Vengeance Assuaged: A One-Shot Analysis of Daratt (Global Contemporary Cinema Homework)

Daratt
Directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Analysis by Michael Bridgman

Opening Frame:










Closing Frame:










Daratt (Dry Season) is a 2006 drama film from Chad directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. A central African nation with a tumultuous postcolonial situation following its independence from French occupation in 1960, Chad has undergone a troubled history of political corruption, internal conflict, and widespread poverty. Daratt appears to be set in the aftermath of the second civil war at a historical moment when many war-torn nations, Chad included, begin to assemble judicial apparatuses of inquiry on the model of the post-apartheid South African Truth and Reconcilliation Commission, instituted under the auspices of restorative justice. It is a film released in the second year of Chad’s fourth civil war, which continues to the present writing of 2010. At the beginning of Daratt, Atim (Ali Bacha Barkai) the hero runs home to his grandfather Gumar (Khayar Oumar Defallah), who immediately summons him to listen to the news on the radio. Over the airwaves, the “President of the Commission of Truth and Justice” announces it has “finally finished its work on crimes committed during the civil war.” “During our work,” he explains, “which has taken six months, we have interrogated 200 war criminals, and heard over 600 victims and witnesses. The Commission makes a solemn appeal to end the cycle of war that has eaten away at our country for more than 40 years. Thus the Commission of Truth and Justice has decided upon a general amnesty throughout the land...” Horrified by this prospect, Atim immediately flicks off the radio, asks: “Grandfather, how could this happen?” and runs off. In the moments that follow, we hear the sounds of outraged voices and machine gun fire off from some distance as indiscernible to blind Gumar as it is to us.

We learn that despite his courage in battle, Atim’s father was killed in the war by Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), who Gumar describes as “a dangerous man.” Unfolding his father’s old pistol from a towel folded into a pouch, the old patriarch presents it to Atim as an inheritance, commissioning him to seek revenge for the death of his father. “I shall go into the desert,” he says in a word of benediction, “I shall pray God to watch over you.” This vigil evokes Jesus of Nazareth’s symbolic retreat to the desert for forty days following his baptism where he is beset with conflict over his vocation and identity,[1] echoing the Judeo-Christian leitmotif of exile and return. Commenting on the importance of this recurring theme to geopolitically dispossessed Africans, Philip Jenkins writes: “Just as relevant to current concerns is exile, forcible removal from one’s homeland, which forms the subject of so much of the Hebrew Bible. About half the refugees in the world today are in Africa, and millions of these are Christian. The wars that have swept over the Congo and Central Africa over the past decade have been devastating in uprooting communities. Often, it is the churches that provide the refugees with cohesion and community, and offer them hope, so that exile and return acquire powerfully religious symbolism.”[2] The population of Chad is split between a Muslim majority, and a significant Christian minority, and Jenkins cites the country as an example of the phenomena in which religiously oriented “governments massage [census] figures to make their own side look more powerful, especially in regions with deep political and cultural divisions.” Certainly in line with his general thesis, it is a region ripe for violently tumultuous interfaith conflict, which bodes bitter fruit indeed.

Atim ventures forth in a presumably second-hand military surplus jungle camouflage jacket, symbolizing a spirit of militancy that stands in stark contrast to the acquiescence of the people surrounding him. Shortly thereafter, he is threatened at gunpoint by a thuggish member of the Chadian military in full uniform, and violently assaulted on the street by two more, signaling that his own interests do not lie with the present hegemonic order of things. Atim carries around with him a manner and countenance suggestive of profound rage mingled with deep pain, as well as a bag in which he keeps his belongings and secrets. Narrating his struggle between long stretches of silence, he explains: “My father’s killer was never charged. He lives in total freedom. I never knew my father. He was killed before I was born. That’s why I’m called Atim, the orphan.” Coming to terms with these themes of the death of the father and “the story of children lost and far from home,” a tale with “universal appeal” which “in the age of existentialism and thereafter... has been all the rage,”[4] one cannot but think of Friedrich Nietzsche’s parable of the Death of God. Nietszche tells the haunting tale of a madman who seeks God but cannot find God, and surrounded by mocking unbelievers who live as if nothing has changed, he declares that he, and they, have murdered God with their bloody knives. Holding a lantern at the break of dawn, he prophecies that the earth has become unchained from the sun to drift into the endless cosmic abyss, that all values can no longer be rooted in that which is eternal, holiest and mightiest, but must be created ex nihilo by those who transcend the human condition for the sake of human survival. “Then the time of exile begins,” explains Albert Camus, “the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?’ Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle.”[5] While no one can be certain of the extent to which director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun is directly familiar with existentialist sources, his exilic dislocation to France after coming of age in Chad is ripe for the absorption of such influences.

