Reyhaneh

“The women weren’t often kind to me. I suppose that at that time they resented my being there alive while they had no idea what had happened to their own daughters. The appalling disaster that had befallen us probably explained their attitude: none of them ever bothered about me or made the slightest attempt to comfort me. But perhaps that wasn’t possible? My own mother wasn’t with us and we had no notion what had become of the others. We assumed they were probably all dead. I have raked through my memories of that time, I thought I saw them swaying and groaning, crying and shivering with terror. None of them looked at me and I hated them. I thought it was unfair, and then I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror. I moved away from Alice and went”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. 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 am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. 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 that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“For a few moments I wondered what gave me my determination to live. I thought of all those women who had been killed by despair well before they reached old age, of Laura who grew tired of keeping her soul tethered to her body, and I felt a sort of vague temptation, a gnawing urge to admit defeat, which terrified me. I got up and took a few steps. It was a clear night, the sky was vast, hill after hill, I had thousands of kilometres to cover. My curiosity, momentarily dampened, was reawakened. The”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Did the planet on which I was wandering have a thousand sister planets scattered across the starry sky and, at night, while I was waiting to fall asleep, and my gaze sometimes lit on some distant globe, was the same scene taking place there?”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men