"What does it mean to be a woman who has never been touched, never been named, and never been known?'
What remains of identity when you are born into silence, when you inherit no past, no gendered gaze, no history - only the burden of existence?"
Belgian novelist and psychoanalyst Jacquelin Harpman wrote with a rare sensitivity toward the liminal spaces of womanhood - between self and other, memory and forgetting, silence and language. Her acclaimed works (La Mémoire trouble, Orlanda, La Plague d'Ostende) explore these tensions through prisms of trauma, sexuality, and gender. But it is I Who Have Never Known Men (Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes, 1995), a speculative novel translated by Ros Schwartz, that remains her most enduring and disquieting work - and arguably her most radical.
It is dystopian fiction, yes - but of a different kind.
This is not a world after war, but a world after meaning.
The novel begins in subterranean prison : forty women are caged underground, guarded by silent male figures. Their crime is unknown. Their captors never speak. Their bodies are not touched, raped, or beaten. But nor are they acknowledged And here lies the genius of Harpman's feminist vision : she removes not only violence, but also recognition.
Among the women is the narrator - younger than the rest, and crucially, someone who has never known life before the prison. She has never lived in a world shaped by men, nor has she experienced love, sexuality, or even maternal affection. She is born not just outside patriarchy, but outside history itself. Her body is not politicised, sexualised, or even socialised.
This radical erasure of social scripts allows Harpman to ask : If patriarchy ends not with revolution but with erasure, what kind of woman emerges from the void?
When the prison doors open and the women escape into a barren, lifeless plain, there is no society to rebuild - only endless walking. There is no future, no resistnace, no utopia. Just the unyielding persistence of being.
The narrator has never menstruated, never been desired, never reproduced. In her, Harpman gives is a woman unmarked by patriarchal biology. Neither punished for her body nor empowered by it. This is rare in feminist literature. Most dystopian heroines - from Offred in The Handmaid's Tale to Furiosa in Mad Max - are women shaped in opposition to patriarchal violence. But Harpman goes further : she imagines a woman untouched by the very structure of gender itself.
This is not liberation. It is liminality.
The narrator does not mourn the absence of men ; she mourns the absence of meaning. There are no rituals, no reflections, no names. In the absence of the male gaze, the body becomes neither sacred nor profane - it becomes irrelevant.
Here, Harpman critiques not only gender roles but the very construct of womanhood as relational. The narrator is not a mother, daughter, lover, or victim. She is simply as self - and the self, in this context, is a terrifying blank slate.
Though the novel does not use the language of class or class explicitly, its structural critique is unmistakable. The women in the cage are dispossessed of every marker of humanity - name, origin, purpose, voice. They are the unseen labourers, the disposable bodies, the detained without trial. Their erasure mirrors the caste and class apartheid of real world societies, where entire populations are incarcerated - not for crimes, but for the crime of being.
The women are not given backstory because, like the Dalit, the enslaved, the marginalised in every society, their backstory isn't permitted. The silence of the guards, the faceless authority, recalls carcera regimes here power is not personal, but structural. It cannot be appealed to, because it does not even acknowledge the subject.
And what could be more casteist or classist than being punished without explaination?
Once free, the women find not the wild earth, but a sterile one. No trees, no rivers, no animals. Just a scorched plain and automated warehouses dispensing food. Nature, like woman, has been used and discarded.
Harpman's landscape is not merely post apocalyptic ; it's post ecological. In its desolation lies a deeply ecofeminist allegory. The earth - once fertile, abundant, and living - has been stripped of all function, mirroring the fate of the women whose reproductive and social roles have likewise been erased.
In this world, woman and land are not romanticised - they are residues of utility, left behind by a system that no longer needs tham.
Ecofeminism often connects the exploitation of nature with the domination of women. Harpman extends this further : what if both are abandoned when they are no longer extractable ? What if exploitation ends, not because of justice, but because of disinterest?
Perhaps, the most unsettling choice Harpman makes is refusing explanation. There is no apocalypse described. No history uncovered. The narrator walks the world, writes her journal, and dies with the same question she began with :
Who were we?
Why were we imprisoned?
What happened to the world?
This narrative is not negligence - it is a radical political refusal. In a world obsessed with resolution, Harpman suggests that some violences remain unknowable not because they are too complex, but because they were never acknowledged in the first place.
Like so many women, like so many oppressed people, Harpman's narrator is not granted the luxury of context. Her story is not "about" something. It simply is.
Unlike other dystopian narratives where survival is resistance, Harpman asks :
What if survival itself becomes unbearable?
The narrator's life is long, perhaps unnaturally so, but it is not full. She does not fight to live. She fights to understand. When that fails, she fights simply to continue. Not with hope, not with joy- but with a quiet relentless dignity.
In this she is closer to Camus' Sisyphus than to Katniss Everdeen. There is no glory in her journey - only the act of journeying.
Her writing is not testimony. It is rebellion through remembrance.
Her walking is not escape. It is insistence on being.
In the era of hyper visible feminist slogans, I Who Have Never Known Men dares to ask the quieter, more dangerous question :
What if the real violence is not abuse, but erasure?
What if patriarchy does not end in confrontation, but in apathy?
This is not a tale of uprising.
This is the tale of unbeing, of surviving long enough to remember yourself into existence.
Harpman's narrator - unnamed, untouched, unknowable - becomes a symbol not of womanhood, but of what is left of womanhood when history forgets to mention it.
And in that, this novel is not just a feminist work. It is a devastating elegy for all who were never known - by their families, by their countries, by the histories they were erased from.
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