From National Wounds To Sacred Surrender: Oumar Farouk Sesay’s Two New Poetry Collections

In “When My Pen Pours Poetry” and “Labbaik: A Pilgrim’s Verse from Scalp to Soul”, the Sierra Leonean poet moves from national wounds and global injustice toward pilgrimage, prayer, and spiritual renewal.

Oumar Farouk Sesay’s two recently published poetry collections reveal a writer working across the interconnected worlds of public conscience and private faith.

In When My Pen Pours Poetry: New and Selected Poems, Sesay confronts political betrayal, environmental destruction, racism, war, displacement, corruption, and gender-based violence. In Labbaik: A Pilgrim’s Verse from Scalp to Soul, he turns inward, transforming the Hajj experience into a meditation on surrender, mortality, remembrance, and spiritual return.

Read together, the books form two movements of a single poetic journey. The first looks outward at a wounded society and insists that forgotten lives be remembered. The second looks inward, asking what remains when pride, status, and worldly identity fall away before the Divine.

When My Pen Pours Poetry contains 235 poems organized into 12 thematic sections, spanning culture and heritage, politics, environmental degradation, race, migration, spirituality, war, gender, and love, its subjects include the stone breaker labouring beneath a punishing sun, the survivor marked by war, the neglected child, the violated woman, the displaced migrant, and the ordinary citizen carrying the cost of failed leadership.

Firmly rooted in Sierra Leone, the collection draws on local rivers, mountains, neighbourhoods, proverbs, oral traditions, and national symbols. Yet its concerns reach far beyond the country’s borders.

In “The Cotton Tree Is Gone,” the loss of Sierra Leone’s historic Cotton Tree becomes a metaphor for cultural dispossession and the erosion of collective memory. The fallen landmark symbolizes not only physical destruction but also the risk of a nation becoming severed from its history.

Environmental loss receives equally urgent treatment. In “Reign of Ruin” and “There Was an Eden,” polluted rivers, depleted forests, and scarred landscapes serve as evidence of greed and failed stewardship. Sesay presents ecological destruction not merely as a policy failure but as a moral injury passed from one generation to the next.

“Stone Breakers” offers one of the collection’s most memorable portraits of economic inequality. Through repetition, wordplay, and images of broken tools, shattered stones, and deferred dreams, Sesay exposes the divide between those whose labour builds society and those who enjoy its rewards.

Elsewhere, poems such as “The Middle Passage,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Am I Next?” connect the history of enslavement to contemporary racial violence. The poet situates Sierra Leone within a broader African and diasporic experience, suggesting that the injuries of the past continue to shape the present.

Sesay’s voice throughout the collection is lyrical, prophetic, and often confrontational. Rivers, graves, wounds, trees, dust, and stones recur as symbols of suffering and endurance. Yet the book is not overcome by despair. Anger repeatedly gives way to resistance, compassion, prayer, and the possibility of renewal.

The title poem captures this central purpose. When Sesay’s pen pours out poetry, it releases personal anguish, challenges public cruelty, and calls institutions and citizens to account. Poetry is not decorative here. It becomes testimony, remembrance, protest, and civic responsibility.

That movement toward prayer and reflection becomes central to Labbaik: A Pilgrim’s Verse from Scalp to Soul. Rather than merely documenting the rites of Hajj, Sesay transforms the pilgrimage into an inner journey through memory, humility, longing, and surrender.

The collection follows the sacred geography of Makkah, Madinah, Mina, Muzdalifah, Safa, Marwah, and Arafat. Its deepest landscape, however, is the human soul.

The title word, Labbaik, means “Here I am.” It is the pilgrim’s response to the divine call and the collection’s governing refrain. Sesay presents himself not as a visitor documenting sacred sites but as a seeker being spiritually transformed by them.

In “Here I Am,” the repeated declaration becomes an act of surrender. The speaker approaches the Divine with no wealth, status, or stable self to offer—only breath, longing, and the willingness to be transformed.

