Vèvè Clark proposed reading African diasporic literature through marasa consciousness, a theory of textual relationships modeled on the Haitian divine twins. Pressley-Sanon extends the idea in two directions: back toward the concept's African sources, themselves already doubled, and forward into contemporary Haitian fiction.

Her material is three stories from Haiti Noir, the anthology Edwidge Danticat edited in 2011, by Évelyne Trouillot, Katia D. Ulysse and Gary Victor, grouped as a marasa twa of her own devising. Though the narratives sit squarely in the New World, she argues that their African inheritance shapes them, and surfaces plainly in at least one.

What the marasa offers, on her reading, is not a stalled opposition but a third term. The dosu or dosa, the child born after twins, supplies the resolving element that pairings of here and there, us and them, home and abroad otherwise lack, and that diaspora and foreign intervention make pressing.