I Who Have Never Known Men follows a nameless narrator, locked underground with thirty-nine other women and watched by male guards all hours of the day. As the youngest of the group, the narrator is raised without the confines of tradition or societal structure, and so she forms her own opinions and perspectives on her situation. When alarms sound through the base and the narrator and her companions escape, they begin a several year long trek to find survivors and try to form a life for themselves, stilted and strange though it may be.
The book is beautifully written. I don't think I can continue without saying this first. The book has no chapters, just one endless narration of events, and I think if Harpman were a less skilled author this would have made many readers lose interest halfway through. I have the absolute worst attention span and sometimes even slightly longer than average chapters lose my interest, but this haunting, twilight zone-esque story of a bizarre alien world and how the women try to find their way through it kept my attention until the very end, and that's insanely impressive. It really does feel like the twilight zone, so if that's something you like, I would definitely read this.
There's a lot of interesting questions raised by this book through our narrator, summarized by Sophie Macintosh in her end notes, which I got to read in the version of the book I had; what parts of humanity are innate, and what are learned? When you are raised in a cage under the earth and have no concept of societal standards, what remains?
Modesty is a big one, in this book. All the other women hate the idea of bathing or going to the bathroom in front of one another, but the narrator doesn't care much about it. She was not raised with privacy, and so does not see the value in it. It reminds me of the way we see the human body now, I mean why do we think that the naked, natural body - especially the natural body of women - is a private, sexual thing? It's not the natural order of things, since there are thousands of years of historical clothing, artwork, and stories that prove otherwise. But the women in the cage rejoice the chance to go to the bathroom or bathe alone again, especially older women (which is also a societal thing! The villainization of the aging female body, a topic I will mention again later). The need to cover the body and hide it's natural state is something that society built and uplifted, so our narrator, who remembers nothing outside the cage, doesn't see it's importance.
Death is another one. God, the amount of time I could spend talking about death.
As the narrator and her group travel across the barren world to find life, they come across other bunkers like their own, where the prisoners had been unable to escape, and died of grief or starvation in their cages. The women around the narrator compare the stench of decay to other things, rotten eggs or foul chemicals, but our narrator, who both does not know of the things they relate it to and does not have the quiet voice in her head to steer clear of death, compares it to nothing. Death is death. She doesn't shy away from it as the others do, and in fact finds respect and peace within it, in the unwavering stare into it rather than cowering away from it's gaze.
Now death customs are something that I find incredibly interesting, so I won't bore you with all the details. I also can't say what point Harpman was trying to make, as she was from Belgium and was Jewish, and I can't say for certain what customs she would have grown up with. What I can do is relate it to modern American death customs, or rather the lack of American death customs. America, like several other nations in Europe (there's a pattern here but I will not point it out), steer clear from talks or mentions of death. It's not dignified, it's gross, and the dead body, much like an alive women's body, or an alive women's aging body, are unsanitary, unsightly, and thus should be kept out of sight and out of mind.
I'm beginning to branch off into a conversation I probably shouldn't. Look up Zoe Moss' essay It Hurts to be Alive and Obsolete: The Aging Woman. It's a very good essay on the topic of aging women's bodies. I also intend to talk more about this at a later date.
Point is, for a very long time the white-washed world (there, I said it) has pushed the idea that death, dead bodies, and all things associated with each should be shunned from good society. It's why many places, America in particular, push grieving spouses and children to get the dead cremated or embalmed as fast as possible (fun fact, you actually can keep a dead body for a little bit, like you don't have to give it to a funeral home immediately), and then pressure them to invest in small white plaques imbedded into the ground, so they're easier to mow over. It's not about closure, it's about quickness.
For our narrator, who knows none of this, she respects and honors the body. She takes on the few death customs that the women around her are willing to share and then creates some of her own. She takes her time with them. It is her relationship with death that allows her to do the heavy job of killing her fellow women when they are ill or in pain, a job that none of the other women, with their tradition, have the heart to do.
It also has to be noted, as Sophie Macintosh says in her end commentary, that Jacqueline Harpman was again, Jewish, and fled from her home to escape World War 2. So the concept of women being imprisoned underground for reasons they don't understand only to be released and find everyone else dead? There are a lot of potential layers to that. I can't say anything for certain since I don't know why Harpman wrote this, but it is interesting to consider.
The other part of the author's questioning is very reminiscent of the "if a tree falls in the forest" argument; who decides time? Who decides meaning? Who decides stories deserve to be told, or what it means to exist?
I think everyone gets to make that choice individually, and so as a group no one consensus can be made, which means no one gets to decide. Another thing humans naturally have is a want for agency. Wanting, too, is something humans always have. Desire and the like. But the human experience is so specific to each person and holds something new and special each time, which means everyone has to decide for themselves where their meaning and existence lie.
There's a scene in the book where the narrator is asking about the women's lives before the cage, and they all tell her some variation of "it's pretty ordinary, no different from the rest". But to the narrator, there is no ordinary. Everything is important and new information, and another thing about humans, they like to know things. They like to learn. And their stories are different; one woman was divorced, another had children, another had fertility struggles. One lived on one side of the world and another lived on the opposite. Ordinary is decided by societal standards, and without them, every person has the opportunity to realize the uniqueness of their tales. Does that make their stories worth telling, worth hearing? Yes, I think it does. Absolutely.
Admittedly, I have no idea what the point of this book was for most of the time I spent reading it. Even now, saying all of this, I could be totally off the mark. But these are the questions I found myself considering while I read, and had a good time trying to find the answers to. And that's what humans do, when all is said and done. Explore. Ask questions, find answers.
I wouldn't say this book is a happy story, I honestly felt like a shell of myself after reading, but it did leave me with an odd sense of hope. Do with that information what you will.
Happy writing!
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