I will sit on the bed, and arrange the cushions and blankets rolled up around me so that my body is firmly supported. Everything will be perfectly clean and tidy. I hope there’ll be no blood, which I know is possible. Perhaps nobody will ever come, perhaps one day, an astounded human being, arriving at the foot of the stairs as I did so long ago, will see the dark wood-panelled room, the neatly arranged bed, and an old woman sitting upright, a knife in her heart, looking peaceful.

It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men.

AFTERWORD

Sometimes we read a book of such singularity and uniqueness, yet such ringing truth, that we wonder why it has not found a larger audience. Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is beloved by a small and intense core of readers, and yet has not entered mainstream awareness. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, refusing as it does to be put into a neat genre box. It’s a philosophical treatise as much as it is a story about an alien world, one that prizes the humanity of its characters and places this humanity square, front and centre, even in a disorientating landscape of total strangeness. The prose is cool water. Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting.

In recent years we have seen a boom in science and speculative fiction written by female authors, but I Who Have Never Known Men seems eerily prescient, a book from a hundred years ago or a hundred years in the future. Lumping together female-centred science fiction can be reductive; problems of women are still problems that affect everyone living under patriarchy. In fact, femaleness is somehow both central to and almost incidental in this novel. Yes, there are men among the dead, but the novel would look very different were men to make an appearance beyond their roles as guards and dead prisoners.

The narrator is at the heart of this doubleness, presenting her memories and theories to us from a space of peculiar neutrality. She is not like the other women of the novel, with their memories of the outside world and knowledge of relationships, sex, love and family. Her body never developed the markers of reproduction, and being raised in an underground bunker since an early age, she is in a unique position to be a person without any of the signifiers of personhood. She is an example of a person raised without culture, without societal constructs, without knowledge. She is a pure experiment asking: what does a person become when stripped to the core, raised in isolation? What might a woman be like under these conditions? It is testament to the strength and beauty of this novel that she remains a character too, not just a device; she is formed, sympathetic, and possessing both curiosity and courage.

Nowhere in this novel is exploitation, pain for the sake of pain, or needless cruelty. The entire novel manages to balance its elegant philosophical concerns with also being an amazing feat of human tenderness. Everything is pared down, and everything has a purpose. Harpman shows the worst of what humans can inflict on humans, but also the best that love and togetherness can do. It is a ‘minute account of a nightmare’ (Hector Bianciotti, Le Monde) and yet also a triumph of the small, seemingly trivial fragments that make up who we are. ‘It’s all so ordinary, it’s the same as everybody else!’ exclaims one of the women when talking about her previous life; to which the narrator responds with ‘As if she did not realise that for me, nothing was ordinary, since nothing had happened to me’.