LABBAIK

Labbaik: Poems of Hajj from Scalp to Soul is a spiritually luminous poetry collection by Sierra Leonean poet Oumar Farouk Sesay, chronicling the pilgrimage to Makkah as both sacred journey and inner transformation. Moving through the holy geography of Hajj-Madinah, Masjid Quba, Safa and Marwah, Muzdalifah, Mina, and the Mount of Mercy at Arafat-these poems trace the physical rites alongside the deeper undoing of ego and the soul's return to its Source.

Written in a voice that blends devotional reverence with lyrical intensity, Sesay's verses read like invocations: prayers shaped into poetry, silence given voice, and memory transformed into testimony. The collection honors the prophets whose footsteps sanctify the pilgrimage while elevating everyday saints-especially women whose quiet endurance, sacrifice, and faith carry generations. Poems such as "Here I Am," "My Prayer at Arafat," and "The Man Who Prayed in the Plains of Minā" illuminate surrender as lived experience rather than abstraction, while "When the Reed Refused to Sing" confronts creative silence as a moral and spiritual reckoning.

More than a travelogue in verse, Labbaik becomes a map of nearness: a record of what happens when the body performs the rites and the spirit learns to answer the call-Here I am, O Allah, here I am. This is a book to be entered, carried, and returned to-poetry as worship, remembrance, and homecoming.