In 'Talk to Me,' the grandson of a former Haitian president uncovers family secrets

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4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

In 1957, a labor leader named Daniel Fignolé was the president of Haiti for 19 days. Just two weeks after his inauguration, he was forced to sign a resignation letter as part of a U.S.-backed coup. But growing up, Rich Benjamin – Fignolé's grandson – didn't know anything about his grandfather's political career. The cultural anthropologist says his family, especially his mother, erected a "wall of silence" around him. A new memoir, Talk to Me, is Benjamin's attempt to fill in these gaps in his family history. In today's episode, the author speaks with NPR's A Martínez about Fignolé's work with labor unions, state-sanctioned silence, and the State Department documents that helped Benjamin piece together his grandfather's story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Amper's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Sure, we've all got family secrets. I bet there's
0:07.6	tons of stuff our grandparents did that we have no idea about. But my grandparents, and I'm guessing
0:14.2	yours, weren't heads of state. But Rich Benjamin's was. His grandfather was president of Haiti.
0:21.1	Granted, it was only for 19 days, but that makes his story even more enticing.
0:26.2	And yet Benjamin heard nothing about his grandfather growing up.
0:29.6	He's got a new book out now titled Talk to Me about trying to uncover his family's history.
0:34.7	And he talked to Empir's A. Martian as about how he circumvented
0:38.1	the wall of silence erected by his own family. That's coming up. In the U.S., national security
0:45.7	news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.
0:53.0	On our new show, Sources and Methods.
0:55.1	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why
0:59.8	distant events matter here at home.
1:02.7	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:08.1	Author and anthropologist Rich Benjamin's maternal grandfather, Daniel Finiola, was the president of Haiti for 19 days in 1957.
1:17.5	His short-lived presidency ended when the Haitian armed forces broke into the presidential chambers,
1:22.4	forced him at gunpoint to sign a resignation letter, and then exiled him to New York City.
1:28.8	Soon after, the brutal reign of Francois Pavadok Duvalier took over Haiti. Now, despite his grandfather being the leader of a
1:34.8	nation, Benjamin didn't know much about him. The desire to fill in those gaps are the core
1:39.9	of Benjamin's new family memoir, Talk to Me. Rich Benjamin joins us now. So, Rich, let's begin actually where your book ends.
1:46.0	You rushed to Haiti soon after the earthquake in 2010.
1:49.6	How much did you know at that point about your grandfather?
1:53.4	I had known relatively little about my grandfather by the time I rushed to Haiti in 2010.
	...

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