By Adeline, Ee Sing, and Isabel
Yalie Kamara is a first-generation Sierra Leonean-American writer, educator and activist from Oakland, California. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and English at the University of Cincinnati where she is also a Yates fellow. As a poet, she is the author of two collections of poetry, A Brief Biography of My Name (2018), which is featured as a part of the New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set series, and When The Living Sing (2017).
Her writing explores personal identity, relationships with loved ones, and those she observes through a compassionate lens. Vulnerability and empathy shape her dual acts of listening and writing. This shines through best in poems such as Besaydoo, where she blends her native Krio with overheard teenage slang as a means of communicating love and tenderness to her mother, and a series of haikus inspired by overheard conversations on public transportation.
We had the privilege of speaking with Yalie at length over Zoom about A Brief Biography of My Name and her thoughts on form, her writing style and processes, her identity and her relationship to language. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Who do you write for?
My first audience is myself. But if I write with emotional authenticity, someone else will relate to it too. There are in fact people outside the demographics I identify with that relate to my works! I got an interesting piece of fan mail saying: “I’m a white guy, and I really like your work!”. The universally compelling themes about my poems are the endeavour to find home and examining what it means to be destabilised. Everyone is experiencing some sort of otherness and destabilisation, and there’s a universal appeal to not feel othered.
Many of your poems centre around home and identity. When you write so much about similar themes, do you get tired, or does it make you feel more impassioned?
I don’t get bored! It’s like a prism – when you’re hitting it with light, there’s one light but many different colours coming out; it’s never the same two colours and never a repetition. But you have to think bigger about how to represent something and create that prism effect. Do you change the language? Imagery? Length of the poem? Play with breaks? Are you using form?
Are there any Sierra Leoneian poets whose works have inspired you?
Kadija Sesay, Syl Cheney-Coker, and Mariama Savage are some of them! My response to their work is that I now know how cool it is to be from Sierra Leone. Being able to revel in the cultural architecture of Sierra Leone has been super exciting for me, and I feel like I have guides now to do that by reading their works. Access to these poets teaches me about myself and what I have the freedom to write. It’s a reminder that I do come from somewhere, and it teaches me how to get home better.
Apart from these poets, are there any stories that inspire your writing?
My influences are places, sounds, and surprising language. I love overhearing conversations – I feel like I’m a hip-hop artist sampling things I hear in public transportation. I write “Public Transportation Haikus”, and one reads:
A man counting crack Rocks gives up his seats for two Girls and their father
I witnessed this on a train in Paris. We have many assumptions of people who have vices, but it doesn’t preclude their humanity. At that moment, he did something so sweet that it heightened my humanity.
Another influence is my mother. I think she was my first poet: the way she speaks is very poetic and she speaks in Krio with a dexterity that I don’t have. I’m also influenced by the cadence of hip-hop music and Biblical language. Pushing and reimagining language is exciting to me. Other poets – such as the expansiveness of Walt Whitman and the explosion of Lucille Clifton’s works – also influence me.
It’s interesting that you’re inspired by both hip-hop and the Bible – those are two individually rich sources of language with different registers. How do these different registers interact in your work?
There’s a lot of boldness and vibrato in both languages. The line “I am a voice crying in the wild” is a Biblical line, but it could also start a rap! The best hip-hop music can train you to be perspicacious and observant. It can really push metaphors and similes. One line I really like is “I make headlines like corduroy pillowcases”. Of course a corduroy pillowcase would make lines on your head; but also of course I make headlines because I’m so tight! My first training in language was hip-hop, then I started reading the Bible and there’s all kinds of language I’ve never heard before. There’s a sensitivity and surprise of language in both, and that’s what pulls me in.
How has your relationship to your name changed through writing “A Brief Biography of My Name”?
Writing about my name gave me confidence and a sense of origin. I often talk about how “Yalie” is a term for the caste of storytellers, but now I know Yalie also comes from Jele which means “blood” – that’s hardcore! It’s thinking about how you have a lot in you. Be all of that!
How did you order the poems in A Brief Biography of My Name?
I had nothing to do with choosing the order – I had a suggested order, it may have had to do with thematics or chronology of life occurrences, I don’t remember.
That’s so interesting! Did this different order change the way you read your poems?
