The Homesick Sparrow

The Homesick Sparrow – Mahjoub Sharif (1948-2014)

World Poetry Day March 21st 2024

Detail from Ibrahim El-Salahi’s Self Portrait, pictured below, exhibited as part of the series Pain Relief at the Saatchi Gallery, London in 2019. Photographs taken with the permission of the curators.

El-Salahi returns again and again to the symbolism of birds in his work. As they gently alight on the huddled shoulders of the caged prisoner, they speak to the fractured soul, trailing with them echos of the miraculous, divine compassion, revelation and intelligence.

See more in Birds of the Soul

Below, detail from a work in the artist’s Prison Notebook, 1976, reproduced in Ibrahim El-Salahi, A Visionary Modernist, by Salah M. Hassan. Both the highly spiritual El-Salahi and politically committed Mahjoub Sharif suffered imprisonment under various Sudanese regimes.

In celebration of World Poetry Day 2024, this week’s post recalls the words of the great, beloved Sudanese poet, Mahjoub Sharif. A Homesick Sparrow was written upon the poet’s imprisonment in 1990. The poem is translated by Adil Babikir and appears in his Modern Sudanese Poetry, An Anthology. The poem can also be read in full, together with the Arabic original in

“But they Can’t Manage to Silence Us:” Mahjoub Sharif’s Prison Poem”A Homesick Sparrow” .

A homesick sparrow

perches on the heart’s window.

with longing eyes,

It cranes out to glance at the houses,

at the distant skies,

waiting for a cheerful morning,

with promises laden,

to land like a turban,

on the shoulder of the homeland.

Enrico Ille’s analysis of the poem, see link above, notes that the view out of the prison window “is deeply entrenched with the inner life (fuʿād) of the prisoner, longing for and belonging to both private dwellings (houses) and a widely shared homeland (bilād), for which hopes and visions are far from being achieved (“distant skies”). In the lyrical imagery, the fulfilment of these hopes is symbolized by a “cheerful morning,” whose dawn is likened to a turban,”…”its end resting easily on the homeland’s shoulder, a frequently used allusion to Sudan’s mountains and the banks of the White and the Blue Nile.

The poem eloquently closes with the lines:

O my beloved daughters,

nestled in the shade of of kind people.

O the luminous space in the eye range:

warm me up with your peaceful greetings ….

On World Poetry Day, we remember the poet who dared to say:

I say it without fear: / I’m not afraid to die, / never bother when, / how, / or where. / Watching the stars in a summer night. / A bullet in the heart: / a deadly stab. / I’m not afraid to die …

What I do fear, though, / what makes me particularly anxious, / is death dealing a blow, / to my conscience.

From “I Say It Without Fear”, Mahjoub Sharif, translated by Adil Babikir in his

Modern Sudanese Poetry, An Anthology