The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Devin Bustin speak with Yalie Saweda Kamara about her new book, Besaydoo.
Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D. is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, professor and researcher from Oakland, California. She currently lives in Cincinnati and is the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate.
Her new book of poetry, Besaydoo, will be released on January 9th. Preorder now!
Yalie read the following poems from Besaydoo:
The musical excerpt was Ponta de Lança Africano by Jorge Ben.
Devin Bustin is a writer and teacher who lives in Loveland, Ohio. Growing up, Devin attended well over a dozen schools across Canada and the United States. This gave him a longing to know specific places, to connect with openness, and to create belonging. Raised Pentecostal, Devin wrestles with the faith he inherited, often through fiction, essays, and poetry. He is often working on a song, and his emergent work can be found at devinbustin.com.
This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Devin Bustin speak with Yalie Saweda Kamara about her new book, Besaydoo.
Yalie Saweda Kamara, Ph.D. is a Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator, professor and researcher from Oakland, California. She currently lives in Cincinnati and is the 2022-2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate.
Her new book of poetry, Besaydoo, will be released on January 9th. Preorder now!
Yalie read the following poems from Besaydoo:
The musical excerpt was Ponta de Lança Africano by Jorge Ben.
Devin Bustin is a writer and teacher who lives in Loveland, Ohio. Growing up, Devin attended well over a dozen schools across Canada and the United States. This gave him a longing to know specific places, to connect with openness, and to create belonging. Raised Pentecostal, Devin wrestles with the faith he inherited, often through fiction, essays, and poetry. He is often working on a song, and his emergent work can be found at devinbustin.com.
This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
Besédu. While sipping coffee in my mother's Toyota, we hear the bird call two teenage boys in the parking lot. Aye, one says. Besédu, 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 schwinds head in opposite directions. My mother turns to me, revealing the milky John Waters mustache thin foam on her upper lip. Waitin dem be say, be say do, not English? She asks, tickled by this tangle of new language. All right, be safe, dude. I pull apart each syllable like string cheese for her. Oh yeah, Demna El Padi, she smiles, surprisingly broken by the tenderness expressed by what half my family might call thugs. Biseydu, biseydu, biseydu, we chirp in the car, then nightly into our phones after I leave California. Bisedu, she says, as she softly muffles the rattling of my bones in newfound sobriety. Bisedu, I say, years later, her response made raspy by an oxygen treatment at the ER. Bisedu, we whisper to each other across the country. Like some word from deep in a somewhere to newborn pure for the outdoors. But we saw those two boys do it in broad daylight under a decadent, ruinous sun, bedu, we say bedu and split one more for the road. For all the struggle. Tumble drown, bedu, we say to get on the good foot, we get off of the phone. Tie it like the bulbous air of two palms that have just kissed.
I read Bisaidu for friends at my wife's birthday party last week and there were tears what it felt like in the room was like this truth telling. It spoke to vulnerability and this deeper truth that we know and that keeps coming back, like, throughout this book, the the tenderness that actually exists between us and I Wonder if you could speak about that in your work, the tenderness and the vulnerability, the goodness of strangers, like a different story than what we've been conditioned to fear in each other.
