Orality/Aurality and Voice of the Voiceless Mother in Abla Farhoud’s Happiness Has a Slippery Tail
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The problem of the representation of the mother’s voice and the maternal perspective in literary fiction has been a concern of contemporary scholarship in women’s writing for several decades. This chapter explores the literary representation of the voice and the perspective of a seemingly voiceless migrant mother who is silent in the language of the host country through the novelHappiness Has a Slippery Tail(1998) (Le bonheur a la queue glissante) by the Canadian Quebecois author of Lebanese origin, Abla Farhoud. This chapter demonstrates that in terms of literary representation of the mother’s voice, matrifocal migrant women’s writing relies on the orality of the mother’s voice to articulate the experience of mothering across the language barrier. It argues that the novel tells the story of a marginalised migrant mother in two voices: the aural voice of a marginalised mother who is voiceless in French and in writing (she is illiterate) and that of a French-educated writer daughter who understands the quality of the mother’s voice in Arabic. In this way the voice of the silent mother can be heard by the Western readership, and her perspective inscribed in the Western literary tradition.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".