Forsdick tracks the place of Haiti in Edouard Glissant's writing, from the early poem sequence Les Indes through the prison drama Monsieur Toussaint to the essays gathered in Le Discours antillais. Haiti is Martinique's counter-example: two islands reached by Europeans within a decade of each other and worked by the same plantation system, whose paths diverged irrevocably in the age of revolutions.

Glissant came to the country through Cesaire's example and through his 1946 meeting with the exiled photographer Gerald Bloncourt. What he took from it was less a subject than a method. Toussaint, rewritten across several versions of the play, is kept unfinished and opaque rather than turned into a martyr, and the solidarity he gestures toward across the region anticipates the Antillanite Glissant developed after returning home in 1965.

Haiti works, in the end, as a detour: a history thick enough to make alternative Martinican futures thinkable, and to supply the journal Acoma with its bearings.