Between Tides = Entre Les Eaux

by V.Y. Mudimbe

Un prêtre noir, un intellectuel occidentalisé découvre l'ambiguïté de sa situation. Si par fidélité au message évangélique il renie l'Eglise, son adhésion aux thèses marxistes-léninistes de maquisards africains n'est encore qu'une fuite, un tourment et un terrible échec. Ce roman témoigne de la quête exemplaire d'une authenticité humaine dont ce monde rend peut-être l'accomplissement impossible.

189 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was a Congolese philosopher, professor, and author of poems, novels, as well as books and articles on African culture and intellectual history. Mudimbe was Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of Romance Studies and professor of comparative literature at Duke University and maître de conférences at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.

Reviews

[Naomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

My, my - our protagonist here is insufferable. Always seeing symbolism and deeper meaning in everything. Problem is, we're very similar, so...

"My rebellion was a return to the fold: I was rejoining those who cared." (p.13)

"The cool evening air. The brooding night. A glass of whiskey. And music rising, sweet, intoxicating, voluptuous... a kind of sacrament." (p.21)

"There we are: I was too complicated. The idiot mark of a university career... But isn't simplification sometimes impoverishment? How to convey the richness of the message with a poverty of symbols? If we oversimplify the form, don't we kill the content? If we purify it of life's eddies and agitations, doesn't it become a sensational blurb, no longer true because all the human shades and subtleties have been wrung out of it?" (p.27)

"Nothing exists now but my purpose and my pain. But I feel a frightful need of God. Is this all-pervasive absence a sign of love? It cannot be a simple negation; not possibly. Only that void justifies my purpose, my life. I believe. I continue to believe precisely because He is no longer present to me. His absence is yet a presence. His passion. His power to forgive may yet reveal itself." (p.37)

"You need a Virgin for your salvation and a woman for your manhood." (p.59)

[Lessidisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

On suit Pierre, un congolais qui a été baptisé étant enfant. Il devient prêtre, fait des études en Europe et au Vatican, s'éloigne de ses origines. Ensuite il vit dans la contradiction d'être un prêtre noir dans la religion imposée par le colonisateur ce qui lui crée des problèmes psychologiques. Il rejoint un mouvement rebelle marxiste au Congo, ce qui ne lui apporte pas non plus la paix de l'esprit. Livre théologique peu compréhensible, qui tourne en rond, comme quand on ressasse sans cesse.

C'est pourquoi je n'ai pas osé le scandalisé en lui disant que durant tout l'office j'étais mortifié. Comme toujours d'ailleurs. Je pense tout le temps à mes voisins, hanté que je suis pas l'horreur de leurs corps suants. J'ai répondu poliment, selon les rites :
– Oui, Monseigneur, si nous pouvions être des prières vivantes. Notre bonheur serait total.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some authors get so totally focused on conveying a message that they seem to forget their novel should also be entertaining. Reading Between Tides by the Congolese author V.Y Mudimbe was impossible to finish as a result.

It's a novel written from the perspective of Pierre Landu, a black African Catholic priest who is experiencing doubts about his faith. He is struggling to accept that his religion is truly meeting the needs of his countrymen at a time when the country is experiencing a crisis. Fearing that God is on the side of the colonial oppressors and not on the side of those who seek liberation, he rejects the priesthood to join a Marxist revolutionary force. When the book opens he is undergoing a tough training regime designed to turn him into a Marxist guerrilla and to 're-educate' himself. But his fellow fighters are not convinced by the level of his conviction in their cause. And it becomes clear Landu has his doubts too about this new life he has chosen.

The plot sounded reasonable when I chose it as part of my World Literature project but it became evident within just a few pages that this would be hard going. Between Tides is full of tedious passages of self examination by Landu written in a declamatory style more suited to polemic than fiction.

Weariness. Despondency. Slogans sanctify acts that in other circumstances we might not consider hopeful. How can we accept this pretty patchwork of murderous phrases, hiding their freight of corpses! I would like to hear words that sprang from naked reality!. Once again I measure the gap between them and me. Echoes — which long since ceased to rouse me — fade in my ears; the positive nature of violence, the dialectic of history, the ineluctable application of the historical law of thesis and antithesis. the bloodshed for idealogical purity! The dialectic of the master and the slave. The class struggle.

I don't want books that are so easy to read they barely tickle my brain cells. But neither do I want to waste my brain trying to get even a glimmer of understanding of what the author means. In the end reading Between Tides became a chore and I just couldn't continue.