Tag: history

  • Watching Live Aid Again

    Watching Live Aid Again

    Tonight I watched a documentary about the history of Live Aid.

    It carried me back to my teenage years. Back then, the story seemed simple. Millions of people were starving. The world came together. Musicians sang. People donated. Food would reach those who needed it.

    That was enough for a teenager.

    Adults, unfortunately, don’t get to keep many simple stories.

    Watching it now, I found myself noticing things I never would have seen then. Not just the images of hunger, but the people standing around it. The officials. The governments. The negotiations that always seem to appear whenever suffering becomes visible enough for the world to notice.

    One interview stayed with me.

    An Ethiopian official seemed more struck by Bob Geldof’s appearance—his long hair, his beard, the fact that he wasn’t wearing a suit—than by the catastrophe unfolding around him. Maybe there was context I didn’t see. Maybe there was more to the exchange than the documentary showed. But it left me unsettled.

    I found myself looking less at Geldof and more at the official.

    As a teenager, I probably wouldn’t have noticed him at all.

    As an adult, I couldn’t stop noticing.

    His appearance stood in sharp contrast to the images of starving people surrounding him. Fairly or unfairly, I found myself wondering how someone could stand so close to such unimaginable suffering and seem so emotionally distant from it. It felt, at least to me, as though the people who were starving had become something to point toward rather than people to grieve.

    I eventually turned the documentary off.

    Not because I couldn’t bear to look at the victims.

    Because I couldn’t stop thinking about everything happening behind the camera.

    Over the years, I’ve worked alongside more people from different parts of Africa. I’ve learned how deeply history, politics, ethnicity, and tribal identities have shaped many nations there.

    That complexity leaves me with questions I cannot answer.

    How much suffering was caused by drought alone?

    How much by war?

    How much by corruption?

    How much by governments that placed power above people?

    History is filled with stories of trucks waiting at checkpoints. Food sitting only miles away while paperwork, politics, greed, or war decided whether starving families would eat.

    How much of that food never reached the people it was meant to feed?

    Perhaps that is what disturbed me most.

    Not simply that people were starving.

    But that even starvation can become something to bargain over.

    A convoy waits.

    Someone demands payment.

    A permit.

    A tax.

    A favor.

    And while adults negotiate, children continue waiting.

    Live Aid showed the world extraordinary generosity. Millions of ordinary people opened their wallets because they believed another human being deserved to live.

    The people who donated weren’t thinking about politics. They were thinking about hungry children. They believed compassion could bridge the distance between their table and someone else’s empty plate.

    I hope that generosity reached those it was meant for.

    I also hope history continues asking difficult questions about the systems that allowed so many people to suffer in the first place.

    I miss believing that kindness was enough.

    Because feeding the hungry is an act of compassion.

    Asking why they were hungry for so long is an act of responsibility.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • “What We Remember, We Keep-Alive”

    “What We Remember, We Keep-Alive”

    I had been working on the newest book in my Culinary Crossroads series, where Jamaal was supposed to return home—to the States and the old South.

    I thought it would be simple.

    A return to where it all began.

    A pilgrimage from the polished kitchens of Manila to the front porches, fields, and kitchens that shaped so many of us long before we ever touched a passport.

    I thought I was writing about food.

    But the deeper I dug, the more I realized that it was never just food.

    It was survival.

    It was remembrance.

    It was resistance disguised as Sunday dinner.

    I read everything I could find.

    The recipes were there, sure.

    But what kept catching me, snagging me like thorns on an old fence line, were the traditions.

    Not just what we ate but how we ate.

    Why we seasoned the way we did.

    Why were our celebrations, mourning, and rituals around food and music crafted in ways no cookbook could fully explain?

    It started long before we were “we” in any way we would recognize now—

    on the plantations,

    where bits and pieces of fading memories were passed down by those brought here, enslaved, stolen, stripped, but not erased.

    They blended what they remembered with what little they had.

    Cornmeal. Greens. Off-cuts and castoffs.

    They made necessity taste like something more than survival.

    They made it taste like home.

    And over generations, through sheer will and stubborn brilliance, we built something uniquely ours.

    Not just in the food but in the music,

    the way we buried our dead,

    the way we married our loved ones,

    and the way we danced when the sun went down and the cotton fields emptied.

    These traditions aren’t static.

    They are not museum pieces under glass.

    They are living and breathing things—regional and even tribal, depending on where your people ended up.

    That phrase kept echoing in my mind:

    “Where your people from.”

    The old folks would ask you that when they met you.

    After you named whatever city you lived in now—Detroit, Chicago, Kansas City—they’d look deeper, waiting for the real answer.

    They were talking about the South.

    Not the city, but the state.

    The county.

    The plantation.

    The place that owned your ancestors.

    It was a question about roots.

    (Writing that even now feels like swallowing glass.)

    The place that owned your ancestors.

    So many years later, and it’s still hard to say.

    Still hard to look at without flinching.

    And then came the “Great Migration,” or as some called it, “The Great Exodus.”

    We left with almost nothing.

    No land. No wealth. No easy road.

    But we took what mattered.

    We carried our recipes.

    We carried our songs.

    We carried the parts of ourselves that they could not steal, whip out of us, or erase.

    And for decades, it sustained us.

    Soul Food. Soul Music.

    Names born not in marketing rooms but in living rooms, storefront churches, and kitchens where steam and sorrow rose together.

    And now?

    Now, the word “Soul” feels almost quaint.

    Almost forgotten.

    Funny, isn’t it?

    What slavery couldn’t kill, freedom quietly erased.

    In chasing new beginnings, we risk losing the old songs.

    The taste of real cornbread.

    The sound of a mother’s hum in the kitchen.

    The wisdom tucked into the folds of a handwritten recipe card.

    As I write Jamaal’s story, I realize I’m writing my own.

    Our own.

    The story of a people who carried more than pain.

    We carried genius.

    We carried grace.

    We carried soul.

    And it’s on us—not the history books, not the tourists looking for “authenticity”—to remember what we made from nothing.

    And to keep making it while we still can.

    Before the last song fades.

    Before the last plate is cleared.

    Before the last story goes untold.

    By Kyle Hayes

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    #BlackVoices #MemoryAndLegacy #WeAreOurAncestorsDreams #StorytellingMatters