Monkey Misery

A Haitian tale with a warning: be careful what you ask for

This tale, collected by Diane Wolkstein in Haiti, became well known when published in her book The Magic Orange Tree (1978).

In 1990 I was fortunate enough to hear it told by Hugh Lupton when hosting the Company of Storytellers for a weekend (an important impetus in starting my own telling career).
Hugh's 2019 publication Tales of Wisdom and Wonder has a text.
Another version is in Allison Galbraith's Funny Folk Tales for Children, (History Press - and conveniently available as an eBook).

More about Haitian tales

A storytelling friend asked about other versions/variant of the stories collected in The Magic Orange Tree. I used Mistral.ai (a French ai platform). Below is the ai reply:

Yes — there's actually a rich pre-1980 paper trail, and it's very passable-along-able. Diane Wolkstein collected her 27 tales orally in the Haitian countryside in the mid-1970s, but almost all of the story types in The Magic Orange Tree were already documented in print decades earlier. Here's what I'd tell your friend:

The key pre-1980 written sources

Harold Courlander is the single most important predecessor. He made 20+ field trips to Haiti starting in 1932, published Haiti Singing (1939), and above all The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (1960), a classic collection of tales with the Creole song texts and comparative notes. His The Piece of Fire and Other Haitian Tales is another collection, and his field recordings (1939–40 onward) are archived at Indiana University's Archives of Traditional Music (Wikipedia, Indiana University, Internet Archive). Many of Wolkstein's stories overlap with Courlander's versions.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Haiti's first woman anthropologist, published Le Roman de Bouqui (1937, in French/Creole) and several tales in the Journal of American Folklore — for instance her version of the fish-lover tale (Tezin Nan Dlo, which Wolkstein prints as "Taizan") appeared in JAF with Creole text and English translation (Wikipedia, ResearchGate). Her work is the deep comparative source for Bouki/Ti Malice material.

Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'Oncle (1928) — the foundational study that put Haitian oral literature on the scholarly map and theorized its African roots (ResearchGate).

Philippe and Pierre Thoby-Marcelin, The Singing Turtle and Other Tales from Haiti (1971) — an English-language collection close in spirit to Wolkstein's, and a blogger who compared the two found direct overlaps, including a version of the fish-lover tale and a Bouki contest story (Wikipedia, Multicolored Diary).

Helen Leneva Flowers, A Classification of the Folktale of the West Indies by Types and Motifs (Arno Press, 1980, compiled earlier as a dissertation) — this is the lookup tool: it indexes Haitian tales by ATU/Thompson type and motif with references to the collections above, so it's the fastest way to find printed antecedents of any specific Wolkstein tale (Wikipedia).

On the stories themselves

A few of the best-known Wolkstein tales are demonstrably multi-source: Tezin Nan Dlo has "many versions" across Haiti, the wider Caribbean, and West Africa, with variants collected well before Wolkstein (Wikipedia). The trickster pair Bouki and Ti Malice (Wolkstein's Bouki and Thézin-cycle material) descend from West African trickster traditions — Bouki is the Wolof hyena bukki, paired with Malice echoing Leuk-the-hare cycles from Senegal (Fonkoze, ResearchGate). "The Magic Orange Tree" itself belongs to the wonder-tale family where a humble child magically produces food/fruit (cf. ATU-type magic-tree and "orange of happiness" motifs found across the Caribbean and West Africa).

For post-1980 companions worth mentioning: Liliane Nérette Louis's When Night Falls, Kric! Krac! (1999), told by a Haitian-born storyteller, overlaps with Wolkstein's repertoire (Multicolored Diary) — and interestingly, several of Wolkstein's tales have since been translated back into Creole in Haiti, so her book is now itself part of the tradition (Bandcamp/Diane Wolkstein).

Practical suggestion for the friend

For any given Wolkstein tale, the workflow is: look it up in Flowers' West Indies classification (or in the Types of the Folktale index) to get the ATU/motif numbers, then chase those numbers in Courlander's The Drum and the Hoe and Comhaire-Sylvain's publications. That will recover the pre-1980 printed versions for nearly every story in the book — Wolkstein's notes tell you who she heard it from; Courlander and Comhaire-Sylvain tell you where the story had already lived in print.

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For those who are teachers: Telling stories in the classroom: basing language teaching on storytelling