Atim too is uncertainly positioned with regard to his beliefs matters of faith, although his noticeable discomfort surrounding Muslim practice signals his religious minority status. Might we describe him as Christian without forgiveness, or a disillusioned young man whose faith died with his father? Whatever his beliefs, he quietly pursues Nassara through the streets in a spirit of resentment, with his pistol at ready to gun him down as the opportunity arises. He lives like a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode, and a t-shirt he once wears aptly declares him to be “Mad of Africa (sic.)”. But to kill another human being for vengeance is not so easy as aesthetically portrayed in stories like Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Cask of Amontillado”, or a slew of Hollywood narrative films, and the principle theme of Daratt is to illustrate this point. Atim discovers Nassara now owns and operates a bakery, where he distributes daily bread to impoverished, possibly orphaned young males. This leads to a silent showdown in which Atim pointedly tastes, and then rejects, Nassara’s bread offering. In a second encounter under similar circumstances, they stare down one another, until Nassara places a mechanical larynx to the side of of his throat, and his artificial tongue wisply resonates in query: “Just what do you want?” After a long pause, Atim responds: “Not charity.” After a reciprocal pause in which a competing bakery van pulls up nearby, Nassara graciously extends the offer: “If it’s work you want, come back tomorrow.”

Atim indeed takes up this offer, which affords ample opportunity for character development, both for Nassara and for him. A cyborg engendered of military and medicine, a wartime incident in which someone tried to frag him by slitting his throat while he slept has radically reshaped his identity, a situation in which mechanical symbiosis becomes necessary for speech and survival. This lends him a strong element of tragic pathos against Atim’s remarkably similar efforts. We learn that after the civil war, Nassara turned a new leaf, becoming a devout Muslim both in word and deed. He now lives with Aïcha (Aziza Hisseine), a young woman wed to him, a middle aged man, through an arranged marriage, rather than by choice. By the by, we learn that she has become pregnant, which down the line will play a very important role in the narrative. Apparently Nassara is a well-respected man in his community, certainly enough to lend him enough capital to start a bakery, where he can lead a quiet life of honest repose. He seems to see in Atim an angry young man whose present mirrors his own past, and he hopes to be a mentor to him, perhaps even a second father. On his first day of work, Nassara invites Atim to the mosque where he worships, asking: “You are a Muslim, aren’t you?” Realizing Atim’s reluctance to accept the invitation, he adds: “It doesn’t matter, I was like that before.” But Atim expresses his profound doubts in God’s power to save, saying: “Going to the mosque won’t redeem you,” presumably speaking for himself as well as his adversary. Both men are understandably reluctant to share information about their personal history, so their relationship largely develops in the unspoken silence of mutual understanding.

