#MarieOdgaard

The Beautiful Friend

by Marie Odgaard (University of Toronto)

Growing up in a small town by the fjord, close to the west coast of Denmark, was in many ways a quiet life —at least in the early years. I spent endless hours alone in the backyard, building worlds of magic potions, imaginary beings and witchcraft made from half-rotten apples, tart elderberries, and the smell of the contents of pots and pans filled with what I can best define as thoroughly fermented potions from the weeks prior.

It was a quiet life. Quiet because it was more like a humming than anything else. A lot of talking in different voices, a lot of shifting roles and perspectives, a lot of fluid time and space. I played through a kind of temporality that felt like waiting for something to happen, while also making space for the already existing smaller fragments of magical thinking and possibility. In the background of these temporalities (and occasionally in the foreground) was being close in the sense of physical proximity to two much older sisters. One sister that puzzled me, and one who was only too rarely there for my childhood desires, but who would host witchcraft sessions in that same backyard, where she would spew fire, dressed in elaborate costumes.

One day when I was six years old, I sat on the curb outside the house in our quiet street, probably observing the black ants as they were digging small tunnels in the sand between the cobblestones. As I looked up, I could see someone in the distance, moving closer and closer to me. It was a girl with curly brown hair and the brightest, biggest smile I had ever seen, riding on a pink lowrider bike. She looked a bit younger than me, and more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. In English (which I did not speak at the time) she managed to communicate to me if I wanted to play.

From that day a world opened between us, one that only we shared. It unfolded in my parents’ untamed garden, in the quiet streets of our neighborhood, or on the top floor of my friend’s big house behind the heavy dark red silk curtains. We would be dressing up, tape-record our band “Sisters”, weave together stories through embodiment and conversation, draw women with long hair and big eyes, and I would spend hours just observing her, her small wrists and her little brown tooth, and listen to her ability to sing, dance, and express herself in ways that nobody else I knew could. As if what I witnessed came from somewhere beyond the right here.  It was as if she did not belong to the context we were in at the time. Too beautiful, too talented, too kind and too generous for it. As you can tell, I admired and loved her beyond what I had experienced before, and at times I also felt jealous, rarely as good a friend to her as she was to me.

My friend became a regular in our home, and on weekdays, especially when her mother was out of the country, she would have dinner at our house around the table. In pictures from that time, I see her, my parents, myself and our cat. The happiest family I could imagine. On occasion, I would be invited to enjoy the rich meat sauce over sadza or pasta, while we watched MTV right after her father had blessed the food. My parents were not religious and did not bless the food before eating it.

There was a rift in our worlding, however, because I knew that we were to depart at some point. I knew that when Armageddon came, I would most likely not be able to join her in Paradise.  Not because my sweet friend would ever tell me that so directly, not that she would say that I was not coming with her. But I knew because my imagination had already run wild after she had told me about the bible and what it said. A looming sense that I would never be good enough to join my loved one in the afterlife. But also, a sense that living forever would be immensely frightening anyway, and that all I wanted was the now.

One day my friend and her older brother came to visit us. I remember them standing in our garden next to a big rock that my father had practiced stonemasonry on, as she told me that that she and her family would have to leave. And not just leave me, our street, our town. They were leaving the country. A few weeks after, my eyes were filled with tears as I waived to their blurry van driving down the street, moving in the opposite direction as the pink bike that day five years prior. My beautiful friend was gone. The world had been quiet before she had arrived, and it now became quiet again. But a different kind of quiet. A lonely one that left a gap.

The grass in their garden grew long and unruly, and the house turned into a ghost haunting me every day as I biked past it on the way to school, and again in the afternoon when I maintained a heart drawn with chalk on the pavement outside it. Life returned to its humming ordinariness. But a different kind, as I had somehow become out of key. As feminist Latina philosopher María Lugones writes it in the 1987 essay Playfulness, “World”-travelling, and Loving Perception: “I thought about what it is to be playful and what it is to play in a world in which I only remember myself as playful, and in which all of those who know me as playful are imaginary beings” (14-15).

In my profession as anthropologist, if I had to boil it down, what matters the most to me is to reflect on how intimate relationships, like friendship, can serve as a radical ethical basis for both personal and academic practice. But, perhaps sparked by that first experience of the loss of a friend, I have also always had an interest in the temporariness of friendship in relation to structuring structures like kinship, citizenship, or tribal affiliation. That interest has drawn me in the direction of queer anthropology’s work on everyday ethical life and radical politics. And so, as I hope the reader will sense, a friction between concrete friendships in their perplexing particularity on the one hand (Mattingly 2019), and the decolonial potentials of a politics of friendship, against the racist identity politics of e.g. settler colonialism and imperialism, on the other.

