RECITATIF
A Story
By Toni Morrison
It’s a term I invented, while watching the late, great Toni Morrison masterfully take down her critics: “The Morrisonian Moment.”
My favorite of these instances took place during a 1998 interview with Charlie Rose, who verbally poked Morrison — at least, it appeared that way to me — with questions about race. Specifically, why did it annoy her so much when journalists asked, when would she stop writing about race, meaning, writing about Black culture and Black people?
And Morrison answered, “The person who asks that question doesn’t understand he is also raced.”
At this point, I always giggle. (Oh, I’ve watched this interview at least 10 times.) Not only did Charlie Rose seemingly misunderstand what “race” meant, he didn’t realize that he’d brought a knife to a gunfight. He’d thought himself capable of outwitting Toni Morrison, an African American woman who’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in a debate about Blackness and its profound creative relevance.
What I loved about Morrison’s response — besides her melodious, withering tone — was her historically informed argument that, although her critics might not understand how race works exactly, “white” has always been a racial category, just like “African American.” After all, white folks are the ones who invented the concept of race in the first place.
Morrison’s unflustered logic is what I love about “Recitatif,” her short story originally published in 1983 and now being released for the first time as a stand-alone book. “Recitatif” depicts an interracial friendship between two girls — one white, one Black — who meet in a shelter. They have different reasons for being there: Roberta’s mother is sick, while Twyla’s “likes to dance.” In the story, told from Twyla’s point of view, we encounter the girls over many years, but Morrison never identifies either’s race.
As she later explained in “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,” “The only short story I have ever written, ‘Recitatif,’ was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” Absence is Morrison’s central point; once racial markers are stripped from the girls, each reader of “Recitatif” will experience the story in a purely subjective fashion.
This subjectivity appears in literary criticism as well. Some scholars insisted they’d cracked Morrison’s racial codes. In an essay called “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,” Elizabeth Abel points out what she thinks are clues to the girls’ races. Ann Rayson, in “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Being White, Teaching Black,” insists there are “obvious cues as to race.” However, when I went back to “Recitatif” some 25 years after my first read, it was clear that Morrison expertly used racial codes as a shell game: You never can find the prize. After a third and fourth read, I remain confused. Frankly, I like it that way.
When Morrison published “Recitatif” in 1983, it was nearly a revolutionary act to insist that white people had a race, too. Thus, her 20th-century readers probably wouldn’t have searched for signifiers of whiteness, the “normative” identity. (Some might say it remains the norm.) Most readers would have searched for Blackness — its imagery, its music, its vernacular, its performance. Its static, American stereotypes.
Remember, though, that Morrison tells us in “Playing in the Dark” that race is still there in the story. We (her readers) just can’t identify it. Twyla and Roberta — two wounded, mostly unmothered girls, growing up with material and emotional uncertainties — are playing the racial hands they’ve been dealt. Yet because we don’t know who holds which hand, their social realities increasingly become more absurd.
There are no men in “Recitatif.” Thus, the power of white supremacy isn’t quite as obvious. This is a story about women, and it seems that Morrison asks us: “Are we really going to play this game invented by white men? Are we that weak-minded, that susceptible to a power we don’t truly — and won’t ever — possess?”
In preparation for writing this review, I immersed myself in rereading Morrison’s nonfiction, her ideas about what is still (unfortunately) called “writing about race.” I felt her outrage over the question that I’m still asked in this Year of Our Lord: “Why did you feel the need to write about Black people in your novel?” As if an African American writer deciding to creatively depict Black people — my own people — represents a wading through brackish, non-potable waters.
When I return to “Recitatif,” it is with a renewed understanding that, along with a handful of other African Americans, Morrison was among the first to depict Black culture while also considering politics, while also considering United States history, while also considering white supremacy, while also considering economic class, while also considering gender, while also considering intergenerational trauma.
As the kids might say, Toni Morrison did that.
And she did that decades ago, so it’s not her fault that we haven’t learned simultaneity, that we need a blunt hammer to break the American experience into tiny, sharp-edged pieces that we can touch — and maybe hold — only one at a time.
The fault is ours. The lack of understanding is ours — but within any lack, there exists possibility. And that is ours as well.
