Yaari: An Anthology on Friendship by Women and Queer Folx

edited by Shilpa Phadke and Nithila Kanagasabai, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2023

Reviewed by Sadaf Nausheen

As one begins to read a compilation of stories on friendship, coming across multiple expressions of platonic love would be no surprise. This anthology, however, lives up to its title in also forging a friendship (read: ‘yaari’) with its readers, especially if the said reader is a woman and/or queer person. Centring the experiences of genderqueer persons and women in South Asia has been a conscious decision that has guided the book. In doing so, friendship is looked at from a queer feminist lens that places this relationship beyond its secondary positioning within heteropatriarchy. Simultaneously, there is ample engagement with the power hierarchies that have an impact over these relations. Hence, in centring friendship over romance, the anthology visibilises such relations which have been hitherto deemed peripheral and thereby contributes to emerging scholarship on studies of friendship and gender.

Going through the essays, poems, prose, comics, and other illustrations in the book, the multiple forms of narratives stand out, and myriad aspects of friendship emerge in these narrations. These aspects are fluidly categorised into nine sections that overlap. The first section characterises the conceptual tone of the book in bringing together love, friendship, and intimacy. While friendship is centred, there is also nuance in not strictly prioritising the platonic over the romantic. The authors do not shy away from romanticising their friendships, which goes on to counter such watertight compartmentalisations. Following the first section, as we look at friendships from the lens of love and intimacy, personal accounts highlight the political: friendships that allow us to hope, seek change, and sustain movements; to attempt to overcome differences; have difficult conversations and form alliances; to build solidarities and rebuild ourselves. Friendships defy sociopolitical metanarratives and are yet regulated by them.

The question of care emerges early on and recurs thematically throughout the book, in addition to the eighth section that directly opens up conversations on care and community. Tulika Bhattacharjee’s essay which talks of the constant fleeing/movement involved in her friendship with her college friend, much after they have moved out of that space, provides a noteworthy thought: ‘perhaps that’s the goal of friendship, to perform care in specific ways and to let yourself be cared for’ (p. 100). There are alternative imaginations of being that the contributors have talked about and, in certain cases, have been able to live through those alternatives marking the political nature of friendship once again. In this sense, the second and third sections in the book highlight the idea of feminist friendships that hold the potential to challenge and resist heteropatriarchal regulations. And at times, when these regulations get the best of us, there is solace in those friendships.

I talk of the fourth and the sixth sections together since they evoke feelings of loss and disappointment, grief and rage, friendships that could have been, friends that are lost to distance, politics, and death, and friendships that have survived. There is commonality, nonetheless, in remembering those friendships; in reflections and rants over old and newer ones, those which are fleeting and those that one has outgrown (or had to) and those which are growing. Importantly, in presenting these narratives, there is intersectionality. The hierarchies of friendship are laid bare in the book, asking us to reflect on the possibility of recreating cycles of oppression through the very bond held dear. Systemic factors of religion, caste, disability, sexuality, nationality bring out the ways in which ‘like any other equation, [friendship] is also deeply structural’ (p. 263). While feminism is fundamental to these alternative imaginations, there is no denying that feminists fail in their friendships too. As mentioned by Seerat Fatima in her contribution that highlights the role of social and financial capital that determine the way friendships are enacted in our personal lives, ‘for inclusive intersectional friendships and collectives to exist, an acknowledgment of privilege is essential’ (p. 235). Hence, there is cognisance of the structural aspect that significantly impacts the formation and enactment of friendship, along with its value for individuals and potential for overcoming normativities and seeking collective change.

Friendships are romanticised, and they are also challenged; friendships disappoint, and they enrage. There is also unconventionality in these stories; friendships with books and its writers, on the one hand, and artificial intelligence, on the other; friendship across ages, professional hierarchies, preassigned societal roles, nation-states, and species. These forms move through the continuum of intimacy and distance, and expand the boundaries that define who counts as a friend. The impact of the lockdown due to the outbreak of coronavirus is another theme that has been present throughout the recollections. The interplay of the virtual and the physical worlds in creating and/or sustaining friendships and people is particularly brought out in the narratives in the fifth and seventh sections. These sections talk to one another on questions of technology, connectivity, resilience, and survival. For instance, while some contributions refer to the disconnectedness, disembodiment, and overwhelm of keeping in touch through online modes of communication, others talk about the flexibility, rest, and safe space that a virtual connection can provide. Once again, the point that comes forth is about the myriad forms in which friendship can flow between people, shuttling between distance and proximity through the same means that could work differently for all.

Hence, the anthology consists of several stories which create multiple moments of relatability for the reader though dependent upon the context of where one comes from. As a 20-something year old who is living alone in a city, I am taken back to moments I cherish but had forgotten due to the chaos of adulthood; I open the now inactive WhatsApp groups that were the primary source of solace during the pandemic; and I am filled with warmth thinking of friends I have grown up with and the commitment to navigate around changes as we become different versions of ourselves. The book is therefore a testament to experiences and intersubjectivities that are invisibilised given the peripherality that friendship is pushed to in the larger discourse. On the one hand, the writings and illustrations acknowledge very specific moments that cannot always be universalised. On the other hand, these narratives have an underlying collectivity that speak to a large community of women and/or queer individuals.

The eighth section brings together the idea of care and community within educational spaces and takes us through reflections on friendship as the basis for feminist pedagogy in the hopes of creating inclusivity that considers ‘both [the] intellectual and emotional’ (p. 335). This is followed by the last section on city spaces and their navigations by gendered and marginalised bodies in imagining and carving out leeways that allow leisure and pleasure. Through these narratives, institutions and structures that have largely been described through a normative lens come to be understood from alternative and subaltern perspectives.

To put it all together, the anthology is also a collection of emotions that have been put into words and visuals. The personal nature of the accounts by the contributors create a relationship between the reader and the book itself. There is no promise of resonance with all the pieces; however, there is a connectedness that can be built as the reader may find snippets of their own chronicles in these stories, which would certainly be validating. At the same time, as one is taken through the intimate recollections, the reader also becomes a witness to the love embedded in friendships along with the challenges and chaos of such a relationship. The title of each contribution invokes an informality through which the book speaks to the reader. Additionally, the decision to retain locally used terms in their original form recognises the centrality of South Asian and its diasporic experiences in the book. This is despite the fact that majority of the contributions continue to be from India (as acknowledged by the editors), given that it was the epicentre of the snowballing process that resulted in the anthology. In fact, this has also meant that there is no undue homogenisation of the South Asian community while simultaneously presenting its sociocultural interconnectedness. However, given the scope of the anthology and its recognition of intersectional identities, the expectation for more diverse content would not be a sore complaint. Nonetheless, speaking against the tide that celebrates homosociality among men and disdains similar bonds of sociality among others, the book certainly creates precedence for further work on dissident friendships. In doing so, it serves as an apt reference for early career researchers in the fields of gender, queer studies, as well as friendship and single studies. The writing is accessible to a general audience, and I believe that it would resonate the most with women and/or queer folks, in and out of friendships that have been intense, radically soft, and even harsh.

In its legitimation of the intimacy, disappointment, rage, loss, and remembrance of friendships, the anthology feels like going through a love letter, and it is indeed one. It speaks with unmasked passion about friends and is deeply personal and intrinsically political. As Vijayalakshmi Harish says about what she calls ‘unrequited friendships’, ‘every heartbreak is the same excruciating knife twist that leaves me bleeding and breathless. It is infuriating that the world does not acknowledge this wound’ (p. 163). Putting it simply, this book feels like that acknowledgement.