Despite Atim’s hostile intentions, a deep bond ferments between them through the shared outpouring of labor in the baking of bread. “Making bread requires love and attention,” explains Nassara, “Without love, the bread is not good. You see?” Similarly, an intimate interpersonal relationship develops between Aïcha and Atim, certainly closer than is customary under Muslim standards of propriety. Still, Atim has not forgotten his reason for coming, and he seeks an opportunity to strike, a prospect which proves increasingly difficult emotionally. Often in moments of solitude he makes aggressive gestures with his pistol, as if to psyche himself up (think Taxi Driver). But Nassara is committed not only being innocent as doves, but also wise as serpents, and it is strongly implied he discretely removes Atim’s concealed weapon from his bag of secrets to hide where he can’t find it. Things get more complicated, the other bakery pulls the old “If you’re not happy, complain to the WTO” line when Nassara disputes their truck selling across the street. He asks Atim about his father, but is met with the ultimatum: “Do you really want to know?” The month of Ramadan draws close at hand, and Nassara implores Atim to keep him company, for it is difficult to bear breaking the fast alone because of the nature of his profession. But tension swells, and Atim indeed leaves him literally alone in the dark after they encounter another Muslim who exerts friendly pressures, declaring: “You are not my father! You got that?” Eventually Nassara loses his temper, and is issued a police summons for assaulting the other bakery’s driver. This affords Atim time to sit back and relax to a spirited jazz performance from a female vocalist of brilliant artistic expression, drinking alcoholic beverages, and thrashing the intoxicated loose cannon who threatened him at gunpoint earlier. But it isn’t as satisfying as he hoped it would be.

Upon his return, Atim finds Aïcha in mourning clothes, and learns that she has miscarried, because of which she is understandably distraught. Nassara has closed shop to grieve in solitude. Finding him later drinking a bottle in the dark, he laments: “God has abandoned me, Atim. Nobody around here likes me, I know that. You hate me too, I can see it in your eyes.” Which is to say, he is truly alone in the universe, flung unwillingly into a world of dialectical hatred, a world of prisons, armies, and executioners. Hegel “had chosen to demonstrate human minds in blind combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for one another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination. Those who love, friends or lovers, know that love is not only a blinding flash, but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation.”[6] Whereas before it seemed his survival and prosperity owed to divine mercy, in the manifest anxiety of the traumatic fissure it now appears to owe to cosmic indifference. Or has God indeed heard Gumar’s desert cries for deliverance, and smote the forlorn couple’s firstborn in retribution? Can God forgive us our crimes against humanity, and can we forgive God for crimes against humanity, or are these terms irreconcilably contradictory? What would this imply for human destiny in a world such as our own?

Which brings us to the scene of which this one-shot analysis concerns. Like Donna Haraway’s reading of Buchi Emecheta,[7] here the framing narrative hitherto contextualizes a seemingly unassuming image, a very frog prince of celluloid, revealing it to have far deeper significance than a mere jot and tittle. Our group’s scene begins in the cut immediately after the darkness just described, in a well-lit room, with our three central characters gathered around. Atim listens with anticipation to the words that are about to be spoken as Nassara and Aïcha sit side by side. “I want to adopt you as my son,” says Nassara through the artificial voice box, “For that, I need your parent’s agreement. Your father’s especially. Where is your father?” Should Atim the orphan accept the offer, although no one can sanction it, he will join a family bond born not of blood, but by choice. But although the appeal is in good faith, Atim retreats outside, where he is entreated by Aïcha to reconsider, but in the presence of Nassara he runs further still. This is where my shot comes in. Pulling his camouflage jacket and white overshirt off the rack, he hastily folds and stuffs them, along with his other belongings, into his pack. Evidently he would rather keep the secret than join the family. With his pack now over this shoulder, he looks about with an expression of desperation, before exiting the frame. ‘So what?’ Two things. First, this marks the exact moment Atim definitively gives up his quest for revenge, and all that this action signifies for the concurrent political situation, past, present, and future. He will leave, become exiled anew, but he will not return to kill Nassara. Second, it poses the question as to where exactly is “home”, and all the ways that specifically situated term resonates. Usually, this kind of shot signals exiting roles from a family already established, the start of a quest along the lines of the “lost children” motif. Something like Betty Boop being subjected by her father to a pre-recorded deuterocanonical scolding about the virtue of eating sauerkraut, packing her bags, running away from home, and finding a mad mad world haunted by a drunken skeleton crew, phantom prisoners and their ghastly executioner, and the hip jazz of dancing ghost-walrus Cab Calloway. Here however, “home” signifies two conflicting contexts, the relation to which Atim, the dually situated exile must now existentially define.

