In Everything Inside, Edwidge Danticat explores love, community and the lives of migrants

In Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat's new book, many of the immigrant characters struggle to find a sense of belonging — both in the places they have come from, and the places they've migrated to.

Through a series of short stories, Everything Inside explores themes of community, family, and love, often through the lens of migration.

Danticat spoke with Day 6 guest host Saroja Coelho about her latest book, the power of fiction, and her relationship with her late mentor, Toni Morrison.

Below is part of that conversation.

I am sitting here with your latest book and the title says Everything Inside. I am really curious about the title there. Where does it come from?

Everything Inside comes from a sign that I saw in a window of a house in my neighbourhood that said "Nothing inside is worth dying for." And I was a little bit confused by it, and then I realized it was a threat. 

It was like someone's idea of a safety mechanism, you know, like threatening people [that] if you come in here you will die.

And then I thought, "Oh, shouldn't it be 'everything inside'?" Because you're obviously talking about valuable things that you have in there. 

And then I was determined to put that into a story and it ended up in one of the first stories in the book. And part of the expression ended up being the title of the book. 

What's interesting is that everyone in the book is treated like a person of such value. You draw out their stories, their feelings. Is that part of what's driving this together? 

Yes. I think ... the common thread in the book — it's a book of short stories — is love. 

Everyone in the book is loved by me, first of all, whether they're perfect or imperfect, which is what led me to write about them.

But also they're loved in, sometimes, a very conflicted way by another person in this romantic love.

And it's also love of country which, for many of the characters, requires that they make a lot of sacrifices. 

A lot of that love of country is also from a distance. So many of the people in this are in some way displaced or removed from the places that they once called home. 

Yes. And I think that's becoming more and more of a reality in our world. 

You're going to have more and more, for example, climate refugees. We've always had economic refugees; people have always moved for better opportunities. 

It's really a book also about displacement and trying to find and refind yourself in another place, which is ultimately what the story of immigration is. 

Sometimes we know more about the fictional characters in a story that we're reading than we do about the people in our own lives.- Edwidge Danticat, author, on the power of fiction

What's interesting is that in your writing, you're helping us get into the bodies, into the experiences of the people themselves ... Why is fiction the way that you engage with stories of migration and exile and displacement? 

I write some essays and I write opinion pieces. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker online about the issue of the migrant children. But I find that fiction brings us under the skin of the people we're reading about. 

Sometimes we know more about the fictional characters in a story that we're reading than we do about the people in our own lives. 

Fiction brings us into a space in people's lives that, maybe, we may not be privy to. It brings us into their minds, it brings us into their feelings. 

So fiction removes that veil of what a stranger is because if you're reading a story about someone, and you're learning their deeper secrets, they're no longer a stranger to you. 

And the hope is that that will encourage someone who is reading about someone of a different culture who's in a situation that they're unfamiliar with to go out and learn more about that situation. 

The hardness and harshness of the world — while it is delivered in fiction, I have to say as a reader, [it] hit me very hard. I didn't feel that the fictional world stripped away any of that. 

One example I have is the short story Without Inspection. In that one you have an undocumented migrant from Haiti who is falling to his death. He's falling off a construction site and he's witnessing in those few seconds his whole life. It's a really harrowing scene, a chilling scene. 

I wonder if that epic fall is a metaphor for something.

That story, Without Inspection, was inspired by two different sources and one was I went to an immigration forum one Saturday morning. It was an all-day forum on temporary protected status. 

People were talking about this term, "without inspection," which is a legal term which means that ... you, in your coming to the United States, did not encounter an immigration official, so it's like you're not here at all.

I was thinking of all the people who had come by boat from Haiti, from Cuba, through the Bahamas at times, and they come here, a lot of them. When they get here they're building these monuments — you know, they're building these hotels, they're building these skyscrapers and often some of them do fall. 

And those things came together in that story and the reality of that experience, of just losing your life after you've sacrificed so much to be here. And then thinking what that life means and what someone would be thinking in the final moments of their lives. 

I want to go to the moments that have shaped you as a writer. You narrated a documentary called The Foreigner's Home which was based on an exhibit Toni Morrison curated at the Louvre in Paris. 

I understand that when you first got the call for that opportunity, you felt like you couldn't take it. Can you tell me about that?

I love Toni Morrison and I loved her since I was a young writer starting out. 

I remember I went to meet her at a Barnes &Noble in 1996 where she was introducing a book by Toni Cade Bambara and I brought her flowers and someone took a picture of us. That was our first meeting. 

Ten years after that meeting, in 2006, she called and asked if I wanted to go to Paris where she was in residence at the Louvre. And I had a baby at that time and I was sick, and I said, "I can't do it. I would love to."

But the thing was months away and she said, "You know, the baby's not going to always be small and you're not always going to be sick. Just tell me what you need to be there." And I said ... "I need my husband to come and I need my mother and my mother-in-law," and she's like, "Fine."

So we got an apartment right by the Louvre and I did my event and I got to spend a good amount of time with her in Paris. And she was always extraordinarily kind to me and very gracious.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.