His Grandfather Was Haiti’s President for 19 Days. The Trauma Endures.

TALK TO ME: Lessons From a Family Forged by History, by Rich Benjamin

On June 13, 1957, Daniel Fignolé — duly inaugurated as Haiti’s president 19 days earlier — was deposed in a late-night military coup d’état led by Gen. Antonio “Thompson” (after the machine gun) Kébreau. A mere 43 years old, the charismatic Fignolé was already legendary for his relentless activism on behalf of the peasantry and urban poor, and for the fiery orations that could, at a moment’s notice, rouse thousands of his supporters — his woulo konpresè, or steamroller — to take to the streets in a show of raw political force. He was as beloved by the common people as he was loathed and feared by the Haitian elite and U.S. business interests.

On that June night, Fignolé and his wife, Carmen, were packed off to New York with only the clothes on their backs. Their seven children were taken from the family’s home in Port-au-Prince and transported to the notorious Dessalines Barracks: five girls and two boys, ranging in age from Danielle, the oldest at 13, to Carmen, the baby, age 2.

The children were deposited in a basement room, slapped, mocked and shouted at. The girls were taken into a closet and raped. For 10 days the Fignolé children were held in the barracks, while on the streets the Haitian Army embarked on the wholesale slaughter of their father’s supporters. In the chaos, a brave young aunt tracked down the children, negotiated their release and engineered their escape to the Dominican Republic, and, ultimately, to New York, where they were reunited with their parents.

The deposed president and his family ended up in a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. While Daniel fumed over his lost presidency and schemed to reclaim power, his wife worked as a housekeeper and applied for welfare benefits. Carmen and the children lived in terror of Daniel’s rages and hair-trigger temper, and his ferocious beatings. Within a few years he would leave Carmen for a younger woman, and wouldn’t see Haiti again until 1986, after the fall of the Duvalier regime that had succeeded him in 1957. Gray, tottering and terminally ill, Fignolé returned to a hero’s welcome, and died five months later, still doing politics on his deathbed.

“Their bodies bore the weight of empire,” Rich Benjamin, Fignolé’s grandson, writes of his family in “Talk to Me: Lessons From a Family Forged by History.” His account is a harrowing depiction of “transgenerational haunting” (a term coined by psychoanalysts in the wake of the Holocaust), the ways in which silenced or forgotten historical trauma persists in the lives of survivors and their descendants. Benjamin’s mother, Danielle — the 13-year-old girl who was raped in the Dessalines Barracks — became a high-achieving professional married to a Yale-educated economist, but despite the family’s financial security, life was anything but peaceful.