M.J. Fievre is the author of the new book A Sky the Color of Chaos, which is based on her childhood in Haiti. She also edited the anthology So Spoke the Earth. She has written nine books in French, and has taught writing at Broward College and Miami Dade College. She is based in South Florida.
Q: You describe your book on its cover as “based on the
true story of my Haitian childhood.” Would you call it a memoir, or is it
partly fictionalized?
A: Until I wrote this memoir, I never told those things that most
Haitian women never tell—those terrible, awful, intimate memories. As a Haitian
woman, I’m expected to stay silent about whatever embarrassing things happened
to me. There are some chapters in A Sky the
Color of Chaos that I almost deleted (my legs shook and I felt like a
failure) because I thought the events they revealed were too humiliating,
embarrassing, and shameful to share with anybody—particularly because these
events also involved other people.
As the publication date of the book
approached, I was faced with the same challenges Melyssa Griffin discussed in
her article “Is
it your story to tell?” where she writes, “We’re often faced with the
decision of whether or not we want to discuss the realities of other people in
our writing.” I thought about it a lot as I cleaned my apartment. As I
took the trash to the curb. As I bleached the bathtub. (When I breathed in the chemicals a quick
pinpoint of pain erupted in my head.)
In the end, I decided to take some
creative liberties to protect the privacy of the many individuals who appear in
A Sky the
Color of Chaos. As soon as I changed all the names, it became clear to
me that I would need to use the “based on” label. It should also be noted that
I combined some of the “characters.” All my sisters became one, which didn’t
feel inappropriate because, growing up as the youngest of four daughters, I often
saw my sisters as one entity whose job was both to protect me and to make my
life impossible. (I often think about “Soeur” and the history
of our sisterhood, about the rooms we grew up in, the vibrant curtains
making shapes on the tile floor, my body cupped up into her arms before bed.)
I
considered combining some other characters as well, but it felt like cheating
because these characters were un-interchangeable. At some point, Sister
Bernadette and Madame Lemoine almost became one, but it felt wrong,
particularly because the chapter dedicated to Madame Lemoine became a sort of homage—an
ode—to her memory. It’s okay, I believe, to combine minor characters in order
to improve the craft, but I think any ethical writer will agree that it becomes
shady business when one tries the same with characters who are larger than
life.
Q: How did you come up with the book’s title, and what does
it signify for you?
There is a section in the book where I find myself at
the scene of a shooting: I’ve taken cover behind a dumpster and am lying in
the mud, expecting to die. (I’ve got butterflies in my stomach just thinking
about it). While people are screaming around me, their cries punctuated by gunshots,
the sky remains a perfect blue. There’s a lot of looking at the sky in the book
because I’m taken by how indifferent to our human struggles nature often
remains.
When it came time to name the book, I knew I needed the sky to be in
the title somewhere. Chaos was another word that came to mind. I’ve had several
working titles. I might be good at titles when it comes to short stories (it’s
easier to encapsulate what happens in a short tale), but not so much when
longer works are involved, contrarily to some authors like Evelina Galang whose
amazing titles seem to come effortlessly.
In the end, I had three options. I
was a visiting professor in Santa Cruz de la Sierra at the time, and my
students at the International University were excited to help with the final
selection. It created the opportunity for an interesting conversation: What
exactly should a title evoke? Some titles were too violent, others too vague.
I’m glad we finally settled on A Sky the
Color of Chaos.
Q: In the book, you describe your own life, but you also
include descriptions of what was happening in Haiti during that period. What
did you see as the right balance between the personal and the political?
A: To know me well is to know my story—the experiences that have shaped
me, the trials and turning points that have tested me. People are inseparable
from the place(s) they come from, the places they belong to, the places that
molded them. To understand who I am, one must understand where I come from,
what created me. I couldn’t possibly write a memoir about growing up in the
90’s in Port-au-Prince, without rendering the events that took place in Haiti
around that time.
During the writing process, I first focused on the personal
story and then worked into the prose the circumstances that made this story
possible. Some of the political details were slowing down the narrative,
however, so I resorted to using footnotes.
