Today’s Haitian Book Club selection is Tante Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories by Yanick Lahens (University of Virginia Press, $19.95).
Ms. Lahens is considered to be one of Haiti’s finest novelists. This book is just the tip of the mountain range, in terms of representing her talents as a storyteller. Translated from the French by Betty Wilson, with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat (and afterword by Caribbean lit pundit Marie-Agnès Sourieau), the 17-short story collection can be likened to a reader walking up a 17-story building in Haiti, and eavesdropping on conversations of different society levels in Haiti. Of course, such a building—that would conveniently house all these different sectors of Haitian society, and keep them co-existing as neighbors doesn’t really exist, but Lahens makes you feel like it does, with her work. There is the story of Brice, a young man who ventures out to Port-au-Prince in “The City” during a hallucination-filled daze. “Port-au-Prince,” Lahens writes, “was a mirage at the crossroads of a thousand streets…There were men who were walking as if they knew where they were going, but their look was like that of animals lost in the city.”
The story collection would lack some punch if some of the stories were not devoted to women-oriented stories. Martine Durand, the protagonist of “A Shattered Day”, is a neurotic mother of two, who longs for far-gone days when her town wasn’t congested with urban dwellers and when suburbs were still hamlets. The overcrowding of her city not only has her occupied but leads to tragic results. “Madness Had Come with the Rain” is more or less about unexpected loss, truncated childhoods, but more than anything about a violent community’s revenge.
Tante Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories is but an introduction to Lahens’ work as a storyteller, a sort of finger food sampler. But it fulfills its purpose and leaves you wanting, hoping that the full-service meal will be delivered next time.