Yeah, I'm thinking about like, observations, you know, and thinking about what I grew up seeing and maybe experiencing. One of those things is, growing up in Oakland, my mother used to walk me and my older sister to the bus stop, where she'd take us to school, on the bus, and she would always give unhoused people money on the street, just as a practice of seeing and believing. And I didn't realize how much of an impact it had on me to see that, because it's like, I'm seeing my mother do this, but I'm being told you should not interact with people who are unhoused and then thinking about every single sort of imagined danger of this sort of crossing between different ways of living, different ways of being. Yeah, so I think my mother was a teacher of humanity for me and tenderness, and thinking about her lack of fear of people, right? And I also think about, well, like, that's kind of the immigrant story, too. My parents are from Sierra Leone, and moving from that country to the wilderness of America, and not the reverse, you know? Thinking about that, and how much sort of, Openness that, that sort of requires, I wonder if that kind of seeped into me too. And thinking of being first generation American English wasn't my first language. And I don't think America was my first culture but having to be in a space where I was observing and trying to learn the world around me. I think that, that does sort of beget a type of tenderness because you have to be open to just seeing the world. And so I just think like, A lot of my understanding of tenderness is a product of observation and just seeing and taking things in. And maybe seeing and not speaking, but just taking things in. And so maybe that's the first thing. And also just like, if my mother and I had been talking, if we had been playing music loudly, if we'd been doing anything but Sitting next to each other and loving each other and drinking coffee. We wouldn't have heard those boys you know and so just kind of thinking about that and I should put this out there cuz I've been saying like I've talked about be seated like Everything is like based on a true story. This is semi Autobiographical this it really did 3000 percent happened though, but just if we hadn't Been still with each other than we wouldn't have heard it and I think even being still next to my mother's a type of tenderness just being next to each other or just All we were tasked with doing was enjoying our coffee and we were gifted with this miracle right outside of my mom's car.
So you talk about America as the wilderness. Yeah. And how that Breeds in you a need to be aware of your surroundings. Yeah, that to me doesn't sound like tenderness That sounds like vigilance. It sounds like how do I protect myself? So for people who are listening or for maybe even for me and Devin are there practices that you participate in on a daily basis to to cultivate that tenderness towards the world and not to look at it as a
Yeah, I mean, I, and I appreciate that. I do think I'm a vigilant person, but I don't think that my vigilance precludes tenderness or being open to that. That's part of why I'm always looking around. There's a safety issue, obviously, but it's also like, what does the world have to offer me, too? I think moments of maybe priming myself for tenderness is prayer. I think that helps me. You know, like, thinking about, like, what is around me, what could be around me. Where I need to be, where I don't need to be, you know. I think also, what, what else primes me for tenderness? Talking to my, like, family, my loved ones. Like, blood and chosen family. Talking to strangers, these sorts of things. Like, engagement primes me to tenderness. I also think teaching. My students and being in spaces where I have the The blessing of like facilitating like arts workshops, I think there's so much that happens in those spaces, just the opportunity to like, sit in a type of stillness or a quietness, or to do the exact opposite and just like be engaging with folks, those things orient me towards tenderness and also the consumption of art and being around creativity, I think that's another thing that kind of opens me up to tenderness.
It seems like there's one type of parenthood, that kind of teaches fear first. Mm hmm. And, it sounds like your mom's kind of parenthood, taught attention to other people's humanity around, it sounds like she, she taught a kind of courage,
She is, my mom's spicy. She's all sorts of things. she does have a lot of, I would say, suspicions. There are things that she's suspicious of. A lot of things. But she's also, she understands people. I think she understands the wholeness of people and the flaws in people. And so, I'm grateful, and my parents are, I'd say they're both kind of suspicious there of this whole thing, um, . \ but, thank goodness they taught me if even inadvertently had to be open to the world. And I think part of that too is I'm thinking about the music we listen to in my household growing up is we listened to so much music from throughout the diaspora. Of which we could only understand maybe 10%. Most of the music was from all over the place. And so, I think the lesson there is you can feel things that you don't necessarily understand in a logical way. And so I, I kind of think that that was like a bit of a blueprint or a metaphor. Like you can still feel people in spite of difference, in spite of the things that you can't necessarily articulate in a way that is maybe like tracked by like multiple groups. And so an example of that is my mom used to like Growing up, a little mixtape, a little Memorex tape, and she'd play this song and we loved that song growing up. And I studied abroad in Brazil, 15 years later, and I was like, yo, that language was Portuguese! Like, I didn't realize that's what we were listening to in our house growing up, but, I don't think it's a mistake or coincidence that I ended up in that country. What brought me back to that song, and what even, made me excited about engaging with the world, I think, was my parents, like, move and then this continuous sort of, And I think that that was the first time that I realized that I had a lot of, like, positive engagement, like, in what the arts, that just kind of grew something in me. But I think they led with a type of, I would agree, like a type of courage that got me leaning into the world instead of pulling away from it.
