As October rolled in, I went in a panic mode realising that I’d only managed to finish fourteen books which was a far cry from my hopeful target of twenty.
So, I came up with a neat plan of abandoning Spanish books that I was slow at reading yet enjoyed thoroughly, focus on English books that I’d bought decades back and never got the chance to read, stay calm and binge-read.
When my cousin Taggy heard of my project, she didn’t approve of it and gave me the bookworm’s lecture of quality vs quantity reading which I totally ignored and went ahead with my plan.
However, when Taggy saw that it was functioning well, she decided to throw in one of her usual dystopian novels that she’d ordered two copies of by mistake.
Although Taggy enjoyed the theme, she found it hard to start and to finish as proven many times especially with Zamyatin’s novel We that she’d abandoned twenty pages later.
The new reading challenge was called 'I Who Have Never Known Men' by Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman, published in 1995. I’d never heard of the book nor the writer before.
However, the idea of a dystopian novel written by a female was intriguing enough to accept the challenge and include the novel on my binge-reading list.
Taggy thought the title was catchy while I felt it an accurate description of the life of Arab spinsters, which she found funny. The book was almost two-hundred pages that I managed to finish in a week, hence winning the competition.
It tells the story of forty women who are incarcerated in an underground bunker with three male guards watching them. The narrator is the youngest of the group, who remains nameless and referred to as 'the child' by the rest. She has no memories of her past, unlike the other women who remember their past lives but were never sure how and why did they end up being in the bunker with the rest.
There are rules in the bunker that includes the prohibition of personal contact or display of emotions and when broken it’s amended with the crack of the whip.
The women spend their day chattering, cooking meager meals and mending their own clothes using their hair for threads. But one day everything changes when the siren sounds, the guards flee and the women are left alone.
They manage to leave the bunker and find themselves in a remote area surrounded by nature. They decide to keep walking to reach the nearest town but what they keep finding are more bunkers like theirs with dead prisoners who never manage to leave their cages.
After years of travelling in the barely changing terrain, they decide to settle and build their own town once they realise that they were the only survivors of this planet that many question if it was Earth.
The story ends with the narrator being left alone after all the women die of age and different diseases. What makes this book different to other dystopian novels is that it focuses on humans and their emotions more than the societal aspects that affects their behaviour.
There is nothing futuristic in the narrative, just a group of women who must survive an extraordinary situation. The narrator’s perspective is unique, having to learn everything from other women’s memories — as she has none — and from her daily experience.
The narrative comes to a full circle when re-reading the first few pages that don’t make sense initially. 'I Who Have Never Known Men' is a brilliantly imagined tale that will stir and shake you. Highly recommended.
Rasha al Raisi
The writer is author of The World According to Bahja
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