Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories

by Yanick Lahens, Carrol F. Coates (Series Editor), Edwidge Danticat (Foreword)

The Haiti of Yanick Lahens's path-breaking short fiction is a country demanding our compassion as it reveals to us its horrors. For decades among the forefront of Haitian writers, Lahens has embarked on a renewal of the genre of short stories that she inherited from Caribbean--and especially Haitian--traditions. Through her elliptical and sharp style she succeeds in conveying the authenticity of her people's tragic fight for survival within the scope of our shared human experience. Here is day-to-day life, packed with its myriad emotions, desires, and contradictions, against a backdrop of extraordinary circumstances.



The men and women glimpsed in Lahens's stories are confronted with the overwhelming task of simply staying alive. "The Survivors" unfolds under the Duvalier dictatorship. The story, centered on a group of men who dream of somehow striking out against the regime, shows how fear is passed down from generation to generation. Life is no simpler in the post-Duvalier world of the title story, in which a young man is caught between a mother who lives a devout life filled with self-imposed restrictions and an aunt who religiously serves the spirits of Vodou but makes no apologies for working in the black market. The twelve-year-old girl who narrates "Madness Had Come with the Rain" finds herself swept up in a violent riot following the death of a modern Robin Hood. Lahens's women, although they may act as the poto mitan (or "central pole") in family life and society, experience a particularly grim fate. In the eviction tale "And All This Unease" a beautiful girl reminisces about her happy childhood in the country in order to forget her current life as a prostitute.

Yanick Lahens presents testimonies, opens intimacies, sometimes offers hope, but always returns to the despair afflicting Haiti, because lying within it is the key to her country. The first collection of Lahens's unforgettable short stories available in English, this volume will bring one of the most important voices in contemporary literature to the wider audience it deserves.

Genres: Short Stories, 20th Century

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Yanick Lahens lives in Haiti. She was born in Port au Prince before moving to France where she was educated at the Sorbonne. Her writing is uncompromising in its portrayal of life in the Caribbean. She occupies a very particular position in Haitian literature, because of her independence of spirit as a writer and the authority she has gained from her engagement on the ground. Alongside Dany Laferrière and Lionel Trouillot she is one of Haiti’s most prominent authors. Professor of literature, she dedicates a large part of her time to a foundation set up to train young Haitians in sustainable development.

This novel was first published as La Coleur de l’aube by Sabine Wespieser Editeur, which won the RFO 2009 award, Prix littéraire Richelieu de la Francophonie 2009 
and Prix Millepages 2008. She also won the Leipzig Book Fair 2002 Literaturpreis. She has published another novel, Dans la maison du père (Le Serpent à plumes, 2000), and books of essays on place (particularly Haiti).

(from http://www.serenbooks.com/author/yani...)

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

I was twenty, an age when you brandish words held out like fists in the face of the sun.

Way back when, I thanked a review for mentioning Woolf and/or Modernism, as it made reviewing Women of Sand and Myrrh a hell of a lot easier. Similarly, I called the modernism in this collection long before seeing it conformed in the afterword. On the one hand, I have been well trained, both autodidactically and academically, to delight in such structures, and this, despite the barriers of both translation and short story that usually affect my comprehension, did indeed delight. On the other, I ask myself a question similar to that posed by the writer of the afterword just at the end: who will read Lahens' work? Lahens is no apolitical expatriate, but while similarly committed Arundhati Roy writes for a populace well versed in written English, the same cannot be said of Haiti's 61% literacy rate when it comes to French. Lahens declaims "the use of an infantalized Creole, the worn-out exotic themes, the tropical eroticism that a certain type of western reader may still be obsessed with", but my appreciation is nothing if not "western" in is upbringing, and only my persistent engagement with self-reflexivity prevents me from obtusely congratulating myself on liking something so seemingly confined to the margins of literature. In short, I liked it, but the question not just why, but how the why came to be, is as, if not more, important than the answers one customarily expects from reviews such as this.

I've made a habit of being very tolerant towards picking up underread women in translation when I come across copies of their work: bonus points if the author is a woman of color. Lahens got more of a boost than most by being recommended by a professor during a class on the postcolonial short story, but the fact that this work only took three years to show up at a sale still flabbergasts (I've waited eight years for ultimately far more disappointing books). As I mentioned previously, I greatly liked this collection, and while I won't do the individual ratings, 'Moon Bathing', 'The Blue Room', and (biased, I know) 'An American Story' especially stand out as exemplary demonstrations of self-contained narrative, 'Moon Bathing' being a mere four pages in length. One could go into raptures delineating how the scattered yet holistic treatment of each characters' waves of expansion and contraction of thoughts and feelings around a single core identity impacted by a multiplicity of external sociopolitical realities reflects the concerns of age old modernism, but my realm of study has lately shifted from literature to library science, and only the latter's grades merit more effort than this review's comparatively casual dabbling. All I can say is that this work goes above and beyond justifying my eccentric book buying habits, and while I do wonder about Lahens' motivations and future projects, I can't say that I don't enjoy reading the results of her effort, both in the political ring and outside of it.

The end of both the semester and 2018 approaches, and the only justification for my exhaustion is the awareness of how much I've accomplished, reading wise as well as adult wise. It could have been a fuckton better, to be sure, and I'll never forgive the general populace for (among other things) putting Trump into place and then believing that the first ever impeachment would ever occur in a government that is demographically 'balanced' the way it is. Despite that, I'll end the year more fully enfranchised than I was during any point of 2017, and to have accomplished that in the midst of a voluntarily taken on school load and more involuntarily taken on loads of work and politics goes some way in impressing even myself. As said, Lahens has rewarded my commitment to engaging with marginalized writing (actually marginalized, mind you, not some poor widdle white boy who isn't taking advantage of his artificially magnified status well enough), and I am even less deterred now by works with few ratings than I had tried to be previously. To be left with such motivation is all I can ask of the books I choose to read, and it will likely not be often left by those of the mainstream.

"Other people's childhood is a foreign country."
"You mean that no one can ever enter it?"
He did not answer.