The Lives of Others: Trauma and Precariousness in Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the major concerns of Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come is the vulnerability of women in a social order structured largely by patriarchal power that often excludes women as “other.” This otherness, in symbolic and material sense, sometimes produces pain of traumatic proportion. The paper explores the ways in which women’s suffering tends to constitute a voice that calls for help and how others respond to this plea. It deploys Judith Butler’s Precarious Lives: The Powers of Mourning and Violence as an analytical model because of its argument that one’s survival after a destructive event depends on acknowledging the suffering of others. Atta’s novel becomes an important template on which the idea of precariousness produces its signification. In other words, Everything Good Will Come shows in order to mitigate the pain of others it is important to enter into the space of mutual precariousness. More importantly, the paper suggests that this novel has done more than being sensitive to the traumatic pain of other people by enacting a narrative possibility for Nigerian women’s fiction that projects a different politics that privileges the sacrificial commitment to the cause of others.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".