Description
Lana Bastašić’s best-seller Catch the Rabbit (2021 [2018]) centres on the friendship between two teenage girls, one Muslim and the other Orthodox Christian, who become estranged and meet again after twelve years. This novel explores ways in which teenage girls construct their worlds through each other in the context of discrimination against and disappearances of Muslim members of their community in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bastašić’s portrayal of the two women as teenagers and adults avoids cliches of harmony, capturing jealousy, distrust and hurt. This friendship is based on navigating the two women’s disagreements, and my paper asks how this depiction challenges a liberal paradigm of friendship. Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship(1994) uncovers and critiques the tradition following Aristotle and Montague that connects male friendship with fraternity – a familial relationship of brotherhood – to democracy and closeness, not emotionally but through agreement and objectives. Derrida’s thinking about male friendship as a privileged political reference point based on similarity offers a starting point for this paper. In it, I will argue that Bastašic’s depiction of a female friendship, which can hold difference, helps rethink the meaning of diverse forms of friendship in politics and peace.