Aspect Ratio: 1:85:1
Shot Duration: 27 seconds
Shot Size: A medium close-up
Sound: Set in a silent room, the rapid rustling of cloth and zippers signal amidst Atim’s complete silence signals his hasty departure. While no word or weapon enforces his departure, Atim concludes in good or bad faith that a return to exile is his most viable option.
Contrast dominant(s): Dressed in a black shirt amidst a stark off-white room, Atim is the main contrast dominant to which his domestic environment is secondary to him and the contents of that room. In the order of their appearance in the shot, the secondary contrast dominants are the green jungle camouflage jacket, symbol of a spirit of postcolonial militancy, the blue jean bag of comparable color to the pants he is wearing, symbol of guarded secrets, and the humble faded red-plaid covered bed upon which he sleeps, symbol of the idea of home. The contrast dominants lead the viewer to consider the relation of these symbolic elements to one another.
Character movement: Atim begins in the far left edge of the frame, facing his hanging jackets on the wall at a distance. Quickly he walks to the wall and removes these articles from the nails upon which they hang, he hastily folds them as he veers to his right, before stopping at his bed. There still standing, he unfastidiously stuffs his various articles of clothing into his bag, zips it, and throws it over his shoulder. He then stops to pause, looking around with an expression of inner turmoil and helpless desperation, before departing screen left. Atim did not choose this course of events, but he does choose to leave. But does he thereby choose to leave or return home? His manner and expression belies this conflict of situated identity. He now fully grasps that he cannot, will not, carry through his initial motives of revenge, even as he is deeply reluctant to enter into such an intimate relationship with the man who murdered his father, who deprived him of orientation to a home.
Character proxemics: For most of the duration of the shot, Atim is oriented away from the camera, just as he is now oriented away from his adoptive surrogate family, concealing his inner emotions beyond the outward manifestation of his behavior. Initially with has back turned on the far left margin of the front of frame, he moves into frame away from the viewer along the Z axis. Moving back toward the viewer while walking obliquely to the right, the moving camera retains its shot size while now focusing on what he is carrying and folding, with his face kept out of view. The lens finally comes to a stuttered rest on Atim’s fragmented backside as he stuffs his clothing in his pack, before returning to center on his upper body as he lifts himself up and turns around to place the pack on his shoulder. It is at this moment the true nature of his feelings is revealed to the viewer.
Camera movement: At first the camera is stationary to focus on the hanging jackets ahead of Atim, but throughout the shot will follow his movements. In the finale to come, Nassara too will follow Atim’s exodus through the desert and back to Gumar, culminating in a surprising, nail-biting finale. The camera’s first movement is a quick tilt down and pan right as Atim comes to pass with his jackets in hand, coming to the aforementioned rest on his bed, bag, and backside. The camera then quickly tilts up to reframe his face and upper torso, effectively revealing his confusion and anguish. Throughout the duration the same shot size is kept, effectively serving to conceal as much as it reveals.
Camera angle: The camera angle in this shot is pretty straightforward and face to face (so to speak), not wishing to emphasize Atim’s actions as catalyzed by a mere imbalance of power through a high or low angle. The shot is made from a fly on the wall perspective, it regards Atim not as the various families might regard him, but with an interested detachment. In light of the film’s general theme of interpersonal connection, seeing it this way comes as something to a shock to the viewer, who regards this turn of events with far more concern for their outcome than a mere fly on the wall. We feel that everyone involved matters, so we don’t see things as the camera sees it. These people are more important than that.
Depth of field: In light of the relatively compact size of the room, there isn’t any room for vast horizons to walk in, but that will change in the scene to come, with all the attendant implications for the existential event horizon. Atim “aspires to escape from this circle, to assert transcendence over immanence, to open up a future different from the past in which his roots are stuck. The prohibition... takes different forms according to the types of relationship recognized in different societies, but from primitive times to our day it keeps the same meaning: what man desires is to possess is that which he is not, he seeks union with what appears to be Other than himself.”[8] The immanent depth of field in this shot is well played to emphasize the distance and tension between existential freedom as a being alone in the world, the pursuit or redefinition of an existential project, and the desire for interpersonal intimacy as mediated through the ethics of the appeal.
Lighting: The lighting of this shot is relatively low key, and appears to be lit only by the incoming sunlight through the window, emphasizing the setting’s stark frugality. The shadows often cover Atim and the surrounding environment, giving the shot a somber mood. Atim’s own shadow is also strongly emphasized, implying the multiplicity of motivations, and hence of possibilities, beneath the surface of his actions. His expression is especially well lit when he turns to the camera and reveals his inner feelings, practically glossing in the frame. So the lighting works for him.
Color usage: In contrast to bright color and shades of the shots surrounding it, the colors of this shot are dim and faded like worn off-white walls and a faded red-plaid blanket, or boldly contrasted like black shirts and green military jackets. This emphasizes the somber mood, and cues the viewer that this isn’t where Atim wants to be. Which colors indeed are more indicative of a life lived with Nasarra and Aïcha?
Screen graphics/composition: Owing to the very minimal decorum of the room, there simply isn’t much compositional density in this shot, which is much the point. This isn’t jazzy nights on the town, but by request it isn’t “charity”, derived from the root of grace, either. Initially the leading lines and centered positioning points the viewer’s eyes in the direction of the jackets hanging on the wall. From there the parade of contrast dominants in unison with motion of the camera leads the viewer’s eye to Atim, then back to the jackets, then to the bag in which he puts them away, then to the bed on which they rest, then back to Atim as he anxiously sets the bag on his shoulder. The compositional logic of the shot says that what is important is that Atim is resignedly returning his jacket of militancy to his bag before his departure to or from home, however defined. The movement in the frame is all his against an otherwise static backdrop.
Editing style: The edits to and from this shot are all straight cuts from bright exterior shots in the company of Atim’s surrogate family this solitary interior shot. In the preceeding shot, Aïcha finishes entreating Atim to reconsider his hasty rejection of the offer of adoption by taking a gentle hold of his forearm and walking him back over to Nasarra, emphasizing that this too is her choice. But when Nasarra rests his arm on Atim’s shoulder and pulls him closer in a gesture of affection, Atim is overwhelmed and repulsed, and immediately pulls away and walks off frame, at which that shot abruptly cuts into this one. In the next shot, Atim is back outside and stands still for a spell, before solemnly walking up to Nasarra to inform him of his immediate departure. But Nasarra responds by stating he will accompany Atim wherever he goes, because that is home to him, where he feels truly alive. By cutting in this fashion, Atim’s departure seems hasty and unconsidered. In contrast to Hollywood narrative editing, this sense of speed is not carried out through the use of fast cuts, for the cuts themselves are relatively slow, but through the motion of the characters and camera in frame.
Time: By editing with straight cuts in this manner, a relatively straightforward passage of time occurs between shots, emphasizing his haste of departure. Certainly he hasn’t stopped for tea to think things over between shots. Even so, the interior solitude of this shot forms a kind of ellipsis of time in contrast to the exterior dialectic of the framing shots, implying what could happen here if Atim stopped for a moment rather than speeding up the clock.

