Pèlin-tèt has been staged more often than any other play written in Haitian, drawing some fifty thousand spectators at the Rex in Port-au-Prince and across the diaspora, and Past sets out to explain why almost no criticism of it exists. She reads it beside its Polish source by Sławomir Mrożek, beside Franketyèn's own rewriting of 2002, and beside Spiralism, the movement he founded with René Philoctète and Jean-Claude Fignolé while choosing to stay in Haiti under the Duvaliers. The action never leaves a New York basement shared by an unschooled labourer with legal papers and a French-speaking pseudo-intellectual who fled torture and fears deportation. Past unpacks their names, their neologisms built from English, and their competing accounts of what their situation means. Against critics who take the play as an argument for staying home, she holds that it treats migration as permanent and calls for solidarity across class and language among Haitians everywhere.