I who have never known men

Those of you who know me may be aware that I'm not much of a reader. My preferred medium has always been film, and I will admit that I have fallen victim to a steady decline of my attention-span. I don't often find it enjoyable to read a book for leisure, but Jacqueline Harpman's I who have never known men (originally Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, 1995) has proven to be an exception. It's a philosophical, psychological tale of power and oppression, of humanity and female connection, reminiscent of Plato's allegory of the cave, with a tinge of Lord of the Flies and The Handmaid's Tale. With these descriptors you will not be surprised to hear that this is a dystopian novel. Set in a time and place unknown, we read the recollections of the nameless main character as she nears the end of her life.

The plot

She is a young girl, presumably around the age of 12, when her story begins. She is locked in a cage with 39 other women and she has been for years. She has no memory of a time before the cage, and none of the other women can remember how they ended up here either. Soon, we learn the conditions of their existence. The women are not allowed to touch each other, commit any sort of violence, or commit suicide. If hints of physical contact or self-harm are detected, guards intervene with the crack of their whip. These are the only men in the story. We don't know anything about them other than there are six of them in total, and they work in shifts of three. The guards don't speak to the women either. They provide them with vegetables, meat, and dull knives every day to prepare meals, just enough to keep them alive.

"My memory begins with my anger", our main character writes. She is significantly younger than the other women and she has isolated herself from them ever since she can remember. During her childhood - or can we even call it that under these circumstances? - she was docile. Asking questions was met with silence and dismissal, so she learned to live a solitary and ignorant life. But there comes a moment when this changes. Anger awakens inside her. Why have we accepted our conditions as they are? Why is nobody challenging the status quo? How the hell did we end up here? More specifically, how the hell did I end up here? None of them are supposed be locked up in this cage, but our main character feels particularly out of place, like an outcast in this close-knit community. She is set on being heard. It takes some effort, but she confides in one of the only women who has spoken to her over the years, Anthea, to seek clarity on her existential questions. She learns that the women have merely been able to speculate the reasoning for their imprisonment, as well as the presence of our main character. Anthea tells her:

"You're almost certainly here by accident. [...] They could have killed you - but they don't kill - or taken you away, sent you elsewhere, if there are other prisons like this one, but then your arrival would have brought news, and the one thing we are certain of is that they don't want us to know anything." (p. 26, emphasis mine).

Knowledge is power

They don't want us to know anything. And by "us", she means us readers, too. We don't have any more knowledge than our characters in the cage do. We are left to ponder the same mysteries. Ignorance is powerlessness, our narrator soon discovers. She makes attempts to ask the other women of the world before the cage. About what men are like. What love is, what sex is. She hears them laughing amongst themselves sometimes, about shared memories or relatable experiences, but whenever she joins, they fall silent. There is no point in telling you anything, the women answer. You won't ever use this information. You won't ever have sex. You will also never need to use multiplication tables, you will never need to learn how to read. We'll be stuck here until our final breaths. So what is the point in teaching you? But in having information withheld from her, even if it is pointless, our main character's rage only festers deeper.

"By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn't know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure. Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren't entirely powerless?" (p. 7)

It creates a power imbalance within the group. Or more specifically, between the narrator and the other 39 women. She speculates that the women withhold the information out of a sort of spite. Or as a projection of the emptiness they feel, knowing they will never again experience those things they chatter about amongst themselves. Depriving her of this knowledge is the only thing that can differentiate them in this existence. And so, decides our main character, if they will keep secrets, so shall I. She conjures up an escapist fantasy to which she returns daily, sitting in silence, not sharing anything about her thoughts when the women ask. She fantasizes about what it would be like to feel a romantic connection. One of the guards, who seems to be younger than the rest of them, is her supporting act in this fictional universe. In doing so she not only finds power in individuality, but also in using the guard's image for her pleasure.

Knowledge is also resistance. Once our main character grows suspicious that a day in the cage - indicated by the artificial lights turning on in the "morning" and turning off in the "evening" - does not adhere to the 24-hour-cycle of the world before, she seeks a way to measure time. Using her heartbeat to track seconds, minutes, and hours, she becomes the community's clock. And indeed, a day inside spans anywhere from 8 to 11 hours. Though the women don't deviate from the days imposed on them, they are keeping with the 24-hour clock, snickering when they are eating breakfast and our main character announces it's 2AM. It's a small act of rebellion, as if to take back one thing stolen from them.

