A Sky the Color of Chaos: Based on the True Story of My Haitian Childhood by Michèle-Jessica Fièvre (review)

Jean-Claude Duvalier’s return to Haiti in 2011 undoubtedly renewed movements for justice and efforts to write his regime’s atrocities into history. These endeavors began in the early years of the hereditary dictatorship that Jean-Claude and, before him, François Duvalier maintained with the aid of US governments for a total of twenty-nine years. A Sky the Color of Chaos recounts the coming of age of a young girl living through the succession of regimes that followed Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ousting in 1986. The work chronicles the instability and violence that marked Haiti’s political landscape during the late 1980s and the 1990s. A testament to the personal’s imbrication with the political, the memoir is Michèle-Jessica Fièvre’s first work exclusively in English. She is the author of numerous books in French, including Le Feu de la vengeance (1997), a mystery novel she published at the age of sixteen; La Statuette maléfique (2001), a young-adult fiction work; La Bête (1999); and Les Fantasmes de Sophie (2007). Fièvre also recently published a trilingual children’s book, I Am Riding (2013), written in French, English, and Haitian Creole, and a trilingual anthology of literature about Haiti titled So Spoke the Earth (2012).

Fièvre’s memoir, subtitled “Based on the True Story of My Haitian Childhood,” follows the narrator, Jessica, through a series of brief episodes at home, at school, and eventually beyond those sites as she transitions from schoolgirl to young woman. Her life is filled with pranks, friendships, boys, and dreams of ice cream and of growing up. Yet so all-consuming is the violence in her life that the memoir veers poetically towards an intimate treatise on the subject. Despite her parents’ efforts, the instability in Haiti permeates the young girl’s world as she witnesses a horrifying killing and hears about the deaths of her neighbors and of her classmates’ parents. Weaving together domestic and state violence, Fièvre goes intermittently from narrating the outbreaks of a physically abusive father to documenting what she sees or hears of the brutal and spectacular assassinations of strangers and acquaintances in Port-au-Prince. Footnotes elucidate the political timeline, replete with campaigns, coups, embargos, and US interventions. The focus, however, remains on the terror in her home. Because the narrator was a child or teenager during most of her time in Haiti, the political turmoil remains fuzzy at best, providing a backdrop for the familial drama. Both the narrator and reader must interpret in whatever way they can the violent outbursts and increasing paranoia of her father, Goule: “He was an unstable man in an unstable country” (45). Ultimately, unable to tolerate either the man or the country, Jessica leaves both by the end of the memoir and heads to Miami in search of peace and stability: “I wanted to leave Haiti—the violence, the fear, the rage. In my home and my country” (93).

The memoir is frank, lucid, and brave. The abuse toward Jessica, her mother, and her sister, whom she refers to as “Sœur,” is narrated unflinchingly. “Papa paced back and forth, his eyes hard between down-drawn brows. A leather belt, the edges cracked, clasped around my father’s waist like a black snake. Papa had never used a marinette or rigoise to discipline us. He preferred the belt” (16). Fièvre crafted a voice that is consistently precise and clear, even in the bleakest of moments. She writes: “The next time Papa got mad, we both pretended to be dead” (42). Apart from two or three episodes, much of the brutality at home is recounted through the psychological terror it produces: “I expected my father’s chair to slide back, waited for him to lunge at me across the table, to...