Fiction: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, 1995
Forty women are locked in a cage deep underground. Watched by silent guards, with no sense of how they got there or why they are imprisoned, the women are denied even the most basic of human experiences, including sunlight, physical touch, and a sense of time. What comes next is an exploration of how humans find meaning in senseless and inexplicable cruelty. Through this story, author Jacqueline Harpman asks the reader over and over again: what does it mean to be a human without history, community, knowledge, nature, or future? What does it mean to be a human without purpose?
Harpman’s nameless protagonist is a young girl with no memory of the world before the cage. Selecting a child character to narrate this story was no mistake: children are deeply curious by nature, which this story reveals as the characteristic that keeps us human, even in the bleakest of circumstances. During the women’s imprisonment, the girl battles her own dehumanizing environment with curiosity: imagining romance, the outside world, and even the passage of time. Telling this story from a youthful perspective makes even more sense upon learning that Harpman, who was born in 1929 Belgium to Jewish parents, was only eleven years old when she was forced to flee the violence of the Holocaust. She watched from afar as the majority of her family in Belgium was killed in the senseless murders of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In a sense, this story is therefore autobiographical: a story of a young girl trying to explain an unexplainably cruel world.
I particularly resonated with the protagonist’s generational disconnect from the other women, who cling to memories of a world that she has never known and may no longer exist. As a young person in the United States, I feel a similar inability to rationalize the stories I hear of decency, bipartisanship, and cultural sanity with the bizarre and nonsensical political age that has reigned since the beginning of my adolescence. But the adults in the story seem lost in the past, the girl’s insistence to understand their present reality is what keeps the women alive – and eventually, what leads them aboveground. The girl’s cynical (but justified) lesson to readers is to let go of the desire to return to a safer world that has long since passed, and instead to go out and discover what lies ahead.
Harpman herself makes a point to lay bare the readers’ yearning for meaning alongside her characters’: just as the protagonist never stops seeking an explanation for her imprisonment, you as the reader will keep turning the book’s pages to find those same answers. We the readers, alongside the nameless girl, answer Harpman’s question: to be human is to want to know.
Author’s Note
I’m starting this run of articles in the hopes that it will encourage everyone to explore the Olin library’s stacks more often. I was skeptical of the library when I first arrived – it seemed so much smaller than a traditional college library. It is, but I’ve discovered this is because we simply got rid of all the bad books and only have good books. I normally read a lot of science fiction, but our library has helped me explore political science, sociology, literary fiction, and more (the sci-fi collection is pretty impressive too). I’m starting small with this issue, but going forward I hope to include a fiction and nonfiction review so there is something for everyone. If you read any of the books I talk about, or just like talking about books, come find me!
