{"id":8297,"date":"2020-03-13T12:37:32","date_gmt":"2020-03-13T16:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8297"},"modified":"2020-07-15T15:32:39","modified_gmt":"2020-07-15T19:32:39","slug":"everything-inside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/13\/everything-inside\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything Inside."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside<\/a><\/em> just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying <\/em>won the NBCC’s Memoir\/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume revolves around Haitian immigrants to the United States, the cultural shifts they experienced, and the challenges of settling in a country that still has racism and xenophobia in its DNA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Haiti, Danticat emigrated to the U.S. at 12 years\nold, and every story in this book revolves around that immigrant experience,\nespecially those of Haitians who emigrated to Florida and move back and forth\nbetween the two countries, either physically traveling between them or feeling\nthe pull of one from the other. (Danticat’s Wikipedia\nentry<\/a> says that “Although Danticat resides in the United States, she\nstill considers Haiti home. To date, she still visits Haiti from time to time\nand has always felt as if she never left it.”) Every one of these stories\nin Everything Inside<\/em> feels drawn from something very personal to\nDanticat, as if they’re not just conceived and written but lived-in, so while\nthere will always be a comprehension gap for readers like me (white, Anglophone,\nU.S.-born to U.S.-born parents) who don’t share her experiences as an immigrant\nor person of color, several of these stories still pack enough of an emotional\npunch to connect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

“Dosas” revolves around a home-health nurse whose ex-husband\ncalls in a panic because his new wife \u2013 and former affair partner \u2013 has been\nkidnapped in Haiti and he can’t raise the ransom. (In Haiti, a ‘dosa’ is a girl\nborn after twins.) This complex web of relationships, between the protagonist\nand her ex and between the Haitian diaspora and those who stayed behind (or\nmove back and forth between the countries), colors her decisions and threatens\nher job as a live-in nurse to an elderly patient with kidney disease.  “Sunrise, Sunset,” originally\npublished in\nthe New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, contrasts two women, a mother and her daughter who\nhas just become a mother herself, as the former faces creeping dementia while\nthe latter grapples with a stark postpartum depression, which culminates in a\nterrifying moment that confronts the erasure of memory, individual and across\ngenerations. “Without Inspection,” the closing story, follows the\nthoughts of a man who has fallen on a construction site and is heading to his\ndeath, during which he thinks about the family he leaves behind and the improbable\nway in which he arrived in the United States, saved on a beach by a Haitian\nwoman who goes there each day to try to help migrants who barely make it to the\nshore when their transporters dump them to swim the last mile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Seven Stories” is the standout in the collection,\nperhaps in part because it’s so different from the other stories here. The\nHaitian-American protagonist, Kimberly, visits an old friend who is now the\nwife of the Prime Minister of an independent island in the Caribbean, where the\nelite live in luxury, abetted by corruption, amidst shantytowns and abject\npoverty. The story of how her friend survived the assassination of her father,\nhimself once Prime Minister, and returned to the island unfolds over the course\nof the story and diminishes the dichotomy that first appeared to Kimberly when she\narrived on the island. The story ends with a wedding and celebration in a village\ncalled Maafa \u2013 which I assume is an allusion to Ma’afa, a term referring to the\n“black Holocaust” where European and Arab peoples enslaved Africans\nand continued to oppress them through colonialism and imperialism \u2013 and Kimberly\nreflecting on how her friend’s life has been anything but simple despite her\nevident privilege, while Kimberly herself is an outsider (on an island where\nthere’s prejudice against Haitians) viewing the island’s injustices through a\ndifferent lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’ve read four of the five books shortlisted for the NBCC Award for Fiction this year, and would have voted for either The Nickel Boys<\/a><\/em> or Feast Your Eyes<\/a><\/em> over Everything Inside<\/em>, but with the caveat that I know there’s an aspect to this collection that I likely can’t fully appreciate because of my background and identity. (I’d vote for this book over The Topeka School<\/a><\/em>.) It’s still a worthy winner, just not my top pick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: About halfway through Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edwidge Danticat’s short story collection Everything Inside just won this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday night, her second NBCC win (her memoir Brother, I’m Dying won the NBCC’s Memoir\/Autobiography award in 2007) and the most notable award she’s won yet for her fiction. Each story in this slim, beautifully-written volume […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1161,1160,36,1164,556,892,275],"class_list":["post-8297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-books","tag-2019-literature","tag-american-literature","tag-haitian-literature","tag-immigrant-fiction","tag-national-book-critics-circle-award","tag-short-stories","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8297"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8534,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8297\/revisions\/8534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}