I think sometimes when you order your own chapbook, you destroy it. An outside voice is always good because you sometimes don’t know what you’re doing or how much more story could come to life. There’s things in this chapbook that I didn’t know until talking with Professor Larry, like the role of a female protagonist. I thought my mom was a badass but I didn’t know what it meant or how she was inviting alternative ways of seeing women outside of the dominant assumption. That’s something I didn’t see because I grew up with this woman. I think A Brief Biography of My Name would still be waiting to be published if it was just up to me.
There is attention to sound and music in your writing. How do your choices in form help you navigate this?
Listening to Nina Simone Sing “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is very vertical and walks through my understanding of that song. I listened to Bob Dylan’s edition 60-70 times, no joke. But it wasn’t until I heard Nina Simone’s version that I was like, “So that’s what he’s talking about.” That was like a doorway into a path, it gave me greater reverence for what Bob Dylan was doing. I wanted to luxuriate on the sounds, what her voice sounds like, how she says “ghost” as a multisyllabic word; there’s all these moments of revelations.
In my life, I’ve read far more prose than poetry. I love prose. I want a long line, the satisfaction of the imagery, I want you to know you’re entering a story, I don’t want to be done before I’m finished. Besaydoo is a prose poem, I couldn’t see it working in any other form. I want you to see the bird call, to show that music, to show that this is multiple stories about sound, language, refashioned language, intimacy and a connection. I wanted to show that it was a story by virtue of form.
You’re fluent in English, French, and Krio – how does this influence your poems?
There’s a lot of short proverbs that exist in Krio which I try to search for in English to convey something in a short pithy way. Maybe that’s why I’m obsessed with haiku. It’s not at all a Sierra Leonian form but there are similarities in the brevity of language. As for French, the rigidity of its rules makes things pop. For example, some might say “that’s a brightly coloured shirt”, but shouldn’t it be “the shirt is coloured brightly”? In doing translation work from French to English, I realise that the original text often loses its joy when translated. You don’t want to lose the passion of what is being said, but in English sometimes you feel limited in the options you have of expressing yourself. We’re constantly challenged with the shortcomings of English. Maybe that’s what poets are doing, we’re trying to make more language out of this language.
Beyond poetry, you also write fiction and non-fiction. How does your relationship with these forms influence the way you write poetry? Also, how do you differentiate these forms?
What I love about fiction and non-fiction is the sense of expansiveness. I’m not saying you can just write forever with fiction or non-fiction, but I think there’s more wiggle room with how expansive you can get. It’s not that long poems don’t exist, but there’s a sense of boundlessness and freedom that I feel writing in these forms.
Non-fiction, to me, is training on how to be honest in a poem. In terms of thinking about what fiction affords poetry, I call upon the freedom I get from fiction when I get stuck in writing poetry and its rigidity and constraints that I feel like I’ve created for myself.
You’re currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Cincinnati. How does being in an academic environment shape and influence your writing processes?
For my Creative Writing PhD, there are workshops, but we’re also required to take literature courses, literary theory and cultural studies. There’s all these ways in which we are constantly reading critical and creative texts that are juxtaposed with each other. We’re using the critical language to explore these creative texts, so they work in tandem in that way.
Being in this programme then allows you to understand who your work is in dialogue with, allows you to know the history of your work – if you’re under the delusion that you’re the first to do something, you realise that 200 years ago someone else already thought of that – and it gives you the language and context to articulate why you’re writing what you’re writing. It also gives you a greater understanding of the vastness of the legacy, culture and history of writing that came before you.
Do you have a poem that you found most challenging to write? Why was it so difficult to write?
Besaydoo was challenging to write. The poem brings me joy, and it was a pleasure to experience that with my mother and have it turned into this thing. But it’s difficult when you reveal struggles in poems because you just say what it is and hope people understand. I don’t mind being vulnerable, but sometimes you want to be vulnerable on your own terms. In Besaydoo, I’m not vulnerable on my own terms. I’ve shared something with the world and they will react to it however they want to. Not having control over somebody’s perception of me is difficult.
In terms of topics I intend to write about, I want to and will write about everything, I just need to have the courage to do it. Most things are not off limits, but I need to grow up a little bit more.
Moving forward, what new projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently shopping up my little book titled Besaydoo to different presses. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, which was awesome. So, I’m currently looking for a home for that full-length book.
I’m also doing work outside of creative writing: a nonfiction piece, but on material cultural studies. I’m doing ethnographic research and visual cultural research on Krio women’s clothing. It’s also a way of understanding my own cultural identity more.
Yale-NUS College Introduction to Poetry 2020 