I was given this book for Christmas by a friend and at first I just laughed because I saw the title and said “same”. Until I was 25, I’d never had a boyfriend and until I met this specific guy I’m with now, I’d never wanted one. It was always a joke between me and my friends that I would be alone forever, and for a long time I was just fine with that. Relationships always seemed like unnecessary stress and drama and eventual heartbreak. For a while, I was right. There was so much more for me to do and I knew, if I stepped back a bit, that myself and whatever guy I was talking to were not going to make it in the long term, so I would rather spend my time and energy in other places. When I met my guy, I learned that a real partner brings excitement and newness to your life, like any good friend would do.

Needless to say, I was skeptical of men and what value they could bring to my life for a lengthened period of time, so this book seemed right up my alley. I had never heard of it before, but I later found out that it’s within the canon of classic feminist literature, which made this all the more exciting to read. 

The author, Jacqueline Harpmen, was born in Belgium, fled to Morocco with her family during World War II, and wrote her books in French. I Who Have Never Known Men is a science fiction work published in 1995 and was originally titled Mistress of Silence. It’s a short book — I read the whole thing one morning in a cafe — but there were no chapters, no breaks at all. At times this made it all flow together nicely and at others, it made it all feel a bit monotonous. Harpmen’s writing is extremely detailed and she is meticulous about completing any explanation, following each detail to its natural conclusion. This showed how dedicated she was to the project and what she was trying to do. I believe the intention of this story was to articulate the importance of culture and community, the stubborn endurance of human desire to hope, and the anguish of loneliness. 

The story begins with 39 women and one young girl trapped in a cage like a large zoo enclosure, though the only visitors are the three guards who walk in sync, never acknowledging the prisoners or each other. The only time they are even perceived by the guards is when they are being given good, without any words exchanged or emotions shown, or when they break a rule and are cracked with the guards perfectly accurate whip. The story is told from the young girl’s perspective. We later learn that she is likely 14 or 15 and has been in the cage probably half her life, with no memory of any life other than what they experience in the cage, even her own parents. The young girl, who is never given a name other than “child,” also never has a period or menstruation. The rest of the women remember that they had a life before the cage; they had children, husbands and lovers, jobs, and interests, but it is all a little fuzzy and they don’t know how they ended up in the cage either.

The child begins the story hating the older women because the women will not explain things to her that she doesn’t understand, that she’s never experienced; things like love and relationships, why they menstruate at all, or any stories of their lives before the cage were kept from the child because the women deemed it was useless to tell the child. She is instead told that she should feel lucky that she didn’t have to deal with pain and discomfort of menstruating; although, the child’s response begs the question of how can one feel grateful to not experience something they’ve never experienced? It’s only when our noses are completely clogged and our head is foggy with congestion that we swear to never take for granted breathing freely. The young child is constantly angry with the older women for being treated with such indifference.

She is constantly badgering them for information until one day, she notices that she finds one of the guards attractive. She recognizes that he may not actually be cute because she’s never seen anyone else, but this doesn’t stop her from fantasizing about a scandalous, clandestine encounter that excites her so much that she feels a router that spreads throughout her entire body (which we can only imagine is an orgasm). She never puts that word to it, nor does she ever really understand it, but for weeks after this she creates ever-evolving and ever more complicated fantasies in her head that give her that same explosive feeling. She spends hours everyday in silence, sitting completely still and staring at nothing with her imagination racing to create a story fast enough that she surprises herself.

The older women begin to feel the same frustration for the child that she once felt for the older women because she won’t tell them what she’s doing. The child realizes that it was never the secret itself that angered her but rather the feeling of not knowing what others know that made her hate the older women. From this, she realizes that the older women cannot hold any authority over her, they can’t even touch her. Once the child realizes they are all equal, her relationship to these older women changes.

One woman in particular becomes close to the child and they start to exchange ideas. The child explains that she has begun staring at the young guard she had once fantasized about because she’s trying to get him to slip up and acknowledge her.