I still remember the message that woke me before dawn: “Here’s a song from South Africa.” A YouTube link. I clicked. It was music pulsing with that deep kind of longing—the kind of melody that carries both wound and hope. I sent it to Omar Farouk Sesay, my fellow student from Fourah Bay College, back when he was already known as a playwright among us. But as we both sensed, his artistry would exceed even that prediction. A few hours later, I read The Song of Every Land, his response poem — potent, expansive, world-bearing. In its lines I witnessed his evolution: not just a playwright of stage, but a poet of earth, ache, and anthem.
Listening to Land
The Song of Every Land begins with an invocation: “Every land has its song / a heartbeat drumming beneath the soil…” Here the land is not background. It is not setting. It is the breath, the pulse, the ecosystem of memory and voice. The rivers, the soil, the trees become instruments in a universal symphony. He writes:
“Every land has its music”
trees bending like dancers in the wind,
rivers crooning lullabies of stone and foam…”
Darwish understood that land was a subject of song when words became witness. Senghor taught that land is also flesh and rhythm; that Africa’s fables, dialects, and sweat are poetry in motion. Neruda made vineyards and seas lovers, ancestors, myth. Sesay joins this lineage, but his voice is unique. It is simultaneously African, global, hymnal, and internal. His land is the salted soil of Freetown, the swollen rivers of our childhood rains, the forestry where cicadas tremble at dusk—all echoing beyond geography.
Dissonance, Listening, and Response
What distinguishes this poem is its refusal of idyllic or naive celebration. Sesay acknowledges suffering:
“Sometimes the dissonance of suffering
strangles the melody of joy,
yet beneath the noise it trembles still…”
In doing so, he does what Darwish did so masterfully: he hears the land’s wounds without allowing them to break the song. The suffering does not silence the landscape; it reshapes its voice. Senghor too wrote of colonial memory, broken lineage, but also renewal. Neruda of heartbreak, yet of persistent beauty. Sesay enters the interstice where the song is fragile, but still irrepressible.
The Poet as Hearer and Herald
I first knew Omar Farouk Sesay as the one who built plays—dialogues, characters, stagecraft. He listened to laughter and argument and rustling palm leaves. But The Song of Every Land reveals how he has become a kind of priest-poet: one who listens to what the land hums in its deepest hours, what people forget to pay attention to. The poem is not only about land singing; it is about our ears awakening, our hearts being attuned:
“it yearns for ears to awaken,
for hearts to throb with its rhythm…”
Here Sesay extends an invitation: to move beyond observer toward echo. When we carry the memory of rivers and fields, we amplify the land’s voice. Our silence becomes collusion with forgetting; our listening becomes acts of revival.
Universality in Particularity
One of poetry’s miracles is that the more particular a poem is — rooted in a certain soil, dialect, history — the more universal it can become. The Song of Every Land is deeply Sierra Leonean in its felt textures: the sweat of peasants, fields rugged from toil. Yet there is nothing provincial about its longing. Like Neruda’s odes, Senghor’s songs, Darwish’s exiles, Sesay’s land becomes everyone’s land. Anyone who has ever felt a river in their throat, or earth press upon their bones, or the ache of beauty that is impermanent — will find this poem as kin.
The Speed of Creation as Testament
What also strikes me — as one who has walked beside Omar Farouk since those university days — is the speed and mastery of this response. From a song shared, to a poem born in the stillness of morning. It testifies to a mind always listening, always ready, always responsive. That swift transformation—from melody to poem—echoes the urgency of what we carry inside: songs we haven’t yet sung, stories not yet told.
Conclusion: Echoes We Must Become
If poetry is an offering, The Song of Every Land is one laid bare at the altar of memory and spirit. It claims that land is more than territory: it is theology, genealogy, yearning. The song does not belong to the land alone, but to those who carry the land inside them.
Omar Farouk Sesay’s journey from playwright to world-poet feels completed in this poem, and yet begins anew. Because a land’s song never ceases. It shifts, pulses, migrates. And so we readers — especially those of faith, those none, those between — we become part of that echo. We are the bodies that carry song, the mouths that give it voice, the hearts that remember.
When the world grows loud with forgetting, The Song of Every Land remains — a hymn unbroken, waiting for ears awake.
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