Are They Mad? Nation and Narration in Tous les hommes sont fous

Abstract

All Men Are Mad, by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin, is set during the antisuperstition campaign in Haiti, which was led by the French Catholic Church during the 1940s. The Marcelin brothers' novel was not only a devastating critique of religious persecution but also a pithy commentary on the structure of the nation-state, meaning all nation-states, not only the polity of Haiti. The text was consequently misread by literary critics whose stereotype of Haitians and belief in nationalism influenced their mean-spirited dismissals of the novel. This paper rereads the Marcelins' prescient novel and addresses its critics in light of critical theory and ethnography.