In Ki moun ou ye Nathalie Joachim asks, “Who are you?” This is a question Nathalie has been answering since her previous album Fanm d'Ayiti, a love letter to Haitian women, the foremothers of Haitian music, and the matriarchs in her personal life.
In Haitian Creole, the question literally translates to “Which person are you?”, a prompt that demands sifting through the various stories and relationships that come together to make us who we are—one’s heritage, family, and experience of love and loss. “Who once owned these bones, this voice, this body, these joys, and woes?” The question of “who once owned us” recalls the conditions of enslavement but challenges this notion by presenting ownership of one’s self as deeper than the physical body. The song Ti nèg takes this defiance a step further, spinning the etymology of the N-word from a violent tool, and celebrates Haitian Creole’s gorgeous reclaiming of this identity as “beautiful, black, negro, nigga.”
In a world where marginalized people have so little, as Haitians, as Black people, as women, our currency is our connection to each other and the ways (however flawed) we pour into those relationships. This project chronicles stories of love, both familial and romantic, from the joy of basking under the moon with a lover in Zetwal to the scars left behind by cycles of abuse and trauma in Nan kò mwen. And as she delves further into these dynamics, Nathalie discovers the great depths of her wounds. Kouti yo shows us that love means handling the stitches that mend these wounds with care. Amidst this pain, for comfort, Nathalie returns to the Haitian women she celebrated in her previous project. She generously invites us into her family in Kenbe m, a duet with recordings of her late grandmother, whose voice may be recognized from her namesake song, Madan Bellegarde, from Fanm d’Ayiti. This time, her voice is woven with her granddaughter’s like a hug, singing a hymn of gratitude to God, the land, and their ancestors.
Sonically, we find the various elements that made us fall in love with Nathalie in the first place: her flute, her deep understanding of complex harmony and rhythms, her experimental production, and her moving classical music compositions. But here, she brings us closer to her musical practice with the intimacy of her songwriting. Nathalie tells these crucial stories through profoundly introspective and personal songs, most of which are written in Haitian Creole, her mother tongue, giving herself permission to claim a language that migration has threatened to take away from countless first-generation Haitian Americans. Nathalie weaves a unique texture of samples of her own voice as a thread throughout the record, a compositional device that centers the voice—an instrument that is singular and personal by nature but carries characteristics of generations before us—as a tool for healing. These vocal samples materialize, almost like fragmented memories trying to piece themselves together and make sense of each other. Through her words and this sound world, she traces her way back home, where the answer to the question Ki moun ou ye lies.
Most of these songs were written on Nathalie’s family farm in southern Haiti. This region of Haiti grows most of the country's vegetables and is emblematic of all that is most beautiful about Haiti—the lush green of the trees and the deep blue of the sea. It is also a region that has experienced a heavy load of the tragedy that is part of the Haitian story, falling in the path of severe hurricanes that have, on more than one occasion, wiped away many of the crops the country so heavily relies on. Ki moun ou ye is not simply being asked at the personal level but is also asking what it means to be from such a land of profound beauty and pain.
Ki moun ou ye is a question for both the singer and the listener. Who are we without our grief, our family, and our homeland? How can we harness the knowledge of these things to claim and define who we have become?
—Nathalie “Talie” Cerin