You said the main focus in your work is home and it feels like home is like where your neighbors are, you know, home is where the neighborliness is and okay, backing up, it was my birthday. And that first time that I met you, what I was going to do was hang out with family and the thing we were going to do fell through. So instead I went to your office hours poetry circle at the library because I wanted to do something poetry. The thing that people do on their birthday is the thing that's with the people closest to them and that's what it ended up feeling like. It ended up feeling like such a gift. So you are from Oakland. And yet, you create home here in Cincy, I'm sure people would say that about Bloomington as well. There's something about the way that you are in a group that makes people feel at home, I mean, you studied with Ross Gay. Did you learn some of that attention, that studying what you love and building a network of care through literature through those experiences at Indiana or does it go back? Can I bring in that?
I think it goes back and thank you for that question I'm happy to hear that that's what that felt like for you. I really appreciate that. I think it's, my understanding of home comes from also feeling marginalized. Even like growing up in like the 90s and 2000s, what were the depictions of African people on television, everything around famine, terrorism, like warmongering and civility. And then that on top of being from Oakland, and, you know, crack epidemic, I had someone tell me it's riotous. I'm like, what a word to describe Oakland. But all these things that were like negative connotations from both places that I was from, right? And not feeling empowered. And I think maybe literature was the thing that made me feel empowered. As soon as I learned how to do research, I began to understand that there was so much more than I was being told. Right? My parents always had incredible pride in Sierra Leone, but they couldn't. And they didn't really tell me how cool it was, they just thought it was cool and that was that, you know, and like there are no discussions over, but like when I started to research, I'm like, oh, this culture, these cultures are so interesting and thinking about like, what is, Oakland the home of or what are the particular things about this place that make it so special. And I think like that's sort of the agency to research and to understand what I could look into started to give me a deeper sense of self and pride. And I, I think those are connected to feelings of home or creating home or safe spaces for people. And part of the other thing aside from that, that marginalization was having and wanting the need for self expression. Growing up my only understanding of poetry is it's something that you regurgitate. It's already been written. You're not contributing to it. You're just learning from what has been. It wasn't until I watched a documentary randomly on our PBS affiliate station in the Bay Area that I knew that young people were writing. I didn't know that that was a thing. I had no clue. And, the organizations that I worked with, primarily Youth Speaks and 826 Valencia, like, something about the way that the adults created a culture of care and thinking about what a workshop looks like and We'll have food, we'll talk, we'll create sounds in the cypher, we'll write poems, we'll discuss our artistic sort of impulses and our creativity, that was where I first got that sort of thing, like, this can be a home too. You know what I mean? And I should also mention my parents, their marriage was dissolving throughout high school, and so that didn't feel like home. In that sense to me. And so I seek peace in certain places, or how do we bring peace or light to certain places? I do think artistic endeavors led me towards that. And I do think, literature, absolutely. Not just the writing of it, but the treatment of it. Like, how do we get together and discuss these things? And how do we world built from what we see here, what we don't see on the page. And I think maybe that was a metaphor for me, like, how do I create what I don't see? Or how do I duplicate the best things that I am seeing? But I think that that I hope to bring to artistic spaces and communities is that feeling of fullness, is that feeling of dignity and light, because I know what it feels like to not have it in the spaces you're supposed to have it, like In a home setting, in an academic setting, and so that feeling of goodness and home is, is thinking about the threat of not having any of that.
Space. AT the age of seven, 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 four 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 Zabel, Richard, Elzabeth, or Sinclair escape from the ninth 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, and in the 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 eye.
