Rich Benjamin — Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History - with Edgar Kunz

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.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593317396?ic_referral=p4XaFfitqSPSnkti-AHIZtpp7NWDCuGW7eBt9YkPyEYwM-OwOJPp6cWt4WO6HfrnROhwOp-SCBxtqPMAs0v2CQaIF1LmbokXP2GqsT51ixeRwgdhCFwLaINrvzy9ojQQvV69ngRich 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.Benjamin is in conversation with Edgar Kunz, the author of Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice book, and Tap Out (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He lives in Baltimore where he teaches at Goucher College and in the Newport MFA.*recorded 2/13/2025