Why do writers from Martinique dominate critical discussion of Caribbean writing in French? Glover's answer begins with geography and career. Authors who made the journey to Paris also produced the theoretical manifestos that taught European and North American critics how to read them, and that legibility bought them a place in the canon. Writers who stayed on their island and supplied no such interpretive key were left outside it. The three she takes up, Franketienne, Jean-Claude Fignole and Rene Philoctete, wrote under Duvalier and named their practice Spiralism, a poetics of disorder taken from the figure of the spiral. Close readings of their novels follow, organised around character, around the handling of time and space, and around narrative technique, including possession as a stylistic device and the framing of peasant life. The argument doubles back on postcolonial studies itself, asking what its appetite for self theorising authors has cost the field.