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

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.