In 1778, during the Revolutionary War, the British captured Savannah, Georgia, as part of a “Southern Strategy” that aimed to rally support from Loyalists in the region. The following year, after Patriot forces allied with the French, some 4,000 soldiers from France and its colonies sailed to North America to help take back the city. Among them were the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a corps of 545 Black and mixed-race soldiers from present-day Haiti, then the wealthiest colony in the New World.
The plan to recapture Savannah failed, but soldiers from Saint-Domingue helped stave off a British counterattack. When the war ended in 1783, the new nation was indebted to France and its colonies. Saint-Domingue would launch its own revolution for independence less than a decade later, in part inspired by the Americans’ victory. According to Marlene L. Daut and other scholars, Henry Christophe, who became Haiti’s president in 1807, had served in the Savannah operation as a 12-year-old drummer with the Chasseurs-Volontaires.
Popular narratives in the United States often portray Haiti as impossibly foreign, a wellspring of disaster at odds with our own way of life. “Voodoo. AIDS. Boat People. Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere,” Rich Benjamin rattles off in his new memoir, Talk to Me: Lessons From a Family Forged by History. Benjamin complicates these notions by unraveling a family epic that traverses both countries, revealing that the two nations are far more interconnected than many Americans might assume.
Benjamin begins his story in modern-day Brooklyn; his mother, Danielle, is visiting from the suburbs of Maryland. One night, after they turn in, Benjamin is awakened by her cries in the next room. “Please don’t kill me,” she pleads to someone she can see only in her dreams. Benjamin writes that when he was growing up, his mother was “closed off and harsh in some instances”—anything but emotional. A career humanitarian who raised Benjamin and his siblings in an upper-middle-class enclave near Washington, D.C., Danielle taught her children to work hard and to value their schooling. Their father, Edouard Benjamin, was an economist for the World Bank. Both were industrious strivers at work and strict disciplinarians at home.
Benjamin spends the bulk of his book unearthing what lies beneath his parents’ still surfaces—his mother’s in particular. Danielle’s parents had come of age in Haiti during the U.S. occupation, which began in 1915 when an uprising of mixed-race Haitians from the ruling class—known as milats—threatened American commercial interests on the island. Discharged by Woodrow Wilson “to preserve order,” U.S. Marines disbanded the country’s legislature, created a new constitution, and took control of its treasury. They also imposed forced labor on the poor and seized valuable farmland before selling it to U.S. companies. Islanders attempted multiple acts of resistance, including guerilla attacks and student strikes. Still, by the end of the occupation in 1934, U.S. occupiers had killed at least 10,000 people.
Few Haitian heads of state would complete their terms in office for the next decades. In many cases, popular uprisings tipped the scales: Groups of students or poorer Haitians in the provinces would cause unrest in the capital when their resources grew especially scarce or a leader seemed to become too authoritarian.
Throughout Talk to Me, Benjamin knits together a winding history of the island’s geopolitical and domestic turbulence with an accounting of his family’s story. When Danielle was 13, her father, Daniel Fignolé, was appointed president of Haiti. As a popular professor of mathematics and history, Fignolé had founded a series of newspapers that criticized the milat elite. He spoke up for dark-skinned laborers who made up the country’s majority yet whose interests were not represented in government. As Fignolé galvanized laborers, an underground movement of intellectuals began to coalesce; before long, Fignolé had become head of a new party called MOP—Mouvement Ouvrier Paysan, or the Peasant Workers Movement. It was the “most organized labor party in Haitian history,” according to the scholar Matthew J. Smith.
Fignolé became a minister of state and a member of Parliament in the early 1950s. These years were considered Haiti’s golden age, when the country was a popular tourist destination especially for American bohemians drawn to the island’s rum, beaches, and hotels. But the new foreign-generated wealth did little to benefit the slums. The president, Colonel Paul Magloire, resigned under pressure from the masses, and Fignolé became president in a provisional agreement among various factions.
Nineteen days after Fignolé’s inauguration, in 1957, he was deposed by a military coup, in which soldiers violently removed him and his wife from their home in the middle of the night and kidnapped their seven children. Benjamin recounts how the children were held separately from their parents for 10 days, undergoing a traumatic ordeal. Some of them, including Danielle, were sexually assaulted by the soldiers.
