الى اللقاء، آرثر هاويس...

Am I writing to you from the " other side " of the world, Arthur Howes?ii
Are you reading this, as a crowd of laughing gods and dancing goddesses drag you towards the gates of a beautiful world you could have never imagined, until the 29th of November? ii
Is the world of hereafter resembles the colourful paintings you were leafing through, sitting at your kitchen table? ii
Or am I offending your restless soul, as you now look to the world of down here with anger, agitation and despair? ii
Will your desire to change this world ever be subdued by death? ii
Are you wrestling now with your unfulfilled yen to capture it with the real, yet artificial, eye of the lens?! ii

Is the world really down-here , where I am, and you are not? Or is it somewhere else, Arthur Howes? ii
Have you elevated, transformed into dust and basic elements, or you simply seeped into everything and have become everything? ii
Will your soul, if it ever hovers above the skies of down here , float above Gibraltar, over Brixton markets, Kakuma Camps, above the Brazilian beaches of Salvador, or the Mountains of the Nuba? ii

And… have you seen, can you, meet my father? ii
ii(You must be asking why I think you have all the answers now for all the questions you shared with me one Saturday evening. I shyly told you that I knew nothing about God, but this shimmering hope that I desperately wish to transform into a solid belief. I'm asking myself the same question, Arthur Howes, with the same fading hope.)ii
****

I still get emails from your Hotmail address! One of them talked about "your" funeral arrangements on Friday the 17th of December. It was signed by your friend Richard. ii
It is Friday, and I did not go the service. It wasn't an anti-religion stance, (although your funeral is indeed a perfect occasion for English cynicism.) I went to the aftermath of that: a British gathering over food and wine, to celebrate you, not to morn, to remember you, with love, and shun death's heavy weight on life. ii

The bouquet of flowers I chose for you rested nicely a few meters away from your home, near the play-ground built for the kids of Brixton. The same kids who disappointed you the other day, when you realised they cared less about the greens than they did about anything else in their harsh, ever changing neighbourhood. ii

Your Brixton kitchen was jammed with a colourful crowd of your friends, from all over the world. Even I, the dusty boy from Khartoum, seemed colourful enough to fit into the international scene. One of the Rahals was present. Inshrah, without her baby Fatma, was there too and faced an embarrassing cultural-conflict incidence that would have made you laugh if you were there. ii

Were you there? Then you must've heard my voice repeating Inshrah's words to Richard, that we hope to stage a night of your Sudanese films. Not even the Nubas of London know about Kafi Story or the Nuba Conversations. I have no big hope that we will get all the exiled Sudanese activists, or the crowds of refugee families to gather in a community hall to watch our painful realities, in film. ii
You must've also seen my confused and not-so eloquent walk into your editing room, trying to find something... what was it, Arthur Howes? the eerie presence of Benjamin or his brother? Kafi's haunting voice? or was it the ghost of the filmmaker him-self?ii
the self that was always so discreet, in the best tradition of social realism in British documentary filmmaking, the understated voice of the filmmaker. I now miss your voice, terribly ... ii

hafiz kheir