What Makes Us Human And What Happens When We Lose It?
TSCBC Book 9: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
Can you still be human when all sense of your humanity is stripped away?
Happy Women’s History Month! This month we are focusing on books that were written by women.
Welcome to The Socially Conscious Book Club! The first pick of the month is I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.
Taking place in an unknown timeline (could’ve happened in the past or present) where 40 women are imprisoned in a cage, constantly patrolled by three guards who never speak and only crack whips in the air for attention.
The women don’t know how they got there, they have vague memories of their past. But one of the prisoners, the narrator, is a young girl, seemingly taken in mistake, the only thing she has ever known is the cage.
The women can’t touch, or show excessive emotion, there are no walls, no sense of privacy, even for self-cleaning and toilets, and no matter how much in despair they are, they can’t end their lives.
The story starts at the end of the narrator’s life and then moves somewhat linear, as she reflects and recounts the things she’s endured. There are moments where she hints about future things throughout the story.
The piece is written as one long essay with no chapters or breaks. It’s a little slow in the beginning and takes a moment to get the rhythm. But it starts to pick up once we reach the inciting incident that causes their escape.
It was interesting reading about the character’s journey from being a child to an old woman. Going back to the beginning and reading the first few pages again helped me understand and fill the gaps I was missing when I first read those pages. Never knowing if anyone will read the words, she writes simply to prove her existence.
The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don't exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come…” pg 161
The Narrator, always referred to as Child by the other characters and never given her own name, is constantly grappling with her humanity. All she knows is the cage, the women, and the silent guards. She doesn’t have any parents, formal schooling, or nurturing. She feels apart from the other women due to her age, lack of feelings, and the women’s shared knowledge of the previous world that she feels they are keeping secret from her.
At the beginning of the book, there is a confrontation between Child and Dorothy, the eldest of the group. It’s in this she truly realizes the predicament they are all in. The women carried on in the cage like life was normal, having conversations that didn’t really have meaning, and assigning useless tasks to pass the time. Their normality in a dire situation was a form of survival, a defense mechanism, something Child didn’t yet understand.
The old women were as helpless as the younger ones. They had seized some imaginary power, a power over nothing, a tacit agreement that created a meaningless hierarchy, because there were no privileges that they could grant or refuse. The fact is that we were on an absolutely equal footing. Pg 14
The narrator often notes how her thinking has changed over time, keeping the feelings of her youthful self bound to the past. But it’s because of her misguided outlook that Child started noting things about the guards, about the questionable passage of time, and wondering just why they were there in the first place.
I suddenly found myself contemplating our situation. Until that moment, I'd simply endured it without thinking about it, as if it were a natural state. Pg 21
Her curiosity is ultimately what starts bringing her toward the other women, starting with Anthea. Child’s curiosity wakens the other women from a walking slumber, they start to notice more things, gain more insight, and come alive because of it.
Apparently, the women had slowly emerged from an inner fog to find themselves accustomed to the strange life they led. There was no suggestion of a rebellion. They'd had husbands, lovers and children. As a result of being too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they'd forgotten almost everything. But they didn't try to shut me up, because they were horrified at having lost their own history. Pg 48
Once the women escape they enter a world that is bleak and now leaves more questions than answers. This leads the women into a new form of despair. Even though now they are “free” if feels as if they had exchanged one prison for another.
This questions how much purpose and hope play into our lives, and into humanity. When the women had purpose and hope they would come alive but the second those things went away they became shells of their former selves.
There had been so much hope when we'd escaped from the prison, and then this slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. Pg 108
Caught in this is Child, much younger than the rest, born for the world the others are trapped in. She craves knowledge and the others teach her but they don’t understand why she would want or need to know the information. They didn’t understand why someone would want knowledge just for the sake of having it. Child is also trapped by the women, unable to move forward. She’s come to care for them but in a way, they are her new prison guards.
I didn't want her to die, but how could I have wanted her to live? Several times during the afternoon, I felt a tremor of impatience. I was overjoyed at the idea that I was going to be free. Pg 117
She was still growing, still trying to understand her humanity, and why she didn’t feel or act the same way as the others. She was at an advantage because she didn’t know the world as it used to be. She didn’t know what had been lost. But as the others constantly reminded her, Child was so young and one day they would all be dead and she would be all alone, then she would truly know loss.
In the end, the narrator creates the memoir in which we are reading, to tell her story, to define her humanity. Writing helps her reflect upon her past and eventually conclude that she has humanity after all.
And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all. Pg 4
This was an interesting book. I am not sure if I ever would’ve picked it up if I hadn’t seen it on display at Barnes & Noble. It was first published in France in 1995. The first English translation is titled the book The Mistress of Silence (why). This recent translation came out in 2019.
I think it’s interesting, and also is noted in the Afterward, that the author, Harpman, and her family had fled to Casablanca in 1929 during WWII and there may be a connection between the cages to the concentration camps.
Perhaps there is a connection in the characters’ search for humanity. I think of the end of Night by Elie Wiesel and how after his whole ordeal he looked in the mirror, finally seeing himself, seeing the humanity that was stripped, seeing in himself the very things he saw in the faces of other prisoners of the camp. Is it similar to when Child, sees herself age in a mirror?
I wonder why they never built a tower to see the full extent of the land. Or tried to map out everything they encountered? While I get why the women settled the way they did, I felt the same annoyance Child did at their lack of motivation.
Like the narrator, we never get any answers as to why there were cages, when this took place, why they were locked up, or if they are even still on earth. If you’re in it for the character journey I guess this end feels fine. But if you are in it for the plot, you’ll probably leave dissatisfied.
Let me know what you think below.
And if you haven’t, check out the previous post: Living in A Medical Apartheid
What were some of the social issues highlighted in the book?
The biggest issue here would be human rights. The prisoners were taken, possibly drugged, and locked up in these cages. While they were given food and shelter, their privacy and choices were stripped away. They were given no tasks, no answers, no reason to live, and no means to die. They were stripped of their humanity.
Further Reading:
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood