Everything Inside

“They were soon like a trio of siblings, of whom Olivia was the dosa, the last, untwinned, or surplus child.”

In Haitian Creole, the term dosa refers to a girl born after a set of twins; here, the term is used to describe Olivia, Elsie’s friend who eventually ran off with her husband. By the end of the story, Elsie begins to consider herself to be the dosa in their love triangle, and in the world at large. The term highlights her loneliness.

“Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t afford the plane ticket. She had already booked a flight to go to Les Cayes in a few months to visit her family, and she’d need to not only bring her family money but also ship them all the extra things they’d asked for, including a small fridge for her parents and a laptop computer for her brother.”

This passage highlights the multitude of expensive responsibilities faced by immigrant communities. In addition to supporting herself in Miami, Elsie is also sending money back home, and her visit will not be a vacation, but rather a chance to share her economic success with her family.

“Or was it wrong of me to think of death in a jokey way when the person who might want to turn on that switch—at least my mother’s switch—was actually in the process of dying?”

This passage highlights the unique relationship to death and mortality that comes with generational trauma: Nadia laughs even in the face of death. The fact that she thinks her father wants to kill her mother demonstrates how little she knows of her family’s history.

“I wondered why they were praying for me and not for my father, but like the soup, the prayer calmed my stomach.”

Nadia’s acceptance of her Haitian culture is an essential part of the process of forgiving her father and grieving his passing. This passage suggests that, although she doesn’t fully understand Haitian traditions, she finds them both comforting and an effective way of understanding her father’s decisions.

“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 the others far beyond.”

Nadia visits her father thinking that he is still alive; when she arrives, she learns that he has already passed. Nadia’s father’s wife tells her to take her time saying goodbye, and that a doctor will pronounce him dead when Nadia feels ready. Although Nadia has little connection to her Haitian background, contributing to this tradition helps her to feel closer to her father’s culture, and to him.

“Sometimes, aside from the tips, they’d find pieces of gold or silver jewelry—mostly single earrings and thin bracelets—that my husband would make every effort to return, but if no one called back or claimed them for a few months, we would allow the maids to sell them to the jeweler down the street, who’d melt them into other pieces to sell to other guests.”

This passage demonstrates the extent to which Haiti’s economy relies on outsiders on a micro and macro level. The housekeepers described rely on tips and these found pieces of jewelry to supplement their incomes, while the jewelers they sell too also rely on tourists to buy their goods. The image of the gold returning to the jewelers suggests how few resources actually remain in Haiti for Haitians.

“If guests show up hungry, you feed them. If they want drink, you ply them. If they want to be left alone, you make yourself scarce. If they want company, you entertain. If they are lovelorn, you find them love. And if they show up sick, you find them treatment quickly before they expire on your watch.”

In this passage, the narrator describes her responsibility as a hotel owner: the reference to lovelorn guests suggests that she and her husband may seek out sex workers for guests or even charge their workers with sexually satisfying the guests. This likely points the source of Mélisande’s infection. The final sentence suggests that her desire to help Mélisande access health care might not be purely altruistic.

“Don’t these die-ass-poor-aahs, these dyaspowa and dyasporén, these outside-minded kings and queens, know that there are many other ways to show love than to be constantly talking about it?”

The use of dialect-specific pronunciations in this description of Haiti’s diaspora is characteristic of Danticat’s realist touch and her efforts to center the Haitian perspective. The suggestion that Babette understands how to take care of her daughter in ways that the narrator and her husband (the “dyasporén”) cannot suggests that the Western perspective is not always the right one.

“When you paint an earthquake, do you paint soil monsters devouring the earth? Shattered houses? Bloody, lifeless bodies? Random personal items—T-shirts, dresses, shoes, hair combs, and toothbrushes—scattered above the rubble?”

Anika’s desire to paint the earthquake is presented as a traumatic response to her helplessness in the face of Haiti’s suffering. The fact that she struggles to do so suggests that she cannot make sense of the violence of the earthquake or the loss of Thomas’s family, which she has complicated feelings about. This line of questioning also echoes the problem Danticat faces as a writer: how do you effectively communicate suffering?

“He tilted his head back as though offering her his throat to cut, then he spread his hand over the front of his neck to protect it. Seeing her, she knew, was shattering him again.”

Both Anika and Thomas come to their dinner date knowing that they will hurt each other and be hurt. Thomas feels guilty about his infidelity, but also knows that this fact will hurt Anika. Anika is hurt by Thomas’s disappearance but keeps her miscarriage of their child a secret in order to avoid hurting him.

“He didn’t wait for her to answer. He brushed her hand away and reached for the prosthetic, pushed, it seemed to her, the absent leg into it, and quickly popped it back in place.”

Anika attends the dinner knowing that Thomas’s wife and daughter have died, although he doesn’t know that she knows. This passage, in which Thomas shows Anika his wounded and prosthetic leg, suggests that he understands that she wants to see his pain, and that he resents her for it.

“For as far back as I could remember, I had slept in grower-owned housing, which was basically bunk beds and sometimes cots behind barns and stables, where only thin wooden slats and planks separated my parents and me from the animals.”

