i who have never known men by jacqueline harpman

We follow her as she experiences rage, fear, and - most poignantly - awe at a world which never fully reveals itself to her.

Readers, then, become both unwitting accomplices in her suffering and passive agents in her creation of memory. She is a blank canvas with no memory of life before imprisonment. The narrative voice logs every minuscule detail and thought, enmeshing the reader - women or not- with the captive women in the cage through a kind of collective consciousness.ĭespite the communal experience of suffering, there is something distinctly unique about the narrator. The first half of the narrative crawls through the passing of time at an agonising pace.

Less filled with pseudo-feministic moments of rebellion, Harpman’s monotonous narrative appeals to all in its ongoing search for hope and humanity among barren lands. This comparison has been drawn many times by readers however, where Atwood’s story becomes an explicitly gendered dialectic mapped onto the power dynamic between victim and oppressor, Harpman’s prose is far more to do with the singular struggle for survival. The prose and dialogue are sparse and honest in much the same way as Margaret Atwood’s lines in The Handmaid’s Tale. This context of persecution, violence, and suffering forms a consistent backdrop to Harpman’s novel in its themes of arbitrary incarceration and dehumanisation. As Harpman grew up, the horrors of the Holocaust were unfolding all around her. During this time, Harpman was just ten years old - a similar age to the only child character in the story. Jacqueline Harpman is a Jewish author whose family fled Belgium when the Nazi regime invaded during the Second World War. Harpman’s novel was originally published in 1995 in French as Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, but has since been translated and loved by many more audiences in English since 1997, as an excellent post-apocalyptic work of modern science fiction. The story that unfolds next is one of immense bewilderment, disorientation, and overwhelming loss. None of these women know why they are prisoners, or why there is a child among them. Thirty-nine women and one young girl are being held captive in a cage underground, guarded by men who never speak to them.

I who have never known men by jacqueline harpman