For the follow-up to her Grammy-nominated debut album Fanm d’Ayiti – a celebration of the unheralded female singers of Haiti which was recited and performed in collaboration with Spektral Quartet – the Haitian American vocalist and flautist Nathalie Joachim sought to fete those ties that bind, from romantic trysts and familial bonds to the semantic shifts and twisted etymologies of Haitian Creole, a contested mode of expression which can be lost as first generation Haitian Americans assimilate to life in the United States, and the sometimes tumultuous relationship which Haitians share with their native landscape.
Returning to her family farm in southern Haiti where she was to write much of her album, Joachim bore questions of self-identity and ancestry, pondering the vagaries of a land whose bounty is increasingly racked by heavy rains, floods and hurricanes, while eager to reconnect with the Haitian women in her life from Vodou singers who continue to serve as models to her maternal grandmother Ipheta Bellegarde, whose late voice here sings a hymn of gratitude as part of a duet.
Over the ten tracks of Ki moun ou ye it is Joachim’s voice which provides the thread, sometimes crisp as the morning air as though singing sublimated clarion calls to freedom, sometimes full of a languorous and ardent yearning, from the moonlit reveries of ‘Zetwal’ to the reclamation of ‘Ti nèg’ and ‘Nan kò mwen’ which recounts cycles of abuse and trauma. Accompanied throughout by Yvonne Lam on the violin and viola and Jason Treuting of Sō Percussion on drums, suffusing acoustic instrumentation with electronic swatches and hitherto discarded vocal samples, Joachim says of her record’s title:
‘Creole as a language almost always has a primary, literal meaning of what’s being said plus a secondary layer of understanding, and sometimes even a tertiary level. “Ki moun ou ye” can be very simply asking, “Who are you?”. But it also means, “Whose people are you?”. And it can also mean, “Which person are you?”. For me, it led to, “Who am I actually?”. Not just on a performative level, but also as a Black person in spaces where I constantly have to code-switch. It’s a deep question. It isn’t casual.’