When I conceive of belonging, I think about people offering it to me that it's something that is created for me that when I lose the eye. My community helps me find it, but this poem that you just read, that's not what happened, you were the agent of your own discovery, and so, I want you to talk about the machinations of belonging, like how did it work for you? And it is that prescriptive for how it could work for other people.
Could I add something to, um, it sounds like in the bigger story there, that there's been, like, all these groups of people that have helped you feel that sense of belonging and build that. Yeah. the pastor is like, don't hold yourself between your thumb and your forefinger, And there's other places too where you say, I had to learn to love myself whole, so it's far from the myth of the poet in their basement free writing in the company of themselves,
yeah, I think the kids piece is a really interesting thing like you're working with kids. I mean, I work with with students too, and I so desperately wanna offer them belonging. So desperately want to Yeah. You know? 'cause what I needed when I was a kid, that's what I need now. Yeah. Shoot. What are we talking about? You know? Yeah. And so, that invitation Is an act of offering belonging. Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. Right. and I guess I'm just thinking about you, no one's looking for you under the desk or in your cubby. No one's looking for that lost eye.
Mm, mm, mm. This really did happen. I'm like, I just wasn't a priority for, the instructors. I would not call them educators. I think an educator would see something. And there's a soulfulness that an educator has. Those entrusted, to care for me did not see me. I was illegible. Even my name was illegible. You know, and it's been a thing, I insist on using my whole name because I've so often been told my name is a burden or I've had teachers react to my name. Or when you get to attendance, I'm like, oh, they just said, you know, Jake Johnson. I know what comes next is K. And you'd be fuddled, kind of looking and not knowing what to do. , Trying to say it without asking what my name is. And so, I think like, in the process of writing, this was like, memory was like, lodged. Like, it was in the recesses of my mind, and it just came up, but um, it's, again, when I talk about the threat of being alone, it's this. I would never want a young person to feel this way. I wouldn't want anybody, even an adult, to feel this way, and like, If I had a student that there's a letter missing from their name because it's consistently like, what's up, homie? Like tell me a little bit about this. I would approach it with curiosity and I wasn't even afforded curiosity. And I, I'm like, wow, I also must have been a very interesting child to play this game. Like I wonder where that was coming from, but I was not engaged with. And if there was a Richard or an Elizabeth or Sinclair, there would have been a sort of question, but did they even know how to spell my name to begin with? And so thinking about that attention to detail, that is something that informs belonging. And this is something I'm so interested in, in teaching and in education. It's like, You need to know everything about the people who you have the gift of spending time with, your students, or people that are in your space, your sharing space. How do you make people feel like they're stakeholders? There's some affordance of dignity. Memorize your students names as much as you can, or you know what I'm saying? do things where you know things about who they are on a whole. And I I think my own experience is being a child who had a name that people didn't understand and I went, this was at a Catholic school, so it's another interesting layer, too, and I grew up in a bi religious household with my father's Muslim, my mother's, well, now she's Catholic. But thinking about that space where they would would separate children by religion And if you were not Catholic, you could not go to the church outside of the gate to go pray. And so there's all these ways that thinking back about like, this is kind of like a rough way of treating children, and so, this was part of that experience is like thinking about all the different ways you're split and not a whole child. And so my impulse towards belonging is I can still feel the reverberations of that pain. And if we can prevent that happening to people around us, why not?
What I hear you saying is in this moment of this poem, there could have been a temptation to say. All right, if belonging costs me not being my whole self, then maybe I'm willing to do that. And you're like, nope, I'm not actually willing to do that. The only thing that can belong in this place or in any place is the whole self, is all of me.
