Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain: The Roman de Bouqui, African folktales in the Caribbean

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain was Haiti’s first black female anthropologist. A student of Marcel Mauss and Bronisław Malinowski, she became a specialist in Creole and Haitian storytelling and conducted various studies on the status of women and oral literature in Africa. Her research focused primarily on Haitian folklore and on the origins of the Creole language, considered minor and worthless at the time. At a time when all over the world, academics were discovering traditional storytelling, she successively published Les Contes haïtiens (1937), Contes du pays d’Haïti (1938) and Le Roman de Bouqui (1940/1973). The publication of Le Roman de Bouqui triggered the process of rediscovery of Haitian oral literature, theorized in 1928 by Jean Price-Mars, revealing Bouqui as the golden thread taking us from Senegal to the rest of West Africa and the West Indies, always confronted to the same smart accomplice, there Leuk the hare or Tortoise, here Malice. This study will examine this third collection to reveal how it is built on the universal folktale structure, closely connected to African folktales, weaved around the trickster and his family, revealing the closeness of African and Haitian cultures.