On September 17, 2019, protests flared in the streets of Port-Au-Prince as Haiti’s fuel crisis entered a third week. There was no public transportation, schools were closed. Petroleum suppliers, owed $100 million by the Haitian government (the offices of which were shut), had cut off deliveries. I found no mention of this dire situation in U.S. newspapers.
According to the World Bank, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. More than half of its population of 11 million live below the poverty line. Haiti’s gross domestic product per capita is $870. It was recently reported that 2,000 undocumented Haitians in the Bahamas are receiving shelter after Hurricane Dorian – but one needn’t look further than Haiti’s border with the Dominican Republic, a country rife with racially stained anti-Haitianismo, to sense the Haitians’ emigration nightmare. Between August, 2015 and May, 2016, the DR deported 40,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent; another 71,300 people “returned spontaneously.” Border camps on the Haitian side are threatened by malaria and the Zika virus. There are still lingering effects from the devastating 2010 earthquake and 2016’s Hurricane Matthew.
In 2017, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that there are 678,000 Haitian immigrants in the United States; about two-thirds of them live in Florida, including Edwidge Danticat, who emigrated with her brother to Brooklyn in 1981, some eight years after their parents arrived and ultimately received their citizenship papers. Haiti and its adversities simmer in the background of the eight stories collected in Everything Inside; the texture of Haitian-American life and the Haitian diaspora are prominent in the foreground, beginning with the first sentence in the first story, “Dosas”: “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.”
To frame and manage the turmoil in her materials, Danticat employs a harnessed pace, unfussy syntax, and a temperate tone. One feels calmed and embraced by her consideration, even as her characters cope with precarity. Her empathic sensitivity is there from the outset, yet she evades sentimentality — because she proceeds with an instinctive understanding that the ones feeling empathy, the narrators of her stories, are never flattered by their own depth of feeling. Danticat’s empathies are founded on an incisive outlook toward loss. With Everything Inside, which collects work published in journals since 2006, Danticat returns to the short story genre with a ripened patience, as if the long-haul caretaking of her energies for her award-winning nonfiction work – Brother, I’m Dying (2007) – and her second novel – The Farming of Bones (2013) – seasoned her story writing.
Nevertheless, she doesn’t dawdle. “In The Old Days,” published in Callaloo in 2012, quickly specifies its situation. A young woman named Nadia speaks:
“My father left Brooklyn to return to Haiti during what he’d considered a promising time for the country. A thirty-year father-son dictatorship had ended, and he wanted to use his American education degree to open a school for poor kids in Port-au-Prince. My mother had no desire to return to Haiti after coming to the United States alone when she was twenty-two. My father left, and my mother stayed behind in Brooklyn. When she discovered she was pregnant with me, my mother shipped my father divorce papers. They never saw each other again.”
The father, now in a coma, had recently returned with his wife to Brooklyn. As my own family’s experiences have shown, tales of “the old days” are essential to a dispersed clan’s mythology. In Danticat’s story, such ruptures yield multiple narratives. Nadia’s mother’s version – of her father, but also of past times — doesn’t coincide with that of her father’s wife’s, but the latter offers meaningful imagery and lore of her own:
“In the old days, she was telling me, conch shells blared for each person who died. In the old days, when a baby was born, the midwife would put the baby on the ground, and it was up to the father to pick up the child and claim it as his own. In the old days, the dead were initially kept at home. Farewell prayers were chanted and mourning dances were performed at their joy-filled wakes. When it was time to take the dead out of the house, they would be carried out, feet first, through the back door, and not the front, so they would know not to return. Their babies and young children would be passed over their coffins so they could shake off their spirits and wouldn’t be haunted for the rest of their lives. Then a village elder would pour rum on the grave as a final farewell. In the old days, she said, I would have pronounced my father dead with my bereavement wails to our fellow villagers, both the ones crowding the house and others far beyond.”
In the end, the minds of both Nadia and the reader, now supplied with impressions, will inhabit the present moment in a sort of suspension between grief and emerging significance. It is an unsettling sensation – and common to every one of us. Danticat is a custodian of the actual.
A repeating motif: how the past bears on the new generation of Haitian-Americans. The setting is often Little Haiti in Miami. In “Hot Air Balloons,” the narrator is Lucy, recalling her freshman year, rooming with Neah who decides to leave school and work for Leve, a Miami-based “women’s organization that runs a rape recovery center in a poor neighborhood of Port-au-Prince.” Lucy’s parents had met as migrant workers in Florida and states just to the north; Neah’s mother is an economist and her father is Chair of their school’s Caribbean Studies Department. Danticat likes to place her characters in the middle of indecisiveness – though in this case, while Neah confronts the misgivings of her father who wants her to stay in school, and also the trauma she witnesses on a trip to Haiti, Lucy speaks as if still peering at her friend’s situation. Little occurs in the story – because Danticat’s intention is to let us hear the sound of youthful witnessing. This is the true subject.
This past February, it was reported that a boat transporting Haitian migrants had sunk off the Bahamas, leaving at least 28 dead and 17 others in police custody. But Haitian tragedies at sea have been occurring with horrific regularity since the early 1970s. After Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an elected president, was overthrown in 1991 in a military coup that also persecuted his followers, the Bush administration incarcerated Haitian boat people at Guantanamo, regarding them not as political asylum seekers but “economic refugees.” Danticat takes up the boat people’s quandary here as well, creating a disquieting resonance with her stories of Haitian immigrants striving with difficulty to thrive in the U.S. But perhaps my favorite story is “Seven Stories,” a tour de force narrated by Kimberly who travels to an unnamed island nation where a girlhood friend from Brooklyn is now married to the country’s president. They had each come to the U.S. as immigrants; Kimberly is Haitian but the friend, Callie Morrissete, arrived after her father, also president of the island nation, had been assassinated. In this story, it is not insecurity but the nature of success that Danticat queries. As a guest of Callie and her husband Greg, Kimberly attends presidential events and meets the island’s dignitaries. With exquisite restraint, Danticat moves her observer from scene to scene as both stability and unease accumulate – and again, the reader and the teller reach uncertainly toward assessment.
Danticat was 11 years old when she arrived in Brooklyn – and child-like perception often seems to determine the vision in these stories. You can hear it in the simplicity of diction and form, the continuing sense of wonder, the acceptance of change and relearned balance, the worry over safety and the groping for individuation – and also, the tremor vibrating out of memory. Under Danticat’s placid surfaces, humans are holding on tight — and there, too, Danticat is both embracing and grasping us. In “Seven Stories,” First Lady Callie is, for Kimberly, still the traumatized father-less girl. Callie had saved some ribbons that Kimberly had given her when they were playmates. Kimberly says at the end of her story:
“On Three Kings’ Eve, my parents used to make me leave my shoes by my bedroom door for an angel to fill with rolls of hair ribbons while I slept … After we met, I wanted to be her angel and give Callie all my ribbons. Somehow I sensed that something about her needed to be bundled and held tight. Maybe she still needed to be bundled and held tight. Maybe that’s why she’d held on to those ribbons for so long.”
[Published by Alfred A. Knopf on August 27, 2019, 240 pages, $25.95 hardcover]