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.