As the daughter of farm workers, Lucy has a drastically different background than her roommate Neah, the daughter of professors. The story suggests that Lucy’s difficult, transient childhood made her protective over the people she cares about, such as Neah. This background helps to explain her reluctance to let Neah disappear from her life.

“And yes, I did not want to see any of the stuff she was talking about on my first trip there. I first wanted to see the beaches, the mountains, the citadel, the waterfalls, the cathedrals, the museums of Haiti.”

Lucy’s relationship with her Haitian identity is complicated: although she wants to visit her parents’ homeland, she also tears down an advertisement for a service trip to Haiti because she’s afraid people will associate her with the violence depicted on the poster. This passage suggests that, unlike Neah, Lucy wants to avoid the darker sides of modern life in Haiti, focusing on tourist attractions.

“The Tainos believed themselves to have originally been cave people who would turn into stone when touched by sunlight. They knew the risk when they stepped into the light, but they did it anyway to create a new world, a world that continues to exist, because we are still here.”

Neah is deeply moved by the violence and pain she sees while working in a rape recovery center in Haiti and feels called to leave school to address the problems she sees in the world. However, the story indicates that she is overwhelmed by suffering. In this passage, Lucy applies the Taino origin story to Neah’s struggle to process her experience, suggesting that the work of building a new world is painful but necessary.

“Doesn’t she know that she is an exception in this world, where it is normal to be unhappy, to be hungry, to work nonstop and earn next to nothing, and to suffer the whims of everything from tyrants to hurricanes and earthquakes?”

This passage highlights the lasting impact of the trauma that can come from immigration and life in a new country. Carole is haunted by both the reality of her life in a single-income household and by the struggles that she left behind in Haiti. The memory of these struggles makes it difficult for Carole to sympathize with her daughter’s post-partum depression, which she sees as a lesser form of suffering.

“When Jeanne and Paul were babies, no other woman was around to help. Carole didn’t have the luxury of lying in bed while relatives took care of her and her children.”

This passage suggests that Carole’s frustration with her daughter is at least in part motivated by a sense of resentment. From Carole’s perspective, Jeanne’s life post-birth seems easy; she has physical and emotional support from family members, something that Jeanne, who raised her children as a recent immigrant, did not have.

“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.”

Throughout this story, Carole and Jeanne are critical of each other’s mental state and failure to live up to expectations. In the final lines, Carole releases herself from the pressures of motherhood, passing them on to her daughter; she doesn’t know that her daughter is already suffering. This passage suggests that, despite their frustrations with each other, Carole and Jeanne have more in common than either can truly know.

“Finally, two decades later, Callie’s husband, who was a child of the island’s oligarchy and had been working as one of the government council’s youngest lawyers, was elected by the majority of eligible voters, who, like their new prime minister, were under thirty years old.”

Kim never explicitly accuses Callie’s husband of election fraud, but this passage is one of many moments in the story that hint at the possibility. The suggestion that this reformed, optimistic, millennial government may have been illegally elected sharpens the sting of Danticat’s allegorical tale.

“On many of the hills surrounding the downtown area, tin shacks and finished and unfinished concrete houses were crammed next to one another.” Their outer walls were painted in bright pinks, yellows, and greens, as if some effort has been made to turn them into a splashy collage meant to be admired from afar.”

During Kim’s time with Callie, she is exposed to the lifestyle of the island’s elite and famous, including staying at the Prime Minister’s residence. This passage suggests that certain elements of her experience—such as the view from the residence—are artificial or improved so that they appeal to the gaze of the elite, despite the reality of their condition.

“Finance and the Runner’s wedding was out in the countryside, on the coast, in a small fishing village called Maafa.”

This passage demonstrates the extent to which “Seven Stories” is structured as an allegory: the use of “Finance” and “Running” as names for characters suggests that these characters are not individuals as much as they are stand-ins for a type of person. The name of the town, Maafa, is also allegorical, pointing to the African studies term describing the ongoing effects of the Transatlantic Trade.

“It seemed to me, at that moment, that together they were watching over the entire island, as though they were its last sentinels.”

This passage depicts Callie and her mother—who carry the trauma of the end of the previous administration—as best suited to protect the island and govern the future. Callie’s husband’s administration is optimistic and forward-thinking, but glosses over the reality of the present and the trauma of the past. Because the women see the island as it is, and with its history, they are its strongest protectors.

“The poor dead children he heard about in the news were also a shock to him, the ones who were randomly gunned down by the police or by one another, in schools, in their homes, while walking in the street, or playing in city parks.”

Arnold is the first of Danticat’s expatriate characters to be openly critical of the United States. The fact that his descriptions of this shocking violence explicitly includes shooting deaths of children suggests that the frequency of these kinds of tragedy is unique to the United States.

“She kept coming back to the beach because it was her husband’s burial place, and her own. The person she’d been when the three of them, she and her husband and her son, had gotten on that boat and left Haiti—that person was also lost at sea.”

This passage highlights the trauma inherent to dangerous sea crossings like the ones Darline, Paris, and Arnold survived. Although Darline feels like her old self died at sea, her repeated returns to the site of her trauma suggests she is continuing to work through it.