By Ilinca Mates
For International Women’s Day, there is one novel that I want to bring into the limelight. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is an important contribution to the canon of feminist literature and one that reveals historical and contemporary restrictions on women’s freedom.
Our unnamed narrator is a young girl who has been caged all her life in the deep underground with thirty-nine other women. They have no recollection of how they ended up there, or why. They are consistently watched by silent male guards and subject to authoritarian rules. They are forbidden from touching each other and being emotional, kept on a strict routine, and denied any knowledge of the world outside their confinement. Breaking this twelve-year pattern is a syren that causes the guards to panic and flee the bunker, leaving the door unlocked and giving the women an escape towards freedom. Little do they know that the world they have once known was no longer waiting for them at the surface. These women, dehumanised and stripped of any autonomy, had forgotten how to live and must learn how to survive together against dystopian backdrop and in a world in which they are utterly alone.
The fortieth prisoner and our unnamed narrator is considerably younger than the other women, and what differentiates her from the group is that she has never known a world outside of the cage. She has never known books, or music, or family, or school, or men, but she has known women.
Harpman constructs a world in which anger is weaponised by women against their lived realities. These women felt powerless in a world that was no longer for them. Their imprisonment and oppression reiterate the historical restrictions on women’s liberty, a multitude of which persist today and are not just dystopian fiction. Women have repeatedly found themselves in inferior positions in which they are systematically denied agency, and the frustration that comes with witnessing women’s rights regressing and not fully grasping why that is happening is all too familiar.
One woman, who takes her own life, speaks for the Afghan women whose rate of suicide has surged as a result of their futures being taken away. The act of suicide becomes a desperate attempt to reclaim some glimmer of agency in a system where they have none. The women’s sexualities are repressed, which resonates with many women whose sexual freedom is policed or objectified. The narrator, who has never received a formal education or seen anything written, echoes the denial of education of many women and young girls in many parts of the world. Also the narrator, who is referred to as “child” and remains unnamed throughout, is emblematic for how women can easily have their identities erased, their voices silenced, and their stories written out of history.
I Who Have Never Known Men explores narratives that are part of a wider effort led by current governmental administrations to ban books that could even slightly challenge power structures. It is a privilege to have access to books, of any kind, but especially this one.
Despite the oppression and uncertainty women face, and the differences between one another, they demonstrate a level of solidarity that should be envied. The older women, who had their own lives before, share their memories with the young girl, describe the sky, teach her poetry, but every woman’s story becomes the narrator’s dream that she cannot have.
Although their sisterhood manifests as a means of survival, it is ultimately insufficient as they are completely isolated from society. As they aimlessly wander through their new world after their escape, they find no other sign of life, only bunkers filled with other women’s lifeless bodies who faced the same systemic oppression but were not able to break free. Reading their story and understanding their despair left me feeling hopeless that women can ever receive the justice they deserve. Nevertheless, women today are never suffering alone. Although power structures remain pervasive – whether in oppressive societies or not – grassroots organisations and social movements offer their support and are a space for collective action.
As the youngest girl realises that she will be the last to survive, her death signalling the end of humanity, she takes on the responsibility for the women’s existence. She uses what she has been taught by the other women, including the ability to write, to tell you and me their story.
Just like the young narrator learned everything she knows from her all-female tribe, everything I have ever learnt about the world I have learned from the women in my life – from my mother and my grandmother, as well as from Jacqueline Harpman, Susan Sontag, Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos, bell hooks, Sinéad O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Fiona Apple, amongst so many others. Women are more than daughters, sisters, or mothers, more than a gender: they are human beings. Women are more than just victims – they are the faces of resistance.
Image: Flickr
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