A people who live by the word.

Zeitlin, Steve

"My village of Dankawali is about the same size as Jackson Heights," Kewulay told me as we walked along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, with the elevated subway roaring overhead. "But quiet, the only sounds we have in Dankawali are crickets and frogs, a whole symphony of frogs." Kewulay is my "friend and close associate," as we respectfully (and jokingly) refer to one another. For more than a decade, we worked together on the documentary In Search of Finah Misa Kule.

Directed by Kewulay Kamara, founding director of the nonprofit cultural center Badenya, the documentary chronicles Kewulay's quest to reconstitute an ancient epic handed down in his family. When he was a boy of 14 in the village of Dankawali in northeast Sierra Leone, Kewulay watched his father, a member of the Finah clan of oral poets and masters of ceremony, writing down the ancient stories in the Kuranko language, in an Arabic script on an animal skin with a reed pen. His father was concerned that his children would no longer continue to pass the stories down in the oral tradition. Kewulay tells of his decision to leave the manuscript in the village as an heirloom after he immigrated to the US. He then tells of the breakout of the Civil War in Sierra Leone and his journey back to his home, only to discover that the manuscript was destroyed when the village was razed. "A thousand years of history lay in ashes," he says.

Kewulay's son, Kalie, is a Queens-based rapper who is reading the dictionary to improve his raps ("I just reached the word 'loaf' in the L's," he told me.) In the film he talks about how he is "holding down 718," his area code. In the documentary, Kewulay returns with his son Kalie to Dankawali to collect and retell the ancient stories, using cameras and computers rather than a reed pen. I was so pleased to travel with them to the village to meet this sweet clan of elders for whom "humility is nobility." Practicing, goodhearted Muslims who live in peace with the neighboring Christian populations, his brothers and cousins do not drink, but Kewulay and I did spend a magical evening telling each other stories of our very different lives in a bar set up in a veranda in downtown Kabala, the larger town where Kewulay went to school.

Kewulay's family mythology is of a people who live by the word. "A person who cannot bear to hear," he told me, "will have nothing of value said in their presence." "Words do not rust, words do not rot." His stories come from a time "when what was said was done, and what was done was said." As his cousin Momory Kamara put it,

   You are not a Finah because you lie
   You are not a Finah because you slash
   You are not a Finah because you kill
   You are a Finah because
   When the people want a word said
   But the word is hard to say
   Finah, say it!
   The people say.

And the Finah says it. "Each word that a Finah utters," Kewulay says as the film opens, "has his life in them. Each word that the Finah utters is beyond poetry, is beyond history. It's an instrument that can create the whole world." As the film closes, he says, "We live by the wisdom in these stories."

Kewulay brings the humility and the gift for words of the Finah clan of poets to bear on his life in Jackson Heights, Queens, both as a teacher and organizer of baro gatherings and Kwanzaa celebrations. He also teaches young people to write praise poems. "If I tell you that my name is Kewulay, that might not mean a lot to you. But if I tell you that I am the son of Kamara and Mara, and I come from the village of Dankawali at the foothills of the great Loma mountains near the mouth of the River Niger, that starts to mean something. All of a sudden I am part of something much greater. A child to be praised may be just a little boy--but pointing out who his father is and who his grandfather is a praise poem that elevates that person. It's not saying that a person has a lot of money or that he is the president of the United States, but that he is a father or mother or a grandfather or a grandmother--and that's important enough.

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Wow So I am Steve Zeitlin, son of Shirley Stein, grandson of Bella Brodsky from the town of Shpola in the Ukraine by the famed Khovkivka River.

Though we all don't all have Kewulay's direct connection to a mythology of words to live by, we all do tell stories and can think of those stories as a kind of mythology. Like a blessing delivered over a meal--"keep us mindful and responsive to the needs of others," for instance--we cannot always live up to the words and ideals in our stories and poems and prayers. But they provide guideposts and enshrine our daily lives with meaning, whether we live in Dankawali or Jackson Heights.

Steve Zeitlin is the founding director of City Lore in New York City. The 42-minute DVD of In Search of Finah Misa Kule is available through City Lore (steve@ citylore.org). This essay will appear in Steve's upcoming volume, The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness, to be published in September by Cornell University Press. Photo by Martha Cooper.