Fifty Bouqui and Malice tales gathered from Haitian country storytellers open with a preface that treats the collection as evidence about a people. Comhaire-Sylvain traces roughly half the stories to African sources, chiefly the West African and Bantu Hare cycle, a few to French or Oriental material that reached Haiti through Africa or Europe, and finds no external parallel for seventeen. Origin, she argues, settles little, because no community takes over another's folklore whole. Character shows instead in what a people selects, misremembers, recombines and reinterprets, and the Haitian versions consistently favour episodes featuring the hyena and rework endings to fit local judgement. She reads Bouqui and Malice as men rather than animals, and their pairing as peasant against townsman, the unlettered against the savé, and behind that the bossale against the creole slave. Country audiences admire Malice; their pity goes to Bouqui.