This article provides a close reading of Marie-Célie Agnant’s Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007) and Femmes au temps des carnassiers (2015), novels that examine the range of women’s experiences during the Duvalier dictatorship. Inspired by real lives, they look back with a critical eye, offering multigenerational perspectives on the era and its aftermath. Agnant reimagines women who wield, abuse, defer to, contest, and resist power, as well as those who are coerced into silence in order to survive.

In this essay, Larrier analyses literary several texts, the main one being Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, so as to explore themes of testimony among women in literature. The author analyses how in Caribbean cultures, women are positioned to see and hear, but they are not always publicly acknowledged as oral historians and storytellers. Many of the female characters mentioned experience trauma and are positioned as witnesses who must transmit information to others but their testimony is almost never given in a courtroom, which reflects the distrust in the current systems.