Published by Beating Windward Press, 2014, 178 pages.

“My life was a deconstructed text, and I was surrounded by words—their sustaining luxuries and dangers. Words have power; you never know what may come of them. Take this: I want to leave—the rest is a jigsaw of memory taking up space in my head. I want to escape to wherever else. I wrote about what I wanted: to become a doctor, to tell stories, to escape Haiti and my father.
“I wanted it all.”

A Sky the Color of Chaos is M.J. Fièvre’s memoir about her childhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1989, when she is eight, until she leaves to go to university in the United States. It is a turbulent time for the country.

Fièvre lives with her parents and her sister Soeur. Her father, a lawyer, has a ferocious temper, so there is violence in the house as well as violence outside it. During one of his fits of rage late at night, Fièvre is barricaded in her room with her mother and sister. The sound of her father shouting and banging on their door is echoed by gunfire outside. Soeur peers through the curtain: men with shotguns are in the house next door. They are zenglendos, violent criminals many of whom are ex-Tonton Macoutes, a private militia created by the former dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

“My father once said Port-au-Prince was a city of upheavals and kraze zo—destructions. The storms around the city broke forth without warning and without vindication.
“Papa belonged there.
“Outside, the sky was a chemistry of perfect shadows—a tomb in which people buried their lives.”

This is a pattern throughout the book. Violence is always close by, whether in the city or at home. Fièvre realizes that it has almost become normal. When she is 13, she takes riding lessons. Bernard, the man who is supposed to teach her, simply puts her on the horse and tells her to control it. Since she has never ridden before, the horse takes off and throws her. Bernard had assumed she could ride, “just like Mother assumed I was strong enough to deal with the horrors of Port-au-Prince and the drama at home. Not once had she tried to explain to me why so many dead people were recorded on TV, and why my father was so angry. At thirteen, I realized that life in Haiti was a mad ride, and no one bothered getting me a helmet.”

Her boyfriends are a part of the chaos. Junior, her first boyfriend, has a mother who is mentally unstable; and Ben, a much older man and a cop, is clearly dangerous. Through him, the troubles outside impinge on her private world.

Fièvre survives by focusing on how she can get out of the country. There are scholarships available to study medicine in the Dominican Republic, because of which she decides to become a doctor. Eventually she does leave, but not as a medical student to the Dominican Republic. Instead, she goes to the United States to study creative writing.

Fièvre brings out the damage that a dysfunctional home can wreak and how it can distort the most important relationships. Her mother tells her stories about her parents—Fièvre’s grandparents—and how they met, stories that the girl loves to hear. But she is jealous “of this uncomplicated love Mother was allowed to feel for her own parents. Her childhood was my phantom limb, the thing once flesh, now gone but living as a restless pricking under my skin.” The thing she treasures most is silence, which is really an absence of violence: “I learned how expansive silence can be, how forgiving.”

Throughout the book, you get a sense of the young girl as a budding writer, the way she observes the world, and the way she collects stories. Her writing is vivid. In her opening paragraph, Fièvre captures the sense of tension—claustrophobic and unavoidable—that permeates her book.

“Port-au-Prince, Haiti—where the sun burned, and the clouds didn’t break into rain. Collars melted against necks and Eskimo ice creams melted down hands. Grass withered. Madansara birds fell into parched silence. Taptap and kamyaonèt shot by, honking, and the clouds of dust they stirred took hours to settle. Heat rose from the pavement, and windows bottled up that heat.”

This is a harrowing but lyrical memoir, Fièvre’s first book written in English (she has written several in French). She gives you a picture of Haiti during that period, with footnotes about the political situation whenever they are needed.

Unfortunately, the book is out of print but available second-hand, and is well worth searching out. A Sky the Color of Chaos is not always an easy read because of the subject matter, but it is so well written that it doesn’t sink under the weight of her story.

It is a narrative of pain and hurt but, eventually, also of healing.