Precarious Mourning: Friendship in Nathacha Appanah’s Le dernier frère (2007)

Abstract

This article considers and develops Jacques Derrida’s ideas on friendship. According to him, friendship between two people is haunted by the knowledge that both will die, and that one will probably witness the death of the other. Due to this knowledge, friendship is structured by a sense of mourning, both before and after the friend’s death. I read this idea in the context of Nathacha Appanah’s novel, Le dernier frère (2007). In it, she recounts a story of two boys, Raj and David, who meet in Mauritius during the Second World War period. More exactly, they become friends in precarious conditions, such that one is constantly aware of the other’s mortality. I argue that, because of this constant awareness, their friendship is haunted by a conscious form of mourning: explicit, intense, and continuous, both in life and in death. I call this affect precarious mourning, which constitutes friendships formed in precarity.

Keywords:

• Le dernier frère
• friendship
• Appanah
• Derrida
• mourning
• Mauritius
• Holocaust

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 My greatest thanks go to Thomas Trezise, who read an earlier version of this essay and provided me with incisive feedback that has greatly improved this piece. I’d also like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers.

2 Note that the terms I use in the essay—precarity and mourning in particular—are analytically loaded. For the sake of digestibility, I slowly unravel them over the course of the essay, instead of introducing them all in the beginning.

3 I focus on friendship here, owing to what is dominantly present in Le dernier frère, but future studies could certainly broach this affect in the context of family, love, and other relationships, whether in this novel or elsewhere.

4 The problem of “deconstruction and the postcolonial” is highly complicated and, barring the topic of friendship that I explore here, outside the scope of this essay. See, for instance, Michael Syrotinski's Deconstruction and the Postcolonial.

5 The one exception may be the work of Beatrice Ivey, who attends to the “ecologies of affect” in the novel, especially by noting the mourning (179). Nonetheless, without critically examining this mourning itself, she ultimately concludes that “Appanah engages with the return of the cyclone as a way of introducing the traumatic legacies of personal loss for the characters and enacting the transnational memory of the Holocaust in the multi-layered colonial history of Mauritius” (192, my emphasis).

6 The separability of “form” and “content” is undecidable. I separate them here only to illustrate my claims.

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Akrish Adhikari

Akrish Adhikari is a PhD candidate in French at Princeton University. He specializes in Francophone studies, critical theory, media studies, and digital humanities. His other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Configurations, Book History, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and The Comparatist.