44 pages • 1 hour read
Edwidge DanticatEverything Inside
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“The Gift”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
“The Gift” Summary
“The Gift” depicts a dinner date between ex-lovers Anika and Thomas, who have not seen each other for seven months, before the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Anika convinces Thomas to attend the dinner by promising him a present and choosing a restaurant they’d been to together many times before. When Thomas arrives, Anika is surprised to see that he is skinnier, older-looking, and less dapper than she remembered. She recalls his confidence and charisma when they met, and how she took the lead in pursuing him. Shortly after Anika and Thomas met, she learned that he was married and had a young daughter. She continued the affair, and Thomas never spoke of his family in front of her.
On the afternoon of the 2010 earthquake, Anika was teaching at Miami Dade College. When news of the earthquake arrived, she accepted an invitation to attend a dinner hosted by the Haitian students’ association, hoping that the presence of other Haitians would help to ease the anxiety and uncertainty of the earthquake’s aftermath. A local Haitian singer named Roro, who had been hired as entertainment for the event, was tasked with conducting a ritual to focus the group’s energies. He constructed a giant circle out of ties and scarves in the middle of the room, declaring it the new epicenter of the earthquake and encouraging the students to fill it with love. Thomas had direct experience in the earthquake: the house he was staying in collapsed, and his wife and daughter were crushed under the rubble. Thomas himself lost a leg and was sent to a mental health facility to deal with the trauma of his losses. In the present, Thomas is short-tempered and cruel to Anika, boasting that he slept with other women during their affair, and that he never planned to leave his wife for her. As a result of these comments, Anika decides not to share that she was pregnant with his child, but miscarried.
The date is interrupted when fireworks celebrating the Fourth of July cause the glass in the restaurant to shake, triggering Thomas’s anxiety. He pours a bottle of cold water on himself in order to self-regulate, then does the same to Anika. The two return to Anika’s apartment to dry off. Thomas removes his clothes and prosthetic leg, encouraging Anna to touch his wound. When he gets dressed, Anika gives Thomas the titular gift: a drawing of two birds with the head of his dead wife and daughter. Thomas is repulsed by the gift and leaves without it, and Anika recommits to her decision to not reveal that she miscarried their child. She brings the sketch of Thomas’s family out onto her patio and imagines her unborn child admiring the skyline alongside Thomas’s daughter and wife.
“The Gift” Analysis
The emotional power of this story comes in its depiction of the traumatic effects of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This trauma is visible in the characters of Thomas, who experienced the earthquake firsthand, and Anika, a Haitian expatriate who experienced it from afar. The juxtaposition of these two stories demonstrates the extent to which the earthquake traumatized Haitians across the diaspora.
Thomas experienced the devastating effects of the earthquake firsthand when the house he was in collapsed, killing his wife and daughter. The most obvious manifestation of Thomas’s trauma is physical: the narrator describes “tears, dips, folds, keloids, and patches on his back, stomach, and thighs, where he’d been bruised, scratched, pricked, or had lost layers of skin” (103). The proliferation of lists in this passage presents an overwhelming litany of physical effects, disorienting the reader and emphasizing the extent of his injuries. Thomas’s prosthetic leg is a symbol of the lasting nature of his trauma: even if the rest of his injuries heal, he will always be missing part of his leg. The story suggests that, in addition to this physical trauma, Thomas is also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The sound and sensation of fireworks exploding causes a physical reaction in Thomas: “His knees buckled against hers. His body tensed up. He wrapped his arms around her waist, not to embrace her but to hold himself up” (99). These short, staccato sentences emphasize the suddenness of Thomas’s PTSD symptoms and their immediate impact. Despite the months he spent in a mental health institution, even brief exposure to sounds & sensations that evoke the earthquake are enough to cause a physical reaction in Thomas.
Unlike Thomas, Anika did not have first-hand experience in the earthquake; however, the story suggests that she was equally traumatized by the tragedy. As an expatriate working in Miami, Anika was far away from the site of the trauma but concerned for friends and family back home: “there were no updates, just a stream of expressions of concern and worry” (91). Desperate to act, the Haitian students with Anika enacted a ritual in which they poured a bottle of rum into a hastily-constructed circle intended to depict “the epicenter of the earthquake” (96). The goal of the ritual was to fill the circle, and therefore the site of the earthquake, with love. Although Anika admits being disappointed by the ritual, she understands the intention: “to try, with will and desire alone, to influence something you could not” (96). The fact that Anika repeats this ritual at the end of the story in order to honor Thomas’s dead family suggests that she is still processing her own trauma and considers the ritual an effective way to do so. The fact that Anika, like Thomas, is still dealing with the traumatic aftereffects of the earthquake indicates the impact of the disaster on the Haitian diaspora.
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By Edwidge Danticat