Some reviewers frowned upon that
choice. “The footnotes shed some light on political events and define Haitian
terms, but, for me, they pulled me out of the narrative,” Debbie Hagan wrote in
her review
for Brevity Magazine. Lauren
Prastien, from Michigan
Quarterly Review, agrees: “I could not find a footnote that couldn’t have
simply been woven into the narrative, and it is a disservice to the engrossing
prose to have it disrupted.”
I still believe footnotes
constituted the best way to make it work. I only weaved into the story whatever
could inform the text. In fact, my research was guided by my memories. For
instance, as I remembered the
shooting outside my middle school and the “journée de couleurs” that
followed, I focused my research on this particular strip of time, and the
political facts in turn impacted my work as I spliced images and motifs, all
through the alchemy of writing and art. The balance between story and history
came naturally.
Q: What are some of the most common perceptions and
misperceptions in the United States about Haiti?
A: As
an individual who’s lived both in Haiti and overseas, I am at a clear advantage:
I can draw on my knowledge of Haitian culture and on my complex relationship
with the island-nation to think about the country from both within and
“without.” Not everyone, obviously, can have a realistic, balanced perspective if
they haven’t lived in Haiti (although it should be noted that, in these
post-Internet times, ignorance is a choice,
not something unavoidable).
I can only speak of the perceptions and misperceptions in South
Florida, as this is where I’ve lived for the past 14 years. Many individuals I
meet seem to believe that my people are hardworking and proud, that we’re loud
and love a good party. After the earthquake, one word was used over and over by
media outlets: resilience.
Many South Floridians also seem to believe that Haiti
is a no man’s land, overrun by poverty and chaos, a place with such a degree of
famine that people will even eat cats. Granted, my neighbors did eat two of my cats, but as pointed
out by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “the problem with stereotypes
is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story
become the only story.”
Some Americans consider all
Haitians to be “boatpeople,” for instance. When I first moved to the United
States, I attended Barry University to complete my Bachelor’s degree. I stayed
off-campus, renting a room from an American family in Miami Shores. (The bookshelves
in my room were stacked haphazardly to fit as many books as possible—some vertically,
some horizontally, and some tucked behind the rows because they could not fit
on the three bookshelves otherwise.)
The mother assumed that I had come to
Florida in a boat and had no legal status here, let alone a passport, so when I
announced that first summer that I would travel to visit my family in
Port-au-Prince, she was beyond herself with worry. Would I be taking an illegal
boat back? (Lady, please, do you
really believe that there are boats smuggling people into Haiti?) She wondered: Why would I go back to a country where starvation
and nonstop violence await? I’m not going to deny that there is poverty and
violence in Haiti, but there’s also creativity, love, hard work, and beauty. (The
mountains in the distance are green, the trees bursting their new leaves.)
Thankfully,
contemporary Haitian writers (such as Edwidge Danticat, Katia D. Ulysse,
Marie-Ketsia Theodore-Pharel, and Fabienne Josaphat) are changing what the
world thinks of Haiti. Their works illustrate the intersections of literature
and social activism.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m involved in many projects. I’m collaborating with another
Miami-based writer and an Irish-American artist to create a graphic novel. I’m also
writing a collection of dark tales about downtown Miami. A few essays are in
the works, along with several poems for O, Miami Poetry Festival.
I recently received an invitation
from Poetry Press Week to unveil my unpublished poetry in front of an audience
of editors during O, Miami 2016. During Poetry Press Week, the new poems are not presented by the authors themselves, but
under their aesthetic direction, allowing them the freedom to design a
multisensory experience of their work; past presenting poets have called on
actors, dancers, musicians, video artists, and djs. By encouraging
collaboration and bringing together the driving forces of literary production,
Press Week hopes to revitalize the poetry publishing industry and revive
popular interest in this art form.
I will create and direct a 10 to 12 minute show, which I
believe best embodies the work I'm presenting. I've submitted a series of poems
in play format: a story about a love triangle titled Shadows of
Hialeah.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m honored to be featured on your blog! Readers can follow me on
Facebook and on Twitter. My blog
is located at thewhimsicalproject.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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