Haitian women — peasants, market vendors, community organisers, survivors of rape under military rule — tell their own lives here. Bell recorded the narratives, edited them, then carried the text back to each speaker to be corrected, expanded, and cut where publication would be dangerous. She calls them istwa, the Creole word that means at once a tale and a history, and their tellers griyo, borrowing the standing of the village keepers of memory.

The speakers move constantly between personal incident and political analysis, and Bell's claim is that their range defeats any single figure of the Haitian woman. She is candid about the limits: a white American author, a book in English that most of its subjects can neither read nor afford, and the absence of the exiled, the wealthy, and the many who did not survive.

It opens around a cooking fire on Millet Mountain, where women trace their courage back to Anacaona.