Erol Josué interview: “I wanted to participate in the reconstruction of Haiti’s national heritage. I needed to be there”

Erol Josué knows how to call down and speak to the lwa (spirits) that visit the ceremonies he conducts in Haiti and with Haitians around the world. A houngan (vodou priest) since his teens, he speaks langaj, a liturgical vocabulary of words once spoken in Benin and Congo and by Haiti’s Indigenous Taíno. The lwa, flattered by langaj, are channelled through trance: Erzulie, the goddess of love and beauty; Chango, the blacksmith with the purifying fire; and the psychopomp Papa Gede, the dancing spirit of life and death, the lwa with the galaxy in his hips. “Langaj is the secret language of vodou,” says Josué, a 21st-century renaissance man who is a singer, songwriter, dancer, actor, lecturer and director general of the National Bureau of Ethnology in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. “It cannot be translated except through rituals and dreams. But as practitioners, we feel it. We use langaj in songs, dances [and] incantations to calm or to change a mood.”

An African diasporic religion with roots in Benin (formerly Dahomey), vodou (also spelled voodoo) is part of the fabric of Haiti, that spectacular, beleaguered nation sharing the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Langaj was formerly spoken by maroons, the escaped slaves who fled into remote mountains and formed communities that – during and after the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 – were crucial in the fight to abolish slavery, overturn colonialism and establish the world’s first Black republic.

Erol Josué (photo: Verdy Verna)

“I learned langaj as a child from my parents and grandparents, all of them houngans and manbos [vodou priestesses],” continues Josué, Zooming from a hotel room in Port-au-Prince. He’s had to temporarily leave his home due to the recent violent anti-government protests in September, which spilled over into attacks on property and citizens including, notably, vodou practitioners – who are frequently blamed for the crises that beset Haiti. Josué sprinkles langaj across the 18 tracks that make up his second album, Pelerinaj: “I’m presenting a way of life using sacred and secular language,” he says. “Even though these songs were composed for musicians to play, not for use in rituals, they present spiritual knowledge.” A homage to vodou’s abiding principles of community, tolerance and sharing, to its affinity with ecology, life cycles and ancestral wisdom, Pelerinaj (‘Pilgrimage’ in Haitian Creole) comes some 15 years after its predecessor, Regleman (Mi5 Recordings), a debut album that mirrored the vodou ceremonies that Josué was then conducting inside New York’s Haitian community.

Pelerinaj blends sacred chants and traditional rhythms (dogo, noki, fla voudon) with elements of funk, jazz, rock and electronic music. He sings mostly in Haitian Creole as well as French. The album is an ambitious, even epic, work with a reach that spans a lifetime, from Josué’s childhood home in Kafou, a sprawling outer suburb of Port-au-Prince, through his journey out of Haiti and two decades spent living between Paris, New York and Miami to his eventual return, to his Caribbean birthplace, first as a traveller undertaking a series of timeworn vodou pilgrimages, then as a proud repatriate.

“The songs on this album were recorded over several years with a range of musicians and producers. But the tracks build on each other so that it feels like one large work,” says Josué, whose dramatic golden tenor conjures centuries of history on album opener, ‘Badji’, a song featuring the vast choir of the National Theatre of Haiti alongside archive samples from the court of the king of Ouidah in Benin (where vodoun is an official state religion). The lyrics tell of the secret transmission of knowledge from the Indigenous Taíno to Africans transported to Haiti. “The Taíno used the word badji to mean ‘high mountains.’ I use it to refer to the high spirituality of this country. It is our duty to protect the transmission of the legacy, the badji of Haiti.”

Erol Josué (photo: Verdy Verna)

The Bureau National d’Ethnologie, which Josué has helmed since 2012, strives to do just that. Founded in 1941 by Haitian writer Jacques Roumain and located on Champ de Mars, a noisy crossroads in Port-au-Prince, its remit is to preserve and champion Haitian culture (housing, for example, a huge cache of stolen Taíno artefacts recently returned from the US by the FBI). The culture of vodou is a priority. For despite a peaceable aesthetic that include the notion of lakou – broadly, a family-oriented compound with a communal worship area and a peristil (shrine) around a sacred mapou tree – the religion is couched in negative misconceptions.

Superstition and Hollywood sensationalism carry much of the blame. As does the dictatorial Duvalier dynasty, which exploited vodou practitioners to bolster their rule (1957-1986). As does evangelical Christianity. “Most people who practice vodou in Haiti live in the countryside,” explains Josué. “The Catholic church is always trying to convert them. Children are beaten at school if they do not speak French well. I was able to maintain my vodou spiritual life at home while attending Catholic school during the day. I never converted. Now I help to dispel the myths.”

He also reminds Haitians – and listeners – of the nation’s heritage. ‘Je Suis Grand Nèg’ (I Am a Great Man/Negro) is re-modelled from a traditional paean to the resilience of Haiti. ‘Kwi a’, with its rousing percussion and chorus by the all-female Nègès Fla Vodoun choir (“my bodyguards in Port-au-Prince”), says that as descendants of freedom fighters, as sons and daughters of Africa, Haitians should not use the kwi, a hollowed calabash, to beg. On ‘Sigbo Lisa’, a Creole-sung, langaj-dotted song acknowledging the power of West Africa’s griot oral tradition, Josué vows never to betray his lwa, his ancestors, or his Haitian culture.

