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Lessons from a Family Forged by History
by Rich Benjamin
A piercingly powerful memoir, a grandson's account of the coup that ended his grandfather's presidency of Haiti, the secrecy that shrouded that wound within his family, and his urgent efforts to know his mother despite the past.
Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero—a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country's president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle's parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.
Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn't know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about—books, learning, world events—the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.
It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn't just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America—of the human cost of the country's hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.
"Benjamin delivers a devastating memoir about the ripple effects of the coup that ousted his grandfather, Haitian president Daniel Fignolé, in 1957...This brutal, spellbinding tale is at once a searing domestic drama and an illuminating glimpse at Haiti's history. Readers will be rapt." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An evocative, wise memoir of a multilayered search for roots." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[Benjamin's] training as a cultural anthropologist shines through in his extensive research, and he renders history in lush, expressive detail… The three main characters—grandfather, mother, and Benjamin himself—all try to reconcile their desire for a better world with a desire for their family's safety. This struggle manifests differently for each of them, and the resulting tension binds the work together. Ultimately, Benjamin's book succeeds as both a political history of twentieth-century Haiti and a compelling family saga." —Booklist
"A brilliant, absorbing book, a family story, a tale of power, exile, and calamity, a love letter to Benjamin's mother that becomes a deep look into the darkness of Haitian history. And it's also a no-holds-barred autobiography. I couldn't stop reading." —Salman Rushdie, author of Knife
"Talk to Me is a revelation. As unflinching as it is tender, it is the story of a nation and an intimate portrayal of a family. Rich Benjamin meticulously probes into Haiti's vast history while sensitively revealing with the painful secrets that his mother and her sisters carried to America. This is a son's homage to a complex, brilliant woman and a letter of longing to a Haiti that might have been, and could still become." —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize
"Rich Benjamin contains multitudes. The grandson of a president of Haiti, son of an Ivy League graduate, gifted with a brilliant mother. Now he's written an eloquent, Argos-eyed love letter." —Edmund White, author of The Humble Lover
This information about Talk to Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Rich Benjamin is a cultural anthropologist and the author of Searching for Whitopia. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, and he's appeared as a commentator on MSNBC and CNN. His work has received support from the Bellagio Center, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Columbia Law School, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Ford Foundation, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.
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