Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Scorpion's Claw. By Myriam J. A. Chancy. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2005. ISBN 1-900715-91-0.188 pages. $15.95 paper. Myriam J. A. Chancy's The Scorpion's Claw recounts narrator Josephe's quest to recover her identity, a casualty of family's move from Haiti to Canada. In Canada, Josephe is at a safe remove from escalating domestic and political violence at home, but she sees herself as less Haitian as a result. Her sense of dislocation and alienation is exacerbated further when, on a return trip to Haiti at age of eight, she is raped by a family acquaintance. Unable to get beyond either assault or her cultural isolation, narrator remains spiritually adrift and emotionally aloof. The temporal and geographical distance separating narrator from her past increases, rather than diminishes, her psychic vulnerability, and she at one point contemplates suicide: have to think I was in wrong place. Never have to wake to smoke of my breath suspended in air because everything is frozen except my brain, which keeps asking me, over and over again: How did I get here? How do I find my way home again? (23). The novel skillfully blends real and fictional by situating narrative against backdrop of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes, but Chancy uses past not in an attempt to dramatize history but rather to personalize it. The author is less interested in casting blame or explaining causes of Haiti's traumatic political past than in exposing destructive effects of this past on individual inhabitants. Toward this end, author focuses her narrative attention on complex relationship between primary narrator, Josephe; her cousin Alphonse; and her best friend Desiree. Each of these characters narrates his or her own story in one of novel's three main subdivisions. Prefacing each of these main subdivisions is a shorter vignette recounted by yet another character who is in some significant way connected to narrator at hand. The thread that weaves narratives together is Josephe's maternal grandmother, Carmel, and it is her story that opens narrative, preceding Josephe's first-person account. Grandmother Carmel watched over all three of text's principal narrators (Josephe, Alphonse and Desiree) when they came to play at her home on Sundays. Although Desiree is not a blood relative, grandmother considers her to be part of her own extended family, particularly because Desiree's mother, Rosaline, was also best friend of Josephe's mother, Jacqueline. Carmel is committed to teaching youngsters about their cultural past, and to pass along to them a sense of Haiti's spiritual heritage. She lovingly teaches them language (Creole), customs, culinary traditions, and simple joys of life that are a part of Haiti's cultural legacy. Although at first enthralled by grandmother's teachings and example, children lose their enthusiasm and patience as they grow older. The aging grandmother sorrowfully notices children's increasing estrangement, and fears that when she dies, children will wander adrift, disconnected from cultural roots that might serve to anchor them in turbulent times. Josephe's story (part one of novel) vacillates between physical and temporal boundaries as her focus shifts between Haiti and Canada, and past and present. She recalls in particular her Grandmother's affection, her friendship with Desiree, her departure from Haiti, and her rape by a family acquaintance named Eric. Shortly after learning about death of her grandmother, she remembers with nostalgic fondness time she spent with her, and lessons grandmother tried to teach her in what is now a foreign and incomprehensible language: Creole, the language of fools (58). Part two of The Scorpion's Claw is Alphonse's story. Alphonse is illegitimate son of Carmel's son Leo. Just as Josephe's story is preceeded by that of her grandmother Carmel, Alphonse's story is prefaced by account of his half-brother Delphi, a freedom fighter involved in struggle for Haiti's independence. …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.057 | 0.015 |
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".