“From Scalp to Soul” reframes the Hajj rite of head-shaving as a powerful metaphor for the removal of ego. A childhood memory of resisting a haircut is reimagined through the lens of pilgrimage, where each falling strand signifies a voluntary surrender and a thinning of the veil between the self and the sacred.

“My Prayer at Arafat” adopts the rhythm of invocation. Divine names recur in the refrain “on this mount of mercy,” evoking the sound of collective supplication. The pilgrims arrive carrying regret, failure, and spiritual hunger, asking to be measured not only by their shortcomings but also by their longing for nearness.

The collection is especially moving when pilgrimage intersects with family memory.

In “A Prayer for My Father After Hajj,” Sesay returns to the mosque where his father is buried. Having completed the pilgrimage, he begins to understand his father’s devotion through silence, remembrance, and prayer.

“Her Prayer Lingered” likewise carries the memory of the poet’s mother into the landscape of Arafat. Her earlier pilgrimage becomes inseparable from his own, suggesting that sacred journeys may endure across generations through remembered prayers.

Women also play a significant role in the collection’s spiritual vision. “I Saw Those Women Who Answered Calls” honours elderly women whose lives have been shaped by sacrifice, labour, and devotion. Some move slowly through the rites, yet their physical frailty does not diminish their spiritual strength. Sesay presents them as women who raised families, sustained communities, and answered countless human calls before answering the call to Hajj.

Several of the strongest poems probe the limits of language itself. In “Before I Leave This City of Stone,” the poet seeks a final poem about Makkah but finds the experience resists completion. The unwritten verse remains suspended between speech and surrender.

“When the Reed Refused to Sing” develops this idea further. Though the world seems to recite its own litany through prayer, birdsong, the sea, and dawn, the poet’s reed remains mute and his ink dry. Even this absence becomes a form of devotion. To acknowledge silence, Sesay suggests, may itself be an act of praise.

This treatment of silence links the two books in an illuminating way. In When My Pen Pours Poetry, silence often signifies neglect, repression, or complicity. In Labbaik, silence becomes more complex: it can conceal pain, but it can also create the inward space where pride recedes, prayer deepens, and the divine presence is felt.

The two collections are therefore distinct, not disconnected.

When My Pen Pours Poetry is largely a poetry of public reckoning, it asks societies to remember the poor, the wounded, the displaced, and the dead.

Labbaik: A Pilgrim’s Verse from Scalp to Soul is a poetry of inward reckoning. It asks what remains when possessions, reputation, and ego are stripped away.

In the first book, Sesay confronts institutional corruption. In the second, he confronts the illusions of the self. In one, rivers are poisoned by greed; in the other, water becomes mercy through Zamzam, ablution, and spiritual thirst. In one, graves testify to forgotten lives; in the other, death becomes a return to the One from whom breath was borrowed.

This shared language of earth, water, wounds, stones, dust, and memory gives the books an underlying unity. Sesay repeatedly transforms physical objects into moral and spiritual symbols.

His greatest strength across both volumes is his ability to transform lived experience into testimony. A stone breaker becomes an indictment of inequality. A fallen Cotton Tree becomes a symbol of a nation losing touch with its history. A wound at Muzdalifah becomes a symbol of sacrifice and remembrance. A mother’s prayer becomes a spiritual inheritance that endures beyond death.

Taken together, When My Pen Pours Poetry and Labbaik: A Pilgrim’s Verse from Scalp to Soul confirm Sesay as a poet of uncommon range—one who confronts society’s failures while tracing the soul’s search for meaning, mercy, and return.

One collection speaks for the wounded, the forgotten, and the silenced; the other answers the inward call of faith. Between them, Sesay presents poetry as both witness and worship, protest and prayer.

Published on July 16, 2026, and available on Amazon, the two books are scheduled for an official launch in Freetown in December 2026. They arrive not merely as literary publications but as invitations to remember, reflect, and respond.

In one volume, the poet calls the world to account.

In the other, he answers the sacred summons: “Here I am.”