Erol Josué (photo: Verdy Verna)

Still, in the early 2000s, returning to Haiti wasn’t on Josué’s mind. He had a new passport and a new family of friends. A graduate of Haiti’s National School of Arts, he’d become a key cultural figure in Europe and New York after variously establishing his own dance troupe in Paris, performing alongside Afro-Brazilian artists on the 2004 album Orixás by Jorge Amorim & Hank – a work celebrating Candomblé, a syncretic religion that, like Cuban Santería, shares similarities with vodou – and creating the ‘electro-vodou’ genre with Haitian-born club DJ and academic, Val Jeanty.

The 2007 album Regleman (a term for the set of rules for conducting a vodou ceremony) had proved him an artist to be reckoned with. His reputation as a sort of spiritual sage, an expert on Haitian history and culture, spread. In 2009 Josué was criss-crossing the US, introducing Haitian culture to schools and universities (he remains a go-to for academics and researchers), when a documentary-maker asked him to take part in some of the time-worn vodou pilgrimages in Haiti. “I knew it would be traumatising. I’d left for Paris [where he lived for 13 years] to find my own identity. But I wanted to see my family and my neighbourhood. I wanted to thank my lwa.”

Josué joined thousands of his fellow Haitians on their sojourns to sites including the Saut-d’Eau waterfall in the mountains of central Haiti; the mud pools of Plaine-du-Nord, the site of a bloody slave insurrection; and to the cleansing waters of the sea surrounding Cap-Haïtien. Wherever he went, people knelt and prayed to leave Haiti, their desperation palpable. “It was emotional,” he says. “It helped me understand.” (The film ran out of budget and was never completed.)

Then came January 2010. Josué was back home in New York when the catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 160,000 people – many of who he’d trekked alongside – and leaving more than one million homeless. “I turned on CNN, waiting for my time to go and help. There were Protestants handing out rice and Bibles and telling people to renounce vodou, saying that the earthquake was a punishment from God. It was neo-colonialism. I was upset and angry, and went on several radio shows to try and educate and explain.”

He also called his friend, NYC-based producer Charles Czarnecki, and told him that he needed to sing. “Charles invited me to his apartment and put a microphone in front of me. The album began from there.” He birthed the aforementioned ‘Sigbo Lisa’ and ‘Avelekete’, calling on Ayizan, the first manbo priestess, the lwa of the marketplace, to ease the suffering of male victims who were yet to allow themselves to grieve.

Two years later, officially invited by the office of Haitian president (and musician) Michel Martelly to head up the Bureau of Ethnology, he relocated permanently. “I wanted to participate in the reconstruction of Haiti’s national heritage,” says Josué. “I needed to be there.”

He to-and-froed from his base in Haiti, continuing to record, compose, collaborate. He sang lead vocals for Jazz Racine Haiti, the project founded by US-based French/Guadeloupean saxophonist Jacques Schwarz-Bart (who co-arranges three of Pelerinaj’s tracks, including ‘Gede Nibo’, a song for the lwa Papa Gede). Jazz Racine Haiti won acclaim for its lightness of touch and spiritual heft, much of which came from its singer. At the 2014 Gnawa Festival in Essaouira, Morocco, before a 100,000 strong crowd that included this writer, Josué was a mesmeric frontman, a sinuous figure cloaked in white, his voice passionate, dignified, otherworldly.

In Port-au-Prince he met Glasgow-born singer/songwriter Mark Mulholland, and they performed together live; their collaborative album, Afro-Haitian Experimental Orchestra, also featuring late Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, was released on Glitterbeat Records in 2016. Now in situ in Paris, Mulholland recalls recording ‘Badji’ (also the term for the altar within the vodou temple) at the Bureau National d’Ethnologie: “Erol said to just bring a few microphones, and I turned up to find a 60-piece choir (of the National Theatre of Haiti). The traffic noise was so loud I had to put Érol in a cupboard to record his lead vocals! He’s an inspired and inspiring musician.”

It is little wonder, perhaps, that Josué’s many talents and authenticity, his preternatural ability to move between worlds, has seen him embraced by the global music community. The Gotan Project’s Philippe Cohen Solal arranges ‘Erzulie’, Pelerinaj’s glorious lead single; in Paris Josué is regularly invited to perform at the distinguished likes of the Musée du Quai Branly; and he attended the 2022 Førde Festival in Norway as a delegate, with a view to creating a Haitian/Norwegian crossover. “Erol is such a powerful and political artist,” says Førde’s Torill Faleide. “I met him at a restaurant in Paris and felt he should meet some of the Sámi artists at our festival. We’re hoping that a Norwegian-Haitian collaboration will happen.”

But for now – or at least, at the time of writing – Josué is tucked away in Port-au-Prince, waiting for this most recent catastrophe to subside. Pelerinaj, then, is his calling card, a testament to the richness and beauty of Haiti, a land of craggy mountains and wild rivers, sacred sites and seismic faultlines. And to vodou, that magical, oh-so-musical religion, with its cast of colourful lwas and spellbinding words of langaj – a hotline to the spirit world, and to togetherness and healing.

Read the review: Pelerinaj

This interview originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today