Bell gathered testimony from Haitian women during the 1991 to 1994 dictatorship and the period after Aristide's return, recording open-ended interviews in Creole with market vendors, factory organisers, peasant activists, poets, a cabinet minister and survivors of political rape and mutilation. Each speaker later reviewed and revised her own transcript. Bell presents the results as istwa, story and history together, and calls the speakers griyo, the keepers of knowledge in an oral culture, because they move constantly between personal experience and analysis of Haitian politics, class and gender. The organising claim is that survival is itself resistance, and that resistance extends through cultural expression and the Creole language, through organising for economic and political change, through demands for gender justice, and through efforts to remake power rather than seize it. The range of the women's responses refuses any single figure standing for the Haitian woman.