Miami Is The Perfect Place To Create a Caribbean Alphabet, Designer Says

The artist Arthur Francietta conducts research on ancient petroglyphs to develop a Haitian Creole alphabet during a residency at the Bakehouse Art Complex. (Photo by Gregory Jacquelin/courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

What if the Caribbean had its own written language? It’s an idea explored by a Martinique artist while in Miami, the region’s unofficial capital.

Originally from the French overseas territory, artist and graphic designer Arthur Francietta’s work focusing on hypothetical written language systems earned him a Caribbean Cultural Institute Artist Fellowship from the Pérez Art Museum Miami. On Sunday, Dec. 15 he finished a two-month stint at Bakehouse Art Complex in Wynwood. It was there that he spent time working on a new writing system for Haitian Creole, one based on something other than the Latin script adopted from the country’s French colonizers.

Also, while he was here, Francietta was a panelist at the Miami Book Fair and appeared in a conversation with acclaimed French author Michael Roch at the Alliance Française Miami.

For Francietta, Miami is the perfect place to develop the project.

Originally from Martinique, Arthur Francietta won a Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship from PAMM. (Photo courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

“This is a really cool experience for me as a French Caribbean,” he says. “Miami is like the center of the Caribbean. If I could, I’d travel to each island in the Caribbean and spend a year there, but maybe the first step is to be here and meet a lot of the diaspora and community, and try to understand how they preserve the aspects of their culture outside the islands.”

To make his new Creole alphabet, Francietta has been conducting investigations on ancient petroglyphs left behind by the indigenous Taino people, as well as Haitian vèvè cosmograms and other symbols. His research also included visits to the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami and explorations into Afro-Caribbean religious practices such as Palo Monte.

“The goal is to use all of the graphic systems, the prehistoric and the new ones, and inject them inside the Latin alphabet, because we use the Latin alphabet for Spanish, English, and Creole. The beginning of the project here is to focus on the Creole writing system, but before that, it’s to understand all the shapes that come from the vèvè, and the Cuban and Amerindian prehistoric shapes.”

One of Arthur Francietta’s calligraphy tests at the Bakehouse. The artist uses black ink on paper to draw symbols that will be used for his Haitian Creole alphabet. (Photo courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

Although he uses modern computer software to draw the completed letters, part of the process involves what he calls “Divination” – using his knowledge of typography and ancient shapes to devise new letters and glyphs. The artist demonstrated this process in the studio, using a paint brush and ink to draw symbols on a prepared piece of paper. Embroidery, either with a sewing machine or by needlepoint while traveling, is another technique he uses to draw letters.

“The idea is to focus on my memory and then try to draw new shapes inspired by these petroglyphs,” he says.

Posters on the wall in his studio show cryptic symbols, drawn by the artist in black ink and white paint, experiments in letter-making for a new alphabet for the French-based language. Rather than mere improvisations, they’re the result of a thought process conducted by the artist. One cross-shaped symbol on the wall, for instance, is based on the Kongo cosmogram, a religious symbol introduced to the Americas by enslaved Africans.

Arthur Francietta’s process includes “divination.” “The idea is to focus on my memory and then try to draw new shapes.” (Photo courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

Francietta first developed an interest in typography while studying art in Fort-de-France, the Martiniquan capital, where a professor introduced him to the field and taught him how to draw fonts. He then journeyed to

Paris to study at the École Estienne to learn calligraphy and further his typography studies, later joining the National Typography Research Workshop. There he worked on the Missing Scripts Project, collaborating with fellow academics in Germany and at UC Berkeley in the U.S. to preserve the world’s writing systems. He researched Medefaidrin, a constructed language developed in Nigeria in the 1930s.

Along with scholarly research, Francietta’s other artistic projects have included murals and commissions for companies like Jaguar and Citroën. He says that he’ll continue developing the Creole typeface after the residency has wrapped; the project’s second phase will continue next year when he takes a second residency in California, sponsored by the French Embassy’s Villa Albertine Institute. He also has plans to travel to Taiwan for a similar project in 2025.

Francietta’s past projects have included commissions for brands such as Jaguar. Photo by Alan Marty/courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

So far, Francietta has compiled a report on his work in Miami, and he plans to eventually exhibit the project as a book, documenting the finished product as well as the process used to reach it. The process of building a new language isn’t an overnight one, in other words. While it may be some time before we see the fruits of his labor, Francietta’s work will hopefully provide Caribbean people in Miami and elsewhere the opportunity to think about different ways of living and seeing themselves. If language can change, what else can?

Once complete, Arthur Francietta’s project will have developed a new writing system for Haitian Creole. (Photo courtesy of Arthur Francietta)

“The idea is to just think about if, as Caribbean people, we have the chance to create an alphabet just for our language. It’s an Afro-futuristic way of thinking,” he says. “As a designer I just want to create a kind of fake writing as the first step to show people that we can just focus on the history of the Caribbean. And then, maybe with the community, if we can think about a new alphabet for Creole, we can think together and work together to bring some new way of thinking about the future.”

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