Tastes Like Not Chicken

Colour, color, nationality, race, genre, black music, white music… So many boxes… We’re boxing ourselves, each other and everything around us. Yes, there is music we can each call our own, ancestral music that isn’t praised or produced in any other part of the world but our own… But like the words I write, you can’t put ownership on feelings… Listen…

Yes, we may all have a preference on the genres or the kind of music we mostly listen to, but how society is set up, there are cool genres and not so cool genres, some of us claim to only listen to a certain or a specific genre… I’m not one of those people because, yes, you’ve guessed it, I believe music is more than style, it is more than a tone, it is more than a melody, it is more than an instrument… Music is feeling, and whatever the genre or how much you don’t like the artist, if a song catches you at the right moment, you’re caught! Feelings everywhere… Going forward, whether you admit to feeling a song or not (assuming in your world it’s a style/genre or artist not generally considered as cool) is then your laundry to air.

Comedy movies are my favourite, they’ve always been my favourite though my most favourite movie is far from being a comedy…

Starring Leleti Khumalo, Yesterday is without a doubt one of the best movies I’ve ever seen… Yes, it caught me, it pinned me down, I felt it…

The movie is basically about a wife/mother who learns that she’s HIV+ and the self-dialogue and struggles that follow.

Living at the village she stays with just her daughter as her husband works by the city as a Miner… She seems to be faithful, but we can’t say the same for her husband… He also turns out to be abusive as he beats her up when she tells him that she had just found out that she has the virus… Lonely and bruised she travels back home from the city… Time and sickness would soon relieve the husband from his denial and whisper the truth through weak, hard coughs that he perhaps did have the virus… and that he had passed it on to his wife…

 

Boys working on empty

Is that the kinda way to face the burning heat?

I just think about my baby

I’m so full of love I could barely eat

There’s nothing sweeter than my baby

I’d never want once from the cherry tree…

 

As his health gets worse, he finally returns to his wife and daughter… Some how, his wife finds it in herself to take care of him, and nurse him as she had to deal with suddenly being treated like an outsider by her stigma ruled neighbours… shunned by many she once knew as friends…

 

Boys, when my baby found me

I was three days on a drunken sin

I woke with her walls around me

Nothin’ in her room but an empty crib

And I was burning up a fever

I didn’t care much how long I lived

But I swear I thought I dreamed her

She never asked me once about the wrong I did

 

Driven by her wish to see her little daughter go to (her 1st day of) school she is in steady health, but tired of her nosey neighbours and how they were treating her and her husband for being HIV+ and the hospital not being able to accommodate her husband she builds a shack in solitude where she continues to nurse him as his health unfortunately gets worse…

 

My babe would never fret none

About what my hands and my body done

If the Lord don’t forgive me

I’d still have my baby and my babe would have me…

 

The movie is definitely about love, forgiveness and of course willpower… She had promised herself that she’d take her daughter to her 1st day of school… Then and only then will the virus be allowed to do as it pleases with her… The husband is as loving as can be towards his wife and daughter as his life slips away…

 

When my time comes around

Lay me gently in the cold dark Earth

No grave, can hold my body down

I’ll crawl home to her…

 

Song: Work Song by Hozier