TALK TO ME

An inquisitive scholar explores his family’s hidden past.

“Unspeakable things, unspoken.” That much described the silence that shrouded Benjamin’s mother, and, as he chronicles in this searching memoir, for good reason: Traumatized as a child, she became an advocate for children who had suffered violence while enabling Benjamin’s father’s violence at home. “Don’t tell the neighbors,” she would say after his father administered floggings that, Benjamin writes wryly, “were a rational, bourgeois affair” intended to punish Benjamin’s seemingly unshakable habit of getting into trouble over small transgressions. Outside the home and the neighbors’ gaze, the family was the soul of propriety, his mother a natural-born aristocrat, the daughter of a short-reigned president of Haiti. Therein lie some of the secrets that Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia (2009), means to tease out in order to relate the “disremembered years” of his mother’s life in Haiti, “lost stanzas in an epic poem.” Interwoven into the family tale is a memoir of Benjamin’s own life as a gay man whose mother, having finally learned of his sexuality, sent him a clipping from the New York Times headlined “HIV Rates Spiking Among Young Gay Men of Color.” Benjamin’s often arch sense of humor shines through these pages, even as he relates the “toxic antics” of his youth, antics that, way back in the pre-smartphone days of yore, happily went unrecorded: “We were fabulous when we were fabulous, and when we dressed up, we did it for ourselves, for one another. Everything was communal, exclusive, not broadcast and needy for likes.” Although many secrets remain, Benjamin did learn a few things from his mother that have clearly stood him well in difficult circumstances, as when she revealed her recipe for survival: “When you’ve been to hell and back…nothing can ever destroy you.”

An evocative, wise memoir of a multilayered search for roots.