This website is dedicated to the memory of Sharif Barko (also known as Majed Hassan). It has been created as a place to remember him, to tell his story and to celebrate his life.
First meeting
We took the main line north
from Euston, first stop Rugby.
We’d find our way from there.
With your uncle’s help you flew
from Khartoum to Heathrow.
Somehow you found your way,
then lost it, ended up
in Rugby Prison for a year.
We showed ID, my walking-stick
was X-rayed, as were we.
They had to look right through us
before they let us in
to see the King of Africa,
huge-handed farmer from Darfur
amid ridiculously puny
prison furniture.
We saw your dignity,
your lostness, your dismay.
Much later heard your roar
of heartiness at what you did
in prison: learnt English, learnt
to play Rugby, befriended
prison-hardened fellow-criminals.
Your laughter echoes through us.
The burning house
As though this
was the morning after,
we visit you in prison and view
the burning house of you.
Janjaweed keep coming:
blackening the houses, then,
when you’re building back,
bristling round and cramming you
over and over
into the back of their car,
hilarious even now your gasp
when they stub your flesh with burn-holes.
Bad sleeping, you say.
Smoke grieves in the timbers,
breathes from the black of the house.
Startles back into fire.
Roof-clearing
Today your Saharan black
is the black of the roofing-felt
on my English garden-shed.
Sheds, huts, rondavels,
they’re home from home for you.
You lie face down on the prickly
face of my roof-top. Brambles
are everywhere, catching at you,
snagging. The stringy stem
of English people’s love for you
will cling and cling. You won’t easily
wrench yourself free of that.
And there’s language, your casual
grasp of it, its casual grasp of you.
There are streets you slept on
and that hospitable telephone booth
at Shepherd’s Bush. They are making
roots, you say down to me.
Small pink mouths are sucking
themselves to the felt. Connoisseur
of small tenacities,
connoisseur of tearing, being torn,
you rip my shed-roof clear. You might
need to go back, you say.
In the desert
Even at night your camels
knew the way across the desert
to the market where you sold
your latest load of mangoes.
We almost knew it too:
no lights, no road, no signposts,
only moon and stars and camel-sense
and like an undipped headlamp
your delighted expertise.
In UK after prison
then detention you found a place
in destitution, standing
only, in a telephone box
in Shepherd’s Bush. Even this
was nothing to the eerie
desert in North London where
they found a room for you
which no one else would occupy.