And I would say that's like the wisdom of like a young child. I mean, I went through definitely like many, many years where I just wanted to be. American, and I didn't want to have the weight of my name. My name has meant different things to me over time. I love every bit of my name now, but, it was a game at one point. It was difficult to just, you know, with teachers not knowing how to hold the name, or even the cultures associated with my name, that was hard. I didn't want to carry all of it. And that's because there was no space for all of it to be carried. I wasn't in a space that celebrated my identity in a lot of different ways, or my multiple identities in a lot of different ways, so I just didn't want to deal with it. And so, again, it's like, how do you do things that bring, allow the whole self to enter the room? And so that's part of the belonging. Because, I'm like, what if I let this define me in the opposite way, where I never thought I belonged anywhere, and that there's no use for belonging and I don't think that's an unpopular sentiment. I do think people are feeling that way. And so, what if it was the opposite? Because it was not, and I'm so grateful that it wasn't, why not share that with other people?
Yeah, that's beautiful. what's your name mean to you right now?
I'll tell you what my name means to me right now. Like, What it means to me is I never had a choice to do anything other than what I'm doing right now. Well, it sits in here somewhere. But Yeli comes from Jelimuso, which is the term for griots, female griots on the west coast of Africa, the caste of female griots. And another derivative of that, Yeli, is also Jeli, from one of my father's tribes, Mende, which means blood. And so blood is griot as storyteller, story keeper, archivist. My middle name is some derivative of black, black girl. And my last name means teacher. And so it's like all these things. My parents had the nerve to want me to be a medical doctor. I just like never had a chance in any of the sciences. And so, yeah, so what my name means to me right now is living out my purpose. It's living out my purpose and encouraging others to do the same. And kind of illuminating stories. And, reminding everybody that they have a story and it's worth telling. And there's an audience to listen.
So you teach at Xavier, the Jesuit way has this discernment of what is my vocation? And part of that process for me has been, the question of, what was missing when I was growing up? Like, find that thing that was not there and then give that to the world. Yeah. Sounds like part of what you're saying.
Yeah, and I will, I will say it's something also that my little sister, she passed away in the summertime. Jenna was her name, and she used to always say this thing where she'd say like, Gotta find where the hole is in the world, and you have to press your heart into that hole. it meant a lot to me when she said it a few years ago, and it just means even more to me now. It's like, where are you pressing? And that's part of the belonging, too. Pressing your heart into the hole, into the issue. It's the best of yourself, putting it into that space, and just what comes out of that, what is generated, what light and what change is generated from that interaction, from that synergy. wHat grows in the stoppage of a type of suffering. And so that is on my mind and in my heart too. And I carry that in my name
that line at the end of a brief biography of my name, where you talk about an omitted part of your name. Yeah. And, then you say, I, one who gathers, in order to understand the weight of the whole H O L E. Yeah, so the archivist who holds the weight of what's been omitted or overlooked or misread.
Absolutely, yeah. What's been silenced too. There's a lot of that. My rule is I ask the same question three times in my family. Because first time people are like, I don't know. Second time, little bit comes out. Third time, you know. And get them off track, right? You get your answer. And so I've had to do that sometimes, too. It's the repetition. I think that's part of the like, storytelling. It's the the art of inquiry. So I often ask the same question twice, three times, four times, and see, see how the answer evolves.
There any specific moments that come to mind for you when you did that?
I'm thinking now, how stories evolved, maybe the meaning of my mother and father in Sierra Leone, because in America they're like, what do they say? Your books are your husband's, your studies are your husband's, no dating, right? But the more I ask them, I'm like, yeah, but y'all were dating in high school, y'all were booze in high school, you know, and I continue to ask over time and more gets revealed. My father was sharing that they would read the poems that they were learning in their Methodist boys school, they'd learn about English poets, and they'd read it to the the girls at the other high school, the Christian high school. So there's some blueprint for poetry back with my parents, too, but even, the Emergence of their story, or even my dad came to America in the 70s and went to UC Berkeley for Engineering and my mother was in like Sierra Leone until the 80s and so like what happened that in that decade of time between these two countries and I'm learning more about like that, but it was the way that they told the story is like, We wrote each other letters every single day, you know, between Freetown and San Francisco, California. And like, it just simply is not the case. But the more I ask, the more details I'm getting. And I think There is a way that family tries to control a myth or to create a sort of story. It's supposed to sort of like play up to virtues, but it just starves us of the reality. And I wish that my parents weren't afraid to show some of their imperfections or that they were actually children, like the way they tell it's like they were born 50 and it's just, it's not that, but yes, questions around their love story. I think questions around my grandparents, those are two that come to mind, but I think the ideas of perfect family, I think, have been, like, the more I ask, the more I'm, like, no, my, like, my family is complicated and imperfect and brilliant and courageous, and so that sort of thing.
