Edwidge Danticat on Life’s Small Epiphanies
The Everything Inside Author on The Literary Life
with Mitchell Kaplan
This week on The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan, Edwidge Danticat, author of Everything Inside, discusses the common themes of diaspora, love and Danticat’s birthplace, Haiti.
“I have been working on these stories for a long time, some of them are more recent. I really love that in a short story you can have sort of a limited universe, there’s so much economy and so much layering. I keep working on them no matter what else I’m doing,” Danticat shares how it all came together with her long-time friend.
From the episode:
Mitchell Kaplan: What the book reminds me a little bit is that when we think of history we only think of the big events, but we don’t think of the small things that really matter to the individual person, and that there is a lot of humanity that happens that doesn’t reflect itself in the fact that, for example, there was a lot of humanity happening in World War I in between in the headlines, so to speak. That’s what you brought out so naturally in the book. In the backdrop, there are these very large events, but it’s how it affects individual people that brings them home. Is that something you would agree with?
Edwidge Danticat: That’s what I really love in the short story as a form is that it seems like a smaller cousin to the bigger narratives, but the shape of it allows you to magnify smaller moments and to linger on these small epiphanies in the smaller interactions that mean so much. It’s like painting and often you’re asked to look at this detail. That’s what I’m trying to do, in the creases and the folds of people’s lives.
Mitchell: There’s that Williams poem, “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.” This is kind of what it is, these red wheelbarrows.
Danticat: For people who come from a place like I come from, there’s always going to be a big backdrop. There’s always going to be some big event, whether it’s political or the event is the distance itself and people are living away from their country. There is always the daily life, and in the stories I wanted to go into these daily lives and how people manage that within the bigger background.
