saying, “Every tool in the poetry toolbox is mine to use, and I will use it how I want.”
Uncles, aunts, a brother, a mother—family, who have come from Sierra Leone and must engage with cultural shifts, form a central theme in this book. We hear odes to lumpia and stories of eating malombo fruit in Freetown, but this book also takes place in the racism of America. In “I Ask My Brother Jonathan to Write about Oakland, and He Describes His Room,” we learn of a brother who hugs his own flesh [so] the “X his arms make across his chest is not mistaken for a target.” Unlike how popular culture often depict Black men, Kamara shows us loved ones who are real and vulnerable. And also unlike much of popular culture, she does not shy away from the specificity of racism in America. She includes a series of poems about the Nia Wilson memorial, and in “Bloomington, Indiana Part I” she writes:
What I knew, but did not want to know, was that a friend was called a monkey and spat on around the corner from my apartment. What I remembered, but did not want to remember, was the car with the tinted windows that once followed me for blocks. What I recall, but want to forget, is why we never stop for gas in Martinsville.
The equivocating “what I knew, but did not want to know” gives these images a terrible poignancy, makes the speaker’s witness more real, vivid, and hard-hitting.
She witnesses violence, racism, and resistance. When the Black football player Marshawn Lynch refused to answer reporters’ questions, Kamara understands this moment as a thrilling refusal to capitulate: “I too have wanted to become a miracle / in my own Black mouth.” This book is filled with the miracles of Black resistance and joy starting from the first poem “Oakland as Home, Home as Myth.” It includes a repeated monostich line “Oakland is a killing field, they say” a terrifying drone that we are taught to consider suspect by the “they say.” The speaker and her community don’t feel this way about Oakland—outsiders do. Kamara contrasts that disparagement of her home with lines of sensory delight and celebration:
The upper level of the MacArthur BART Station
smells like Palmer’s Cocoa Butter because being ashy in The Town
is worse than jaywalking. The aroma of chocolate blankets the opposing
platforms, while warm air kisses bare ankles and calves
Here is a magical world where the very air smells delicious because of how the people care for themselves. In “Sweet Baby Fabulist,” Kamara tells us a three-year-old nephew calls everything Black:
Black is what he called the universe,
to show us how much he loved her. Black
were the rainbows, the full moon and the deep nightfall.
Black were the rivers and sky. God was as Black
as the autumn breeze’s call.
This child sees a Black universe full of love and beauty. The syntax of “Black were” combined with the repetition and rhymes (nightfall, call) make the poem sing like a lullaby. With these techniques, the poem becomes both a witness to Black joy and a promise to protect those who can see the world this way.
Throughout the book, this is a promise we hear a speaker making to herself. Several poems refer to getting sober, deleting Tinder, moving away from the worst of Midwestern racism because those patterns and places keep her from Black joy. In “Elegy for My Two Step” she tells us:
Before the spirits left me, I used to sway
with some sort of lubricated ease inside
a dingy crescent of bodies that reeked of
2$ Dickel shots and buzzed with Tinder
pheromones.
The “dingy crescent” of this old life contrasts with the full moon the child sees. The poem ends, “I touch my blessed, undying self.” She has rebuilt herself. “Besaydoo,” the saying, means the community is watching out for you. Besaydoo, the book, celebrates the importance of that community but also shows a speaker bringing herself healing and joy.
Deborah Bacharach is the author of Shake & Tremor (Grayson Books, 2021) and After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has recently appeared in Poetry East, Last Syllable, and Grist, among many other journals, and she has received a Pushcart prize honorable mention. She is a poetry reader for SWWIM and Whale Road Review. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.
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