Relational Epistemologies: Friendship and Reading in Shida Bayzar’s Drei Kameradinnen

Abstract This article demonstrates that friendship is a productive concept through which to analyse the narrative voice and structure in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021). Drawing on Max Czollek’s ‘Theatre of Integration’, I argue that the friendship between the three protagonists allows us to describe marginalized experiences without recentring the dominant German discourse. Their friendship is the source of the epistemic advantage as theorized by José Medina: by listening carefully and repeatedly to their friends’ stories, the protagonists produce knowledge about structural injustices. I argue that the novel ultimately proposes friendship as a model for reading that renders the underlying structures of narrativized marginalized experience intelligible. As an example, this article provides a close reading of one of the anecdotes in the novel. Inspired by Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s ‘Narratology at the Checkpoint’, I show that Bayzar’s novel highlights how traditional narrative structures do not lend themselves to describing marginalized experiences.