We're talking about belonging within the context of a neighborhood, a community, a classroom, a family but I'm also hearing hints of, I'm going to say a cosmological sense of belonging, like where you're like maybe the universe had this path for me already that I'm I'm stepping into this Also with what your sister said like there is a sense that your heart as you press it into the whole of the world like it's waiting for you to do that Do you have any any thoughts about that?
Yeah, yeah, I more than I have the details about, the lineage of my family, I can intuit, and I know that I have a lot to accomplish on earth and I can feel that all around me and I've always felt that way. Before I had the words, I had the feeling of that. And I do not believe in coincidences. I don't think my parents just randomly named me that. Maybe they didn't know in this sort of conscious way what they were doing. But I do think that subconsciously they put this on me. And I accept it. I accept it.
There is a sense in my mind where belonging can be given and received in friendship or in relationship. And then there's a sense of belonging where you're like, Oh, this is my place in the world.
Yeah. I just think about the places that I've been and what they've led me to. And so I just, I had no clue that I'd be in the Midwest at any point in my life. And I was just thinking back to like, Indiana and IU and thinking about my first ever associations with like this place or that place in Cincinnati. It was like, Who's this like dude always throwing chairs across basketball courts, right? Like I just want you randomly be on ESPN. You're like this guy's a freak, right? Did I know that I would be Around Bobby Knight's essence decades later But the first image like it's just interesting to even have that in my mind my association with like the Midwest was like Yeah, Hoosiers and IU, right? And then I moved to I grew up in the Midwest and I had an experience, in Columbus, like a spiritual experience that changed my life in which I became sober. And I got baptized and I started going to church. But it's like all these things, like who would have thought that it would be here? But I don't think it would have happened anywhere else but in this area. And I just think I've been guided to these particular places. And so this spiritual experience happened to me in Ohio that carried over to Indiana. And now I'm living in the state where that happened. I would have never thought that I would be here. And all these things are placed, and they've helped me find my voice, my writing voice, my artistic voice, my vision for myself and of the world has expanded by virtue of being here in the Midwest. And now I know how to spell Cincinnati also, which is awesome. I didn't know how to spell it before. But I just have to trust it, just kind of where I'm going. I didn't know what this would lead to, but Bisedu wouldn't exist without being in the Midwest. It happened in California, but it was five years later that I wrote it, the poem while I was in Ohio. And so there's something about trusting what is ahead. And so, I feel that way from my name, all the way to the things that have happened throughout. It wouldn't have worked in these other places. And the more you resist, the worse it is. And so, don't resist that. And I just feel like, the Midwest has been mighty. It's been really important for me.
If the myth of home is primarily about a structure of belonging in what ways is Cincinnati in the Midwest a homeland for you?
