"A Bruise Still Tender": David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Cultural Memory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Chariandy's highly acclaimed 2007 novel, Soucouyant, proclaims itself to be a "novel of forgetting."But it is also a novel of remembering, of personal and cultural acts of memory that define the book's secondgeneration Canadian protagonist.Soucouyant tells the story of a young man in 1980s Scarborough who returns to his mother Adele's home after a two-year absence.Adele suffers from early-onset dementia, an illness that the book suggests may have been triggered by the traumatic fire that she and her mother survived when she was a young child in Trinidad.As Chariandy explains in an interview with Kit Dobson, Adele's dementia enabled me to explore the fragility and endurance of cultural memory, and, most particularly, the challenge of cultural memory for a second-generation immigrant.Obviously, because Adele is now forgetting her past in Trinidad, the burden of memory is thrust upon her Canadian-born and raised son.("Spirits" 813) Chariandy's comments point to the particular relationship between cultural memory and a specifically second-generation subjectivity, a relationship troubled by the fact that the protagonist "doesn't have anything at all like absolute or infallible access to the past" (813).The very term "second generation" signifies a belatedness in relationship to the past and the diasporic moment.Chariandy goes on to ask "what … might his mother's elsewhere past, uttered now in broken pieces, and in a language not entirely his, ultimately mean to him here and now, in apparently very different circumstances?What, indeed, might he owe to such an elsewhere past, really?" ("Spirits" 813) .The novel itself is a meditation on these difficult questions.Soucouyant demonstrates how second-generation Canadians often construct iden-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".