Document:Q12212

Sentaniz Nimerik is an electronic literature work, an example of digital storytelling and digital poetry in Haitian Creole, or Kreyòl, as the language is called in Haiti.

Kreyòl has a community of more than 14 million speakers worldwide. It's Haiti's national language—with 12 million Kreyòl speakers. Kreyòl is not a variety of French (Haiti's other official language) and it is not mutually intelligible with Haitian French (or with any other variety of French).

The storytelling basis for this work is “Sentaniz,” a well-known story in Kreyòl by Haitian storyteller Maurice Sixto, who died in 1984, leaving us a collection of some 50 stories (“lodyans”).  In Sentaniz Nimerik, Sixto’s story is retold in two parallel versions which are automatically generated via new framing statements by BIC, using JavaScript to omit different lines at random from a precompiled list.

The work was created by singer, songwriter and poet BIC Tizon Dife in September 2017 at MIT in collaboration with Michel DeGraff and Nick Montfort.  “BIC Tizon Dife” is the artist’s name of Roosevelt Saillant. “BIC” stands for “Brain. Intelligence. Creativity.”  Michel DeGraff is professor of linguistics at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative.  Nick Montfort is a poet and a professor of digital media at MIT.