Crises, Cultural Clashes Drive Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside: Stories. In her second short story collection, Everything Inside: Stories, Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat explores themes of betrayal, loss, and memory. Her island nation figures as a dynamic force, shaping the lives of women by degrees of cultural proximity and diasporic distance.
Vivid prose and dramatic pacing introduce Danticat’s characters at peak moments of crisis and confrontation. Within the first sentence of the opening story, “Dosas,” a live-in nurse receives a phone call from her ex-husband, seeking money to ransom his kidnapped second wife in Port-au-Prince. In “The Gift,” a tragic pair of former lovers meet, following a fizzled affair. A woman’s failing memory provokes rising family tensions while her daughter suffers from post-partum depression in “Sunrise, Sunset.”
Sympathetic or repellent, Danticat’s characters are united by a single heritage and divided by the infinite experiences of being Haitian. The most extreme depictions of this are seen in the lives of those driven away by diasporas of natural disaster, war, or political instability. In “Hot-Air Balloons,” a student named Lucy chooses Haiti as the foundation of her identity, describing herself as “someone who, though I was not born there, considered myself ‘left side of the hyphen’ Haitian” (Danticat 114).
Everything Inside: Stories is appealing for its variety of realistically detailed stories, fueled by drama and told at the speed of life. Danticat’s expertly crafted works also serve to showcase a rich collection of contemporary female voices. Lifelong friendships, broken trust, and reconciliation are seen through lenses of memory. Generational comparisons are complicated by stark cultural judgments between Haitians – those with, and without, a hyphenated identity.
The eight stories comprising Everything Inside: Stories exist as separate worlds, each poised at the brink of a tipping point, and pulled into orbit around the powerful notion that Haiti – no matter how far away – is something greater than home.
