I Who Have Never Known Men

by Jacqueline Harpman

But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity,

all the links between them and me have been severed. There’s no continuity and the world I have come from is utterly foreign to me.

Perhaps, somewhere, humanity is flourishing under the stars, unaware that a daughter of its blood is ending her days in silence.

Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others,

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

If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I

But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me,

because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long t...

There are echoes of concentration camps in the senseless cruelty of their confinement, the endless cracking of the whips of the mysterious prison guards, the sickening inevitability as they discover, over and over and over, that everyone else on the planet imprisoned in the same way as them has perished. And for what? A project with a vague beginning—the ‘confusion’ the women allude to, sirens and fire and being taken from their homes—and then nothing but an endless, pointless confinement.

Reading it is not a passive experience but one that provokes, that exasperates, that moves.

If the narrator has lived a life as best as she could—wildly unconventional, but one that has given her joy in many ways—hasn’t she triumphed over cruelty after all,