FICTION BY BILL MORRISE
dwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969. At
the age of 12, she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where her mother
worked in a factory and her father drove a taxi. Danticat’s 16
works of fiction and nonfiction have won numerous awards. She now
lives in the Little Haiti neighborhood of Miami, and she will be at the
Miami Book Fair with her new collection of short stories, Everything
Inside. We caught up with the MacArthur Fellow to talk about her lat-
est book, the Haitian-American experience, and small moments of joy.Haiti is a presence in all of these new stories. Tell me about
the pull Haiti exerts on you and your writing. Well, everything
I’ve written is either about Haiti or about the Haitian-American expe-
rience. I still have a lot of family in Haiti, so it’s sort of what interests
me as a subject. Also, migration to the U.S. and the Haitian-American
community in New York and, in this book, in Miami. A lot of the book
is set in the area where I live now.A lot of the characters’ lives in these new
stories have not worked out well. I’m
thinking about the woman who’s swindled
into paying ransom for a bogus kidnap-
ping; the woman with AIDS who gets
placebos from a shady doctor. Yet these
characters seem to find consolations.
Some of the stories are based on the experienc-
es of people I know. Not everybody comes out
with a happy ending, you know? And that’s one
of the things that interests me—how people
deal with difficulties. Maybe I just happen to be
a melancholy person. I think also, these days,
the experience of poor immigrants is a lot more
precarious and terrifying because the rules are
always changing. But I hope there are conso-
lations. I think people in very difficult circum-
stances figure out a way to have moments of joy,
you know, moments of appreciation.EDWIDGE DANTICAT IN
CONVERSATION
Sunday, Nov. 24, 1:30 p.m.
Building 1, AuditoriumPHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOREdwidge
Danticat’s
Small
Moments
of Joy
The MacArthur Fellow
talks about immigration
and the pull Haiti
exerts on her writing“The people who
are traveling with
their small children,
leaving places
because they feel like
their children will be
in danger, the people
arriving in Europe
from Syria and other
places—I think
there’s an element to
immigration that is
so forward-looking.”SHOP OUR HOLIDAY SALE
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