To listen to Lalin St Juste’s “Vertulie” is to be plunged into the other side. The five-track EP is a journey to the realm where time stretches backward and forward and the ancestors are as present as the living via Haitian drums and Vodou traditions and a Christian psalm. For St Juste, it’s a journey that began as a seed in Ghana, which she visited in search of her roots and ended up meeting her now ex-husband and collaborator in the genre-bending band The Seshen, and currently, it’s an exploration of her ancestral lineage and identity as a member of the Caribbean diaspora.
“Vertulie” is named after St Juste’s maternal grandmother, with whom she remembers going to Kingdom’s Hall, a place of worship for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Growing up her family converted to various forms of Christianity, including Catholicism, while the Haitian tradition of Vodou was mostly looked down upon and its practice forbidden. She went through the motions, with nothing in those western religions resonating within her, and had lost all religious belief when she was introduced to Vodou music.
“I’d always had this inclination in me to understand my roots, but that’s where it really started firm. Learning about spirits and history through the music made me realize that so much has been kept from me in terms of how colonialism and internalized oppression made Vodou bad growing up, not something that you should be learning about or focusing on.” Through the deepening of her relationship with her ancestors and doing the work of understanding the importance of those traditions for liberation and a sense of self, St Juste created the sonic world that is “Vertulie.”
You can feel the ancestral presence in the EP. It opens with her primary connection to the line, her mother Louise St Juste, reading her favorite Psalm from memory in French, which weaves into an incantation to the Haitian spirit, or Iwa, of initiation. With voice and traditional drumming, the music is calling us to enter the meditative trance-like state that will allow entrance to the other side.
“I felt like it was healing to put those things together as I initiate myself into this path and try to heal my bloodline,” she says of combining the Catholic Psalm and the Vodou meditation in one track. After a roll call, where she breathes the names of her ancestors to life over low-end frequencies and wavering synths, we’re plunged into an expansive acoustic universe, where there is air and a sense of connection with the elements of which the ancestors are now a part. In the lead single, “I Believe in Things,” she sings, “I believe I’m held/I believe they’re here/guiding me.”
“I started singing and accompanying myself and I knew that was part of the sonic experience because that is very much of me and my history as a singer-songwriter, but then I wanted to incorporate other frequencies and etherealness to evoke a sense of multiple dimensions because part of Haitian culture is the magical realism.”
The EP was released under indie label and art collective 7000COILS, which St Juste co-founded with KKINGBOO in order to elevate the queer voices within the African and Caribbean diaspora. “Black liberation and queer liberation can be tied to our relationships with our ancestors,” says St Juste. “There’s a sense of personal spirit and healing, so I’m inviting others to release their music and other work related to this ethos.”
“Vertulie” is the first in a two-part series that continues her own exploration of ancestral traditions. The yet-to-be-released second EP is named after her other grandmother Dame Lalin. In the meantime, St Juste is enjoying sharing the music of “Vertulie” through live performance, deepening those connections to spirit, and embracing this leg of the journey.