Suarez reads Jean-Robert Cadet's Restavec as testimony rather than memoir - a disclosure undertaken, as such disclosures always are, at the cost of returning to what happened. Cadet, born Alfrenold Brutus to a wealthy man and a factory worker, was handed after his mother's death to his father's former mistress and raised in fear and shame as an unpaid child servant.

The book splits between Haiti and the United States, but Suarez notes that the American chapters stay governed by the Haitian injury: nightmares, a marriage lived alongside the trauma, Cadet's own likening of his long silence to that of a rape victim.

She sets the book against documentary films and campaigns on behalf of restavek children, and against a literature that has minimized or denied the arrangement altogether. Cadet's circumstances were atypical, but his survival contradicts the claim that such placements benefit the child, and his writing joins a long tradition of autobiography used as political act.