I’ve waited too late to review this book. I don’t remember much at all about it. Was it not memorable? Or was it that the short stories, being short stories, didn’t take as much time to read so more quickly left my memory banks? I better remember books I read before this one so I’m perplexed. Well, I do recall liking the book, it was compelling, but mostly sad. It felt like no spark of joy exists in Haiti or amongst Haitians. Perhaps that’s the truth from what I read in the news about this very poor country embroiled in turmoil. I do remember the last story, and I loved the premise and writing style. The author’s talented. I probably should try one of her novels next that will more likely stick with me. ( )

https://shawjonathan.com/2021/04/27/edwidge-danticats-everything-inside/ ( )

A fascinating and dense collection of short stories, mostly about the lives of people who emigrated from Haiti to the US. I don't know much about Haiti but enjoyed learning more about the country and its people through these stories and trying to decode the Haitian creole phrases with my Canadian school French. ( )

an excellent collection of stories, all unique and powerful in their own way ( )

I've read Ms Danticat's work before, Eyes, Breath, and Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Claire of the Sea Light, and have always been intrigued by the stories surrounding the lives of Haitians, their struggles living with brutal leaders, harsh economics, the plight of escaping paired with the yearning to return. In many of the stories presented here, Haiti is not so much the setting as it is the place returned to, or escaped from. In fact Miami's Little Haiti is depicted in several pieces. I think my favorite story was the first, Dosas. The first line: "Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince." Danticat manages to set up a complicated relationship history in one sentence. A Dosas is the extra person, the third wheel, which is the way she thought of herself when her husband and best friend became involved, the narrator eventually exiting out of the ménage a trois. "They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus child." Often her first lines got as much information into it as possible so that the reader could jump right in to the meat of the story.
In the second story, a daughter returns to Haiti to a dying father she never knew.
This is followed by one about a girl who gets aids from a man who promised a life by buying her a cheap ring. Dying is certainly a theme in most of the stories. As the LA Times wrote, "As in Danticat’s oeuvre overall, death as a theme is never far from the center in Everything Inside. 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." Though this may seem like a topic one is not anxious to read about, the language and the style of the stories will make you glad you explored the collection.

Some lines:
And some marriages, in hindsight, just seem like detours, sometimes wonderful detours, you take to get where you need to go.

But I had never heard anyone announce to their twenty-five-year-old daughter, as my mother had the week before, that the father they’d never met, a certain Monsieur Maurice Dejean, was gravely ill and dying.

I am the girl—the woman—who is always going to be looking for stability, a safe harbor. I am never going to forget that I can easily lose everything I have, including my life, in one instant.

You are always saying hello to them while preparing them to say goodbye to you. You are always dreading the separations, while cheering them on, to get bigger, smarter, to crawl, babble, walk, speak, to have birthdays that you hope you’ll live to see, that you pray they’ll live to see. Jeanne will now know what it’s like to live that way, to have a part of yourself walking around unattached to you, and to love that part so much that you sometimes feel as though you were losing your mind.

She pointed to some coils of light winding their way throughout the city. They were people, hundreds of them, dressed in white and carrying candles as they walked toward the port and the sea. “It’s called a shedding,” she said. “As you walk to the sea, you shed from both your body and spirit all the awful things that have happened to you in the previous year.” ( )