a grammar of the world by Jeanne Benameur, translated from the French by Bill Johnston, Les Fugitives, 2025
The oeuvre of the Algerian-French writer Jeanne Benameur ranges from poetry (Naissance de l’oubli) to an award-winning novella (Les Demeurées) to various works of nonfiction, and in her latest work to be released in English, a grammar of the world, readers are introduced to her voice in verse. The collection details the author’s journey from Algeria—just before the declaration of Algerian War of Independence—to La Rochelle in France where she grew up, a transition explored with the complexity of migration and belonging, and suffused with potent mytho-historical narratives. Through her personal experiences of departure and a complex familial history (with both Italian and Tunisian-Algerian roots), Benameur explores the slow persistence of syntax both in life and in language, which—however displaced and fragmented—can still be reassembled into something habitable and meaningful. The lines of a grammar of the world unfold without punctuation, their sparse cadence travelling over the subsequent pages in soft tidal motions, culminating in a single long poem in free verse, with occasional phrasal recurrences to generate a momentum between its various contexts. Throughout, the voice shifts between ancient and contemporary, depending on whether it is situated in historical precedence or mythical imagery; the speaker gently walks between memory and myth.
We begin with an invocation of Isis, the Egyptian goddess who resurrects her slain brother and husband Osiris, and subsequently produces their son, Horus. According to one of the Egyptian myths, Isis helps the dead enter the afterlife, as she had once helped Osiris by collecting his scattered body parts from across Egypt—and this myth later gave rise to the earliest practice of mummification. In a grammar of the world, it is this act of harvesting and laying to rest that Benameur focuses on, envisioning Isis as the weary sister who bends to rescue what remains in the aftermath of war and displacement. ‘she gathers up what no longer belongs’, writes Benameur: “pieces // she braves that which is scattered’.
Moving with the rhythms, Bill Johnston’s poised translation mirrors and extenuates this same lengthy process of gathering fragments; the poem seemingly grows through the slow, painstaking procession that the poet herself compares to ‘. . . the work of thought // thought stitching the pieces of the world back together’. Each stanza advances like waves lapping the shores: memories of a displaced childhood, the flight from ‘. . . a country where there were no longer any burials’, Antigone’s defiance, the images of nameless dead people and their unknown fates, the echoes of Egyptian myths. These thematic and imagistic repetitions enact the poem’s central labour, which is the reassembly of what has been scattered by violence and time.
At the heart of a grammar of the world lies language itself, with books not as entertainment but as refuge. Benameur sees her childhood habit of reading as an anchor amidst the tides of uncertainty in a new country: ‘I anchored myself on the shingle / feet planted upon the round pebbles / eyes on the horizon’. As literature became her astute and silent protector, the poet—a child of exile—learns to read ‘. . . the soil of the language / that was the mother tongue neither of my father / nor of my mother’, and thus learns also the tandem lesson of language always as both loss and lifeline, a hybrid inheritance of sayable and unsayable things. As the speaker’s mother sings the ‘songs of the partisans’, her voice carries the traces of a homeland no one names—but the daughter, born into French, feels its textures under her fingers. ‘the rough edges / of the language’, she writes as if caressing the grain of foreignness, accepting that: ‘. . . through a language I was being offered / a possible grammar of the world’.
This attention to linguistic texture is what lends the text its multidimensionality. Benameur is not interested in reclaiming the purity or origin of a homeland or language; she writes hoping for a third space where languages might meet and reconfigure one another. The grammar she seeks for this modern world is prescriptive but relational—built of fragments, multilingual echoes, and translations. ‘to understand that belonging to the world / isn’t a matter of being perfect / is to be free’, she writes. The line carries a silent activism without the polemics of radicalism, insisting that belonging is not an achieved state but a continual negotiation with imperfection. In meeting this distinct language politic, Johnston’s translation carries its mediations with great restrain; his English feels porous, attuned to the spaces between words, leading the reader easily through the shifts from internal monologues to philosophical idea.
Our journey with the poet and Isis reaches a crescendo when the narrator addresses the goddess, describes herself as ‘. . . a woman mixed of ocean and blue sea / a métisse’, with her ‘. . . mother’s so-blue eyes / olive wood and porcelain’. And ultimately, it is through this difference that she discovers the pride of being who one is ‘quite simply / the dignity of being’. In French letters, Benameur’s invocation of Isis joins a long, distinctly feminine lineage of mythic rewriting, including Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and its feminist call to women to write for themselves and reclaim their bodies. Through Benameur’s project runs along a similar vein, it is here quieter, less insurgent—not the terrifying image of female power as a weapon against patriarchy, but a determination and a conviction persisting in relative silence. Her Isis is not the avenger of the feminine, but its restorer, the one who devotes herself to the act of restitution and repair, kneeling on the shingle of history. This gesture of stooping to reassemble becomes the poem’s radical act. In a literary culture and activism often obsessed with visibility and forceful voices, Benameur insists on tenderness as a mode of resistance.
Exile and prophecy are some of the most ancient stories of humankind, and Benameur has clearly drawn from the formidable capacity of this archive when she deftly chose Egyptian mythology to find her way amidst the ruins of history. In joining life to lineage, she exalts writing as a means to learn of both self and other, as a daily intention of creating space for personal growth, as a practice to yield our place to the massive simultaneity of infinite narratives, and as a tool to shed a little light on reality without the need to belong to a certain geography or even language. a grammar of the world is thus neither manifesto nor confession, but a re-suturing. The poem operates in the wake of trauma, in the shadow of the Algerian War, in adopting a new tongue, and beneath the larger diasporic ache that marks the Mediterranean landscape. Benameur’s Isis does not conquer. She is interested in what must be unearthed to be put to rest. Her grammar is one of relationality instead of rule, building a poetics that returns to what still murmurs within us—however broken it might be.
Sayani Sarkar has a PhD in biochemistry and structural biology from the University of Calcutta. She writes academic book reviews and interdisciplinary essays on her Substack newsletter called The Omnivore Scientist. Her reviews and essays fall within an intersection of science, nature, languages, arts, culture, and philosophy. Her works have been published in Full Stop, Tamarind Literary Magazine, LARB PubLab Magazine, Littera Magazine, The Coil Magazine, and The Curious Reader. Currently, she is the Editor-at-Large (India) with Asymptote Journal and a creative nonfiction reader for Hippocampus Magazine. She lives in Kolkata, India.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: