I Who Have Never Known Men

I Who Have Never Known Men is a short novel originally published in French in 1995 by Belgian author by Jacqueline Harpman; it is the first of her books translated to English, originally published as such under the title The Mistress of Silence. The premise is simple, and – aside from some small points in the beginning – I feel like you could flip the genders of the characters and tell a very similar story; please don’t let the title put you off. I feel the author’s background is hugely intertwined with the themes of this book, but I don’t want to spoil that aspect of the book and so leave it to you the reader to decide if you wish to read about her life.

I struggle to think of anything I’ve read that’s quite like this; it’s been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin, but I’ve read both of those and feel the comparison lacking; if pressed, I might compare some of its underlying themes to Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut or the Netflix show Russian Doll by Natasha Lyonne in dealing with the experience of Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, though these comparisons are equally dubious as both those works use a disconnection from time to ask the kinds of questions that Harpman does through subtler, more direct means.

I Who Have Never Known Men is simultaneously science fiction, and not; dystopian, but hopeful; simple in the manner of a fractal; unnerving yet not unsettling; and mysterious yet unwilling to reveal its secrets. As much as I don’t want to spoil an interpretation of the novel based on the author’s background, I feel like I could lay out an entire plot synopsis and yet not spoil enjoyment of the book; I will however refrain from doing so. As Sophie Mackintosh put it in the afterward of the edition I read: It’s a puzzle that cannot be solved, isn’t supposed to be solved, because it is in the process of grappling with it that we discover the point for ourselves.

The book centers on a nameless narrator, who starts the story as a child whom has only ever known life in a cage in a windowless room with 39 women, all much older than her. They are guarded by rotating patrols of 3 men, none of whom ever communicate with the prisoners except via cracking a whip with expert precision. The women don’t remember much of their previous life, don’t know why they’re there, and don’t bother to explain much to the narrator because “what’s the point?” And yet, it’s her determination that slowly changes the attitude of her fellow prisoners. After a stroke of luck lets them escape, its that very determination which helps them all not just survive, but live, and try to find answers.

We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death

And yet, this is a book about being a survivor; of being alone in hostile conditions, of persisting for the sake of it. I felt a lot of echoes of my own childhood, isolated among my peers, having to develop a lot of self-sustaining mechanisms on first principles, of building a rich inner world, of building from spite a determination to thrive.

“We have to leave,” she said. “We can’t settle here and live from the bunker like parasites. We must remain human beings. I want to know where we are, who imprisoned us and why. I don’t want to die sitting on a chair in the middle of I-don’t-know-where.” Curiously, she had just described her fate.

In many ways it is a story about the meaning of our existence, stripped to its core and untethered from all the concerns of being a member of a society or gender dynamics. Much in the same way that I described The Galaxy and the Ground Within, as a wonderful meditation on cultural differences unencumbered by earthen history, this is a story about personhood in isolation. It grapples very much with a question the narrator asks:

How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?

The book was out of print for a few decades after its initial publication, and with a recent re-publishing came virality via BookTok, where my partner discovered it, subsequently disclosed the entire plot to me, then recently reread it and asked me to read so I could offer my thoughts; to which I’ll again state I feel the author’s background is hugely intertwined with the themes of this book, particularly around the driving need for answers in the wake of trauma, and what it means to build a resiliency of spirit.

I knew nothing about him, but I knew nothing about myself, except that, one day, I too would die and that, like him, I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence.

Beyond the themes of the book, the prose as translated by Ros Schwartz is nothing short of beautiful. At 200 pages / six hours (as the narrator more-or-less asserts, eventually everything is measured in time), it’s a quick and profound read about the nature of existence. It’s an under-appreciated masterpiece of feminist science fiction and I hope I’ve inspired you to read it.