"Inside the bars, my strong, regular heart fueled by youthful anger had restored to us our own territory; we'd established an area of freedom." (p. 53)

The final bit of knowledge (read: spoiler) I will give you here is that, after the first chapter, a major event occurs. Just as a guard opens the hatch to hand the prisoners their daily supply of produce, a deafening alarm sounds. Panic sets in and the guards flee, leaving their key in the lock. In disbelief, the women push open the door and exit the cage, entering the world beyond. Now they are left to their own devices. They must explore this terra nova, build a community and create new rules of life. Piece by piece they start to fill the gaps in their mysterious circumstances, but whether they will ever learn the full truth, neither we nor they know.

Bare life

The story reminded me of an anthropological theory by Giorgio Agamben (1998), that of "bare life" (nuda vita). Now I will admit, Agamben's work is one of remarkably high complexity that takes me great effort to decode, so I may lose some of the depth and abstraction in translating, but here's how I interpret the concept. Agamben makes the distinction between a biological existence (bios) and a political existence (zoe), and explains these statuses using the ancient Roman idea of the Homo Sacer, a soldier sent into battle when it is already clear that the fight has been lost. The Homo Sacer's only function is to serve as an offering to the gods. He is a mere beating heart. Biologically alive, but nothing more. When by miraculous happenstance he returns from battle unscaled, his existence is reduced to bare life. In the eyes of the State, he has already been sacrificed, and so we can recognize the functioning of his body but we can no longer recognize him as a political being, rendering him disposable and killable.

The reduction of groups of people to bare life leads to exclusion, or in other words, a state of exception. It is a normalization and internalization of an exceptional state of existence. He uses the example of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe. Through propaganda and fear-mongering rhetoric, Hitler fostered a perceived justification for the Jewish population's reduction to bare life, and in turn a perceived justification for their dehumanization. Once that normalization is established, breaking free from it is hardly possible. Existence becomes a state of survival, not a state of living.

I who have never known men asks us to consider what humanity is. What is a person when stripped down to the most basic of statuses? Our narrator speculates: "I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human." She talks about dancing, about music and books, things she has only learned words for through stories of the past. But we can also see Agamben's state of exception at play here. The women are denied privacy, physical touch, agency, and purpose. All they really have is their bios, until they create their small rebellions and until eventually they form a sort of society outside of the cage.

"Look at us, look at how we live. We have been deprived of everything that made us human, but we organised ourselves, I suppose in order to survive, or because, when you're human, you can't help it." (p. 52)

There isn't much talk about politics or hierarchies in I who have never known men, other than the distinction between "those who make decisions" and those who do not. There is no State. Eventually there is something resembling civilization. Small facets of humanity return after their escape, like a make-shift privacy screen around a make-shift outdoor toilet. But then again, as our narrator had concluded earlier:

"If the only thing that differentiates us from animals is the fact that we hide to defecate, then being human rests on very little." (p. 17)

Lessons and take-aways

After I finished the book, having been underlining and adding annotations as I went, I loaned it to a friend, encouraging her to make her mark as well. And upon flipping through the pages now that it has been returned to me, I snicker at the difference in our highlights. It shows our at times fundamentally different outlooks on life, and also the state of mind I was in while reading it. My friend is the dictionary definition of an optimist. Her underlines consist of examples of the beauty of humanness, small wonders, and marvels. Mine are moody, grim. Depressive, even. Sometimes humorous or hopeful, and also beautiful, but differently so. I like to consider myself a realist but that is a slippery slope into cynicism, I have come to realize. This is all to say that I who have never known men provides wisdoms of all sorts and it's one of those books that you will interpret differently upon each reading, depending on your mood, your values, and your experiences. I thought it would be nice to end on a few of the underlined wisdoms or otherwise interesting phrases my friend and I have spotted on its pages. I'm sure you'll be able to discern which belongs to whom.

"I was happier when I hadn't understood anything."

"Someone had thrown a blanket over me, and I found that strange and touching."

"It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don't know the rules."

"I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it's any use, but purely for that pleasure of knowing."

"What does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?"

"I cannot mourn for what I have not known."

"Despite all that, she had tried to love."

Reference list

Agamben, Giorgio. 1995. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Redwood City: Stanford University Press