Too many hero myths are about the warrior’s courage to slay the terrible “enemy” of his people, often under the leitmotif of atonement with the father. Towering Gilgamesh was mercifully given a moment of fear and hesitation before slaying the monster and forest guardian Humbaba, for whom a gentle rain fell onto the mountains. But few films nowadays have the integrity to honestly address the terrible aspect of industrialized weaponry, its fatal capacity to fragment and shatter bodies, identities, and lives with a heinous speed. Instead of considering the cynical politics of psyops, weapons industries, and arms deals, it bestows a magic charm of invulnerability where the bullets always miss, and no one has to stop to rethink the roots of conflict, much less to forgive anyone their trespasses. Upon this lie is founded an eternally preexistent ideal or essence of masculinity, a cosmic cookie cutter to which all men must conform without doubt or fear, or cease to be men without becoming women. It is a lie to the grave detriment of all genders, a lie that deployed Atim’s father and Nassara to rationalized murder, shattering one another and all their relations, a lie that deploys Atim to take his father’s pistol and become a man. “Here suicide and murder are two aspects of a single system, the system of a misguided intelligence that prefers, to the suffering imposed by a limited situation, the dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated.”[9] But Paul Tillich argues true courage is metaphysically rooted in taking anxiety, the ontic awareness of nonbeing, into the ethical act of afirming “his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation.”[10] Without anxiety, without doubt, there can be no courage. The great charm of Daratt is the extent to which it reveals the tremendous anxious apprehension of the moral gravity inherent in any act of killing, a necessary counterpoint to simplistic aestheticization of violence. This shot represents the exact point at which this anxiety reaches a critical mass, the zero point at which Atim can carry out his quest for revenge no further. This culminates in the courage not to kill but to be, the courage to reach out for the stark desert of the event horizon, a personal exile and exodus. In “The Concept of Anxiety”, Søren Kierkegaard writes:

