Everything Inside

The premise of this story reflects the mixed feelings often experienced by Haitians or Haitian Americans in the diaspora. Lucy is self-conscious that the advertisement for the service trip will create a stereotype of Haiti in the minds of her fellow classmates that she will have to endure. Importantly, the advertisement depicts women that look like Lucy’s mother and her decision to tear down the flyer points to Lucy’s discomfort not only with a simplistic narrative about Haiti but also with a confrontation of her culture of origin. Lucy’s anxiety about the service trip sharply contrasts with Neah’s interest and subsequent commitment to the women of Haiti. Neah’s upbringing is shown to place her completely out of contact with the realities of Haitian violence, particularly symbolized by her highly educated parents and her father’s intense disapproval of Neah choosing service over school. Yet Neah’s passion speaks to a desire to connect to one’s origins, especially when that connection has not been fostered.

Both women struggle to manage their connection to their cultural identities through their tattoos. Lucy’s tattoo that honors the dog she hit symbolizes her struggle with her identity as the daughter of immigrants. Lucy’s parents are aware that, as migrant workers, they don’t always have the luxury of doing the right thing. Saving the dog would cost time and money, and the owners might react violently, knowing that there would be little recourse for migrant workers. For Lucy, the tattoo of the dog represents the painful experiences she had to ignore in order to make her parents’ sacrifice worthwhile. In a moment when Lucy might have acted in a way to establish her adult self—choosing to save a helpless dog—her parents’ positions as migrant workers limited her, thus affecting Lucy’s sense of herself. 

Neah’s tattoo is also a testament to suffering, although not her own. Her tattoo depicts clear plastic water bags hung by Haitians to keep out flies. She explains how Haitians believed that flies saw “magnified, giant, monstrously distorted versions of themselves in the water-filled plastic bags and fled” (123). Neah’s tattoo features two water bags and the phrase Je est un autre (“I is another”), a quote from the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Neah describes her tattoo as “a symbol of her commitment,” an attempt to bear witness to the suffering and resilience that she saw in Haiti. The fact that the water bags look like hot air balloons suggests that Neah may have been using the trip as an escape from her everyday life. The incorporation of French poetry is a reflection of her position as the child of academics.

In the story’s final scene, Lucy lifts up Neah’s shirt while she’s sleeping to look at her tattoo, which Neah has said “is not for viewing” (123). Lucy suspects that Neah “might eventually let me see her tattoo after all,” but the fact that she looks at it while Neah is sleeping suggests that she isn’t confident about this fact. The momentary contact between their two tattoos reflects Lucy’s desire to be closer to Neah, and to share their traumas more fully, an important strategy for those in the Haitian diaspora to remain resilient.