21/08/2026
Our father, Abdul Hameed Salik, loved poetry. Back in the day, the elders would sit together for a mushaira — a poetry gathering — and recite poems they had written.
Many of those poems seem to capture the experience of a community living through migration and settling in a new land: the nostalgia for what had been left behind, the changes taking place within families, and the anxieties about what the future might bring.
One of our father’s poems was written across a portrait commissioned by Rochdale Council. Our own Urdu isn’t particularly strong, but we always felt that the English translation alongside it didn’t quite capture the meaning or emotion of the original.
So we went back to the Urdu and translated it again.
There is something about this tradition that feels worth recovering. Poetry, storytelling, painting, music (he was a big Rafi fan) and art gave an earlier generation a way of making sense of enormous social change — and of leaving something behind for the generations that followed.
We really think our community needs to rekindle that tradition, and art more generally.
