Edwidge Danticat Everything Inside (2019)

Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, the short story collection Everything Inside, explores how people come to terms with death, both their loved ones’ and their own. We agreed with the publisher’s comment that the collection offers “vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love” 

Danticat is a two-time National Book Award finalist, MacArthur Genius fellow, Neustadt laureate, and winner of scores of other prestigious literary honors. NPR describes the book as “ a stunning collection that features some of the best writing of Danticat’s brilliant career.”

We had decided that each of our group members would choose one story on which to comment. When we met, we discovered that our choices were split mostly between two stories: “ Sunrise, Sunet” and “Seven Stories.” All of us commented that the story we chose was so heartbreaking that we almost did not return to read more, but, we all would return, compelled by Danticat’s beautiful prose, her precise descriptions, her memorable characters. 

We talked about our observations of how she created male characters striking for their gentleness. For example, in “Sunrise,Sunset” the elderly grandfather lovingly tried to protect his wife and hide her dementia from others and the young husband tried to understand his wife’s disinterest in their baby, though he had no understanding of what we recognized as post partum depression. We shared our experiences with the ravages of dementia on families, and we recalled a similar kindness in our own lives or in other literature; for example, in the Madonnas of Leningrad which some of us read in the group some years ago. 

Each character, no matter how flawed, was legible in some way that did not exclude them from care. We considered how Danticat’s portrayals are kind, even loving, and noted that, like Tillie Olsen’s portrayals of suffering characters, Danticat cares about her characters; none are villains or beyond compassion.I have often encountered the notion that reading fiction helps to create empathy. Whether or not that is true, we discussed how we felt that Danticat’s stories insist on our empathy not only for her specific characters but for our communities.

We were delighted to have a visitor join our discussion: Oakland librarian Nabilla Mohamed, who helps our members locate books, sometimes even having them delivered to the member’s local branch. Nabilia read Danticat’s stories and shared her insights about the experience of homelessness that haunts every person who has moved from a homeland to a new country, whether by choice or necessity. She shared about attempts to maintain the best of one’s homeland culture, the values, the foods and spoke of the experience of always feeling to some extent as an outsider in both places even when one has the means to return for visits. We all wanted her to join our group despite her young age, and assured her she would always be a welcome guest.

The LARB review comments of the collection that “This is existentialist fiction: everyone is exiled in their own suffering, we can’t fully know another’s pain although we can touch it briefly, and our full essence — everything inside — is not manifest until the moment of death.” While this failure of total knowledge is of course true, that “brief touching” is meaningful, and we were grateful for the ways Danticat’s collection both exemplified that meaning in prose and in our own personal experiences that her prose invited us to share.