As I embarked on fieldwork for my Ph.D., the early days of fieldwork in Amman, Jordan, were incredibly lonely, very different from earlier months spent in the city. It was a turbulent time personally, leaving Denmark had been filled with uncertainty about a romantic relationship there, and about what being away for many months would mean to those relationships. Very far from any noble commitment to building a politics of solidarity, I would often lie in bed in my cold, dark bedroom in a shared apartment, shared with two expat women with whom I shared very few interests, and whom I had no intention of developing any shared interests with. My own relationship to myself was at an all-time low, and the kind of quiet humming that had filled childhood solitude seemed very far away.

The Friend’s Return

However, through that loneliness and attachment to a fear of failure, several people became central to how my perception of the city changed over the months and years to come, and to the fact that in the end I was able to write a dissertation on the arts of living queerly in Amman, through an attention to the politics of queer friendship beyond the self. This because of the ways I witnessed the importance of friendships in imagining and working for otherwise possibility among artists and activists in the city. Even, or perhaps especially, when those friendships were not my own. Friendships that carried through geographical distances, family turmoil, disagreement, and existential uncertainties. But also, friendships that allowed for radical vulnerability and trust to emerge in-between. Through this, I think, the friend arrived again. On one occasion, a young performance artist came back after a long time away and was welcomed by his friends at the airport. He was only able to come back to visit Amman because his friends had crowdfunded the return ticket. Once picked up from the airport, we spent time in another friend’s apartment, and soon after arriving, he opened his bags with a collection of sweets, small beauty products, books, and other objects that he had brought with him to Amman. They were all strangely exotic to the eye as they lay scattered around the apartment, mixed with the local brands of cigarettes and the pouches of sweetened Nescafé that was drunk in large quantities. Chocolate wrappers were torn apart and tasted, bright candy bars halfway eaten and shared as they all sat there together on the couch, reminiscing and reconnecting through entangled bodies and stories from near and far. I imagined him walking around the European city he had been living in for the past year and buying the colorful sweets and the feminist literature he had brought back to the city to share with his friends.

Being an Anthropologist Like a Friend

In the process of writing, through Naisargi Dave’s work on indifference, I came by Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities (2006). It was through Gandhi’s book that I was able to dwell in the transformative potential in friendship to give birth to otherwise solidarities. In her examination of anti-imperial affiliations at the fin-de-siècle, marginalized subcultures around veganism, homosexuality and spirituality become spaces for the development of a politics of friendship beyond imperial project. Friendship, she writes, is “the most comprehensive philosophical signifier for all those invisible, affective gestures that refuse alignment along the secure axes of filiation to seek expression outside, if not against, possessive communities of belonging” (Gandhi 2006, 10). I vividly remember how this quote felt like a secret had been revealed to me. One that I had already been told through the experience of having a beautiful friend in childhood. With this, however, emerged also the question of what seeking expression “outside” means, when one looks not at a history of affiliations or non-bound communities, but at lives as they unfold in the messiness and frustrations of the everyday, through ethnography.  The unfolding oof what Leela Gandhi calls “the co-belonging of nonidentical singularities” (2006, 26). When invisible, affective gestures are captured ethnographically in all their singularity, can we be an anthropologist like a friend? One primary ethical demand in friendship is that you do not tell your friends’ secrets, no matter what. When this demand becomes translated to being an anthropologist like a friend, it will most likely result in seemingly endless discussions about how to tell a story of what emerges in-between, how to make that both an expression of a relationship and of a more general view on the world, without being a tell-tale, and how to best honor your friend’s desires. And you become slow and unsure of everything but the preciousness of friendship itself. Sometimes it will feel like all you do is play around in the unruly garden, and all you do is keep secrets.

Beyond telling your friends’ secrets, however, I find that it in shared chocolate bars and intimate desires, spaces of affective intensity, and in allowing for people and concepts to travel, that become defining for how activism persists through structural oppression, also in the academic context. The slow burn of a world within the world, not outside it. Friendship is the relation that seeks expression of the possibilities for becoming otherwise within already existing relations, and through that, the world unsettles and expands, showing the cracks in dominant polarities and hierarchies of domination.

 Works Cited

Gandhi, Leela. 2006. Affective Communities. Anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism and the politics of friendship. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lugones, María. Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception. Hypatia, Summer, 1987, Vol. 2, No. 2. 3-19.

Mattingly, C. (2019). Defrosting concepts, destabilizing doxa: Critical phenomenology and the perplexing particular. Anthropological Theory, 19(4), 415-439.