BookLife Dual Review by Carol O'Day: Everything Inside and Breath, Eyes, Memory (Edwidge Danticat, author)
Historical fiction novel, short story collection, Haiti, immigrant experiences, diaspora, poverty, sexual assault, mother-daughter, dementia, death, infidelity, earthquake award-winning author
Fresh, startling, stunning, and gripping are the adjectives that best describe the multi-award-winning writing of Edwidge Danticat*. Everything Inside is Danticat’s 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection of impeccable and riveting short stories. This book opened my eyes to the short-story collection as a genre that warrants deeper attention as literary fiction, particularly when rendered by a master like Danticat. Breath, Eyes, Memory, an earlier 1994 novel by Danticat, is a chilling story about the Haitian diaspora, specifically strong women of Haiti who had survived unspeakably traumastic horrors.
The title of Breath, Eyes, Memory hails from a passage near the end of the novel where the author writes, “I come from a place where breath, eyes and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head.” The novel is one of the many stories of the people of Haiti, the survivors of Haiti in the aftermaths of the 1991 and 2004 coups, and the complicated relationship between Haiti and the United States. Everything Inside references both poverty and unrest in Haiti, including the devastating 2010 earthquake. Arguably the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, the stories of Haiti are replete with poverty and despair, but also of stories of hope and resilience. Danticat dances on this line of contrasts and delivers portraits and stories that render a remarkable rich quilt of her native country.
Breath, Eyes, Memory is the story of Sophie Caco, a twelve-year old girl raised by her aunt in a village in Haiti and abruptly sent to live with her mother in Brooklyn, NY. The relationship between mother and daughter is fraught. Sophie is the child of her mother’s sexual assault, a trauma from which her mother, Martine, has never recovered. Martine’s vigilance is abusive, and includes regular invasive “exams” to ascertain Sophie’s chastity. When Sophie elopes to marry a neighbor, she and her mother become estranged for many years. It is only on Sophie’s return to Haiti with her own daughter, to visit her aunt and grandmother, that Sophie and Martine enter a guarded reconciliation.
Everything Inside garners its title from the first short story in the collection. The protagonist, Else, lives in a home with dueling warning stickers on the door, one saying “Nothing Inside is Worth Dying For” and the other scratched out and revised to read “Everything Inside Is Worth Dying For” and another reading “You Loot, We Shoot.” The novelty of the stories in this collection is breathtaking. A home health nurse is scammed out of her savings by her ex-husband and former best friend in a faux kidnapping. A young teacher is summoned to the deathbed of a father she never met. A young Haitian woman struggles to accept an HIV AIDS diagnosis, holding on to a false promise of marriage given to her by a long-gone tourist. Former lovers reunite after the married man’s wife and baby are killed in the earthquake in Haiti. College roommates confront the atrocities in Haiti after one makes a trip there with a rape victims’ advocacy group. A new mother mourns her mother’s advancing dementia on the heels of the birth of her own son. The daughter of a Haitian immigrant travels back to Haiti to visit her childhood friend who has married the country’s new prime minister and escapes the palace to see the poverty outside its walls. An illegal immigrant who arrived by boat reviews his life as he falls from a construction scaffolding to his death. The stories each are weighty but collectively they sing a song of resilience, the deep bonds and wounds of of family and heritage and the power of intimacy.
Edwidge Danticat’s stories are as unusual as her name. They open the world and explore the very real, very human and very challenging environment of the Haitian immigrant and Haiti’s diaspora. Much more enriching than arm-chair travel, the books are cultural gems that allow the reader to enter histories, stories and worlds they may not otherwise encounter.
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*Edwidge Danticat is the recipient of multiple writing awards, including:
1999, American Book Award, The Farming of Bones
2004, National Book Award Nomination, Krik? Krak!
2005, The Story Prize, The Dew Breaker
2007, National Book Critics Circle Award, Brother, I’m Dying
2009, Genius Grant, MacArthur Fellows Program
2014, PEN-Oakland, Josephine Miles Literary Award
2019, National Book Critics Circle Award, Everything Inside
2019, Neustadt International Prize For Literature
2020, The Story Prize, Everything Inside