I Who Have Never Known Men

my friends and i are trying to get a book club going and we kicked it off with I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. the title intrigued me immediately: i have known too many men (coincidence of interests and career); so, i wanted to know what is to be said when someone doesn’t know any. i recall that i expected the book to be overtly discussing womanhood and friendship dynamics in a more tender way.

instead, we were introduced by the narrator to a group of women trapped in an underground cage, guarded by men, with no memory of how they got there or why. no explanation is ever given, but that’s ok since i came to realize that the specifics were not the point. it seemed like the setup was all just introduction to help us think: given baseless, unexplained evil and people who enforce it, what do the receivers of this evil do? after they’re free? are the ones carrying it out absolved of anything? do the ones impacted crave revenge? companionship with one another?

when the women escape and make it to the surface, they find an empty world. and they just live together; they build a small community and take care of each other. to be quite honest: i felt a little smug about this outcome. like yeah, obviously, this tracks: strip away all the inherited structures and roles and what did these women reach for? community. one of my friends and i thought about Lord of the Flies whenever we each (separately) read this part of the book.

i will say: i did have to warm up to the narrator, though. she opens cold, self-isolated, and hard to get close to. i found it a bit frustrating at first, but at some point i stopped reading her detachment as a flaw and started reading it as the only honest response to her situation. her whole life had been the cage; of course she’d turned inward.

what actually turned things around for me was when the narrator begins helping the women die. as the women age and their bodies give out, she stays with them through it and it’s in these moments that she starts genuinely reflecting on her relationships with them, on what each of them meant to her. it was the first time the narrator felt warm to me. the last woman is particularly striking: by the end, her spirit is just gone even though her body is still physically intact. and the narrator (despite the fact that they were never particularly close) stayed with her even though she wanted to explore more of the world. i would like to believe that there’s something deeply human about refusing to abandon someone even when the connection was never strong and even when there’s nothing left to do but witness.

the guards are a different question. they enforce something they didn’t design, with no justification offered. does that let them off the hook? i really struggle to say yes. i think that with this type of question, it’s granular (it shifts depending on the system, the person, how much actual choice existed), and i do think ethical decision-making is sometimes a luxury people don’t have. sometimes you do the “bad” thing because you can’t afford the “good” thing. but i don’t think that fully absolves someone. i understand that the guards had some watch system of keeping each other in check, but i cannot imagine what would have to happen to me to be complicit as a guard in a situation like that.

the ending is my favorite part of the book. to rewind a bit: when the women first escaped and were traveling across this empty world, they came across other bunkers. each time, the possibility flickers: is there someone else out there? is anyone left? however, each time they went down the bunker to see, it was just a mass of dead bodies. so, by the time the narrator settles down somewhere to write everything out (alone), skipping one last bunker because she has no hope anything will be in it, it feels like all hope is gone. but if she actually had no hope, why is she documenting any of this?

i didn’t read this as despair or even stubbornness for her situation. it felt purer than either of those: hope that’s been stripped down to its last form.

i also thought about how little i think i actually care about my own legacy. i try to be pretty present-focused; what matters to me is how i’m making the people around me feel right now and how i feel right now. the narrator doesn’t have a “right now” anymore and even at the end of everything, something in her is still reaching toward someone which made me wonder if i’d do the same.

i think that’s what the book is: what’s left of a person when everything that was supposed to define them is gone.