In Une Méthodologie de la Nouvelle-Écriture Africaine (English translation: A Methodology of the New African Script), Frédéric Bruly Bouabré creates a new African language composed entirely of symbols, most appearing almost stick figure-like, ranging from some that could almost look like letters, and others looking like a stick-figure man performing an action. In the text, Bouabré assigns his own hand-drawn symbol to each French word, lasting a significant amount of pages, and then subsequently proceeds to tell a story using only the symbols once each has been assigned to a specific word.

This book and its symbols strive to move past the convention of the initial language where each symbol represents a sound (letters) and progressing to a language where each symbol represents an idea (hieroglyphs). While this, in theory, can make a “language” seem more universal in the idea that everyone can look at a symbol and theoretically come up with the same idea to represent it, it’s also possible that each person can look at these symbols and come up with an entirely different idea to represent them. In a similar way to Book from the Ground: from point to point, each reading of the text depends on what each specific reader has already been exposed to in their own life.

For example, there is one symbol that is assigned to the French word “lu” (which means “read” when I looked it up in Google Translate) that looks like either a lowercase “m” in the English language or two connected hills.If I was a native Chinese speaker and had never seen the letter “m” or knew what it meant, I would most likely associate this symbol with hills. This particular example of differently interpreted symbols shows that there are multiple interpretations even for a single symbol, let alone the entire text created by the sequence of symbols that Bouabré subsequently creates.