U.S. operatives had been watching Fignolé since the early days of the left-wing MOP, and were aware of the coup. Fignolé and his family were exiled from Haiti, granted American visas, and forcibly relocated to New York. Penniless and petulant, Fignolé focused on leading a group of Haitians in exile and winning back his job as president. Meanwhile, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the notorious dictator who took over some time after Fignolé’s ouster, had banned citizens on the island from even speaking Fignolé’s name. The family settled in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; Fignolé’s wife, Carmen, shouldered their children’s care mostly alone.
Growing up, Benjamin knew only the general contours of his family’s history: that their migration to America had been under duress and that his grandfather’s political ambitions had been the cause. Fignolé, Benjamin writes, was “purged from our dinner-table conversations”; he believes that the silence “corroded” any possibility of real warmth from his mother. It also eventually alienated the author from his own heritage. As a young adult, Benjamin often denied his Haitianness. “To conjure Haiti meant to think of that bloody past,” he writes.
But to conjure Haiti is also to encounter many truths about the New World, the U.S. especially. Americans should see, in the island’s heroes, a reflection of their own rebellious heritage, their liberty-loving patriots who cast off an authoritarian, distant king. One might also heed the repercussions of colonialism, which are still visible in both places. Haiti and the U.S. are parallel societies in which a significant portion of the population was once enslaved, and both countries struggle with how to tell stories about that “bloody past.” In the U.S., book bans and curriculum mandates threaten to suppress its citizens’ history of subjugation and resistance. Danielle, for her part, also developed a commitment to silence, albeit for different reasons.
Benjamin’s book is, in its way, an attempt to “salvage damage from history.” When he tries to interview his mother, she is unwilling to discuss her childhood. “Her eyes narrowed, her lips puckered in anger, and she threatened me not to investigate the coup.” It is only through painstaking archival research and reporting, involving elderly extended relatives, former associates of his grandfather, and a lawsuit against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, that Benjamin is able to reconstruct many events in his family’s history. He realizes that he “cannot understand [his] mother without understanding her motherland”; his memoir is something of a plea, and a love letter, to both Danielle and her home country.
Benjamin seems to be trying to integrate his mother’s experiences into his understanding of himself. Danielle had kept their family’s Haitian past concealed, presumably to protect her children. But in doing so, she perhaps obscured connections between her own struggles and Benjamin’s attempts, throughout his youth, to determine his identity—especially as a teenager grappling with sickle cell anemia and his sexuality. When he finally travels to Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010, Benjamin is surprised to experience, among the ruins, a feeling of “respect” for the cultural vibrancy—won through resilience—that he encounters:
An electric-blue rag diagonally harnessing an Afro. A neck scarf tied just so. Bright plastic sunglasses perched on the nose. A sprawling meal conjured to accommodate unannounced guests. I call it Haiti-sexy. It’s an ephemeral quality, a Haitian style, delivering brilliance born of constraints. Improvised, sensual, cool.
For much of his time in Haiti, Benjamin does not identify himself as the grandson of Fignolé. He wishes to confront his history more privately, “to understand what about my family’s past undercut my present.” Although he is disappointed to discover that much of the archival evidence of his grandfather’s presidency has been destroyed, he does find a new sense of pride and purpose in his writing—through which he hopes to restore, as he writes, “remembrance to its rightful place.”
“My subject is Haiti, the Black Republic; the only self-made Black Republic in the world,” Frederick Douglass, once a minister to the country, said in an address at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He called Haiti a “sister republic” to the United States and declared that how Haiti fares “may be the destiny of the African race in our country and elsewhere.” La Isla Española—Hispaniola—was the site of the first permanent settlement of Christopher Columbus’s men. The French annexed the western third—the land that would eventually become Haiti—in 1697. Talk to Me makes the case that understanding Haiti’s place in the New World might lead to a fuller accounting of the entire hemisphere’s history—including our own.
*Illustration sources: Boursiquot / Jerome family collection; Joe Raedle / Getty; Benjamin family collection.
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