Belony's doctoral thesis follows how Haitians in Quebec have spoken about and remembered Duvalierism, and finds no straight line running through that record.

Competing accounts of what Duvalierist power was, and where it belongs in Haiti's national story, have been argued over within the diaspora, and the arguments have shifted as political conditions changed on both sides — in Haiti and in Quebec. The thesis ends on a claim about interpretation itself: whether a given reading of Duvalierism comes out favourable or damning, it is always anchored in some wider judgment about what Haiti has become since 1986.