"Like all the males in the area, Erminus is not too fond of Derisca. Like them, he had understood that Derisca did not need a man for all the normal reasons that other woman do. For him to tell her boring stories, for him to beat her sometimes or for him to lie on her when he feels like it and forcibly give her children."
The short stories collected in Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories, translated from the French by Betty Wilson, are thematically reminiscent of the work of Dalembert and Lyonel Trouillot. Like these two writers, Lahens captures the misery and downright degradation of life in Haiti, most effectively in Port-au-Prince settings. What distinguishes her, in my opinion, is her much stronger female characters, an ability to switch between narrators seamlessly, (one short story features second person narration) although Trouillot's Children of Heroes successfully does the same, and her metaphorical, loosely structured minimalist stories. The author's gift of prose, as translated by Wilson, illustrates this quite well, in addition to capturing the social, economic, political, gendered, and racial conflict of Haiti (the Diaspora, too, in one short story). I also appreciate Lahens comparison of the Jim Crow US South to political terror in Duvalierist Haiti, thereby connecting the struggles of Haitians at home with people of color abroad. Her stories encompasss Haiti and its complex relationship with the US.
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