Lamour reads the Haitian poto-mitan woman, the one who serves as a central pillar, as a figure with a colonial history rather than a timeless cultural type. Intersectionality and coloniality supply the analytic tools.

Colonial rule and the relations that outlived slavery, in this account, formed and reproduced one another, setting up arrangements of power that still run through Haiti and that tie personal life to national and global forces. One effect is that the labour of poto-mitan women is routinely cast as something deviant.

By putting the figure back into time, Lamour shows how familiar ways of describing it lay claim to the bodies and the hours of women who are handed the work of supporting and protecting everyone else.