In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate... Anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness... Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude. Therefore possibility is the weightiest of all categories.[11]

Albert Camus, torn between a dual dislocation in the French Algerian war in an analogous situation to director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s own, wrote a collection of six short stories titled Exile and the Kingdom. Exile and the Kingdom is about a diverse assortment of heartsick people torn in the conflicts and paradoxes of silence and speech, passivity and agency, when the identity of what is considered home proves confused or elusive. At a crucial juncture in the stories, the protagonists experience a moment of metaphysical revelation in which they grasp the absolute freedom that waits on the desert horizon over against the concrete factors that tend toward their existential negation. So whereas the imprisoned tragic hero of Camus’ novel The Stranger perceives in his cosmic gaze the universe’s absolute indifference to humanity on the eve of his execution for killing an Arab, in “Jonas, or the Artist at Work” the protagonist sees the return of his guiding lucky star after a vocational existential crisis in which he finally decides to work independently/interdependently in the dark silence of his own being. In a crucial sense, Daratt is like a seventh story in Exile and the Kingdom, the tale of an unexpected discovery of absolute possibility precisely where it seemed to be denied in the death of the father. In closing, I cannot do better than to quote Paul Tillich’s own concluding line to an immensely courageous philosophical-historical work published in the age of anxiety, even as we now live in the age of terror: “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”[12]

Blogger's Post-Script: This is the kind of failing-grade paper I can be personally proud of. I suppose I should have payed the ten page double-spaced format and deadline all the literal-minded reverence due to a Platonic form and the industrialist's clockwork time, ignored my own manifest existential turmoil, and failed to abide by my standards of quality control. As of writing, Daratt can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvaawiUry9k. Additionally, I would like to apologize for inadvertently omitting in my analysis the episode in which Aïcha is beaten offscreen by Nasssara in a fit of jealousy, as that depth of sound didn't come through clear from the laptop with which I wrote this paper. This is a good example of why my thought places a great deal of emphasis on the margins of perception. Whereas the patriarchal Islamic sharia law would sanctify a husband's "right" to discipline and punish his wife in the Foucaultean sense to render her active body into a passive body, so long as blows inflicted don't leave any physical marks, Atim visibly disagrees. Throughout the shot, Atim registers an expression of angry desperation as Aïcha's sobbing cries can be heard through the walls, crumbling a piece of bread in his hands and casting it to the ground. This sets the stage for the next scene in which Atim declares he "forgot" the yeast in the daily bread, symbolically evoking the commemoration of the Feast of Unleavened Bread in remembrance of the children of Israel in their hasty flight from bondage in Egypt. Not only does Atim's microeconomic sanction imply that the means of resistance are contained within the deployments of power itself, but might one also say this implies a form of feminist liberation theology?

Endnotes:

1. Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13; cf. Exodus 3:1-10, 24:15-18.
2. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity p. 219.
3. Ibid. p. 165.
4. Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor p. 59, 63.
5. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt p. 70.
6. Ibid. p. 161.
7. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature ch. 6.
8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex p. 74. This quote is taken out of its original context of exogamous marriage exchange, but applies more generally to rites of passage and the myths that catalyze or encapsulate them, and is here cited in the general spirit of the text’s metaphysics as it expounds the existential event horizon for women and men.
9. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt p. 7.
10. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be p. 3.
11. Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong p. 153-154.
12. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be p. 190.