I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered:

how can you feel privileged not to have something that everyone else has?

As if talking only served to make things happen. Talking is existing.

Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness.

There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me. I haven’t heard its music, I haven’t seen its painting, I haven’t read its books, except for the handful I found in the refuge and of which I understood little. I know only the stony plain, wandering, and the gradual loss of hope. I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct.

We had survived the prison, the plain and the loss of all hope, but the women had discovered that survival is no more than putting off the moment of death.

The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human