That's where I found God in the Midwest. And, I mean, that's a full sentence. I've purged so much in the Midwest. There's so much that has left me in the Midwest in so far as insecurities, fears, the way that my world was large in some ways as a child, and then it was restricted in like certain other points of my life. And I came from California, feeling kind of hopeful, scared, and a bit restricted, but thinking that something good might happen here. And so, for me, when I think about, the Midwest, I think it has taught me about a quality of life. Like, could I afford an apartment by myself as an MFA student in California? No, I'd have, like, 86 roommates. You know what I mean? And And that would impact so much. Would I be able to write in the way that I wanted to? Would I be able to dream? Would I be able to cry? Would I be able to pray? Would I be able to dance in the type of solitude that I needed to grow? I think about community, it's so important here, you know, in the Midwest, like I'm a pedestrian, I'm good on gas money. And I realized when I went to Bloomington or even Cincinnati, like, I got you on gas money, people are like, no, we don't want your gas money, we just want to give you a ride. I realized in the Midwest too, like in Bloomington, I was like, even if I ran out of all the money I had, I would never be hungry in this city because I have people that care about me and love me and want me to do well. And so I think about a sort of filling in the Midwest that's happened to me. I think about a sort of a stillness that I've been able to cultivate in the Midwest. I think I've been able to dream more in the Midwest. And my sense of love has definitely deepened here. And I think it's something about not being in a frenetic place that just has really allowed me to see more of what life Can bring it's changed my standards A lot. In terms of Homeland and what the Midwest, West means to me. That's funny you called it Mid Mess. The Midwest means to me. I was a Mid Mess when I got here. But now I love the Midwest. But it just, it means love for me. It means love and it means challenge. And there are things that grind my gears about the Midwest. But there's so much here about, like feeling the prism of like divinity here. That means a lot to me and it allows me to enact that and to be honest and to engage and to encourage other people in that same light. So that's what it means.
So here's this blurb from Ross. Yeah. Ross Gay. This is so Ross to write it this way too. He says, I love this book. I mean, God damn, I love this book. I love how hard it tries, how much it loves Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How it reaches and wanders and how it bears its bewilderment. I love how it sings and how it talks. I love what it does with its hurt and its sorrow and its loss and its longing. And I love, maybe most of all, that Bisedu is a prayer. A prayer for all of us. Which Yaeli Sawida Kamara reminds us a book sometimes can be. And coming from Ross, who's, non religious on purpose, right? Like, he talks like a secular saint, right?
And a friend of the podcast.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, he makes me think of common goodness. Like, what does common goodness feel like, right? But, yeah, the question is, if Visedu is a prayer for all of us What is it praying for and what is it praying about?
The first thing that comes to mind is that you're not alone. That's the first thing I think it prays for. People to not feel like they're completely shattered in darkness and destitution. I think it also prays that you remember the past. I think, and part of the past too, is it's thinking about all the people that make you. I'm not me because of me. I'm me as a sum total of the people who have loved me fiercely, and even the people that have wronged me. As well as people that I've loved fiercely and people that I've wronged, and so it's the experiences and it's also a hope for the future. It's really a hope for the future. And it encourages us to see our agency in that. And it resists, I think, being disappeared. I think that's what it is. And at the very heart of it, it's thinking about home, but it's also a project of dignity. It's a project of dignity and who we are under light, I think is what I want to emphasize.
The book ends with a million lumens of light shining from Antiex's eyes.
Absolutely, and the first poem ends on the biggest shadow is the one closest to the light. So it's light all around.
American Beach. I don't mind when she approaches me. A stranger on North Walnut Street who only tells me about what she sees while reaching two fingers in to retrieve it from my hair. She squints a bit, fights the menace of hot silver Hoosier sun and relieves me of a problem that for her rests too close to me. A deep plunge into my curls. I wait to see how far she goes. And because I miss the hands of the women I know. I think I'd even let her hook her unfamiliar fingers into the lace of my wig, but she stops short of me feeling completely like home. It is an American beech leaf, green as green as opposite of red. She pulls this weightless raft from inside the crown of me. In small town downtown, there is a woman who does not know my name, but calls herself my mirror, Haptic Grace. She holds the leaf to my face, then releases it to flow slowly down the vertical river of air to the pewter concrete. I don't mind when she approaches me, a stranger on North Walnut Street, taking a leaf, leaving her fingerprints to sing and sing and sing so close to our skin, until I hear my own voice say, I feel you too. How mighty, the god portal of human touch.