Roman Clodia's Reviews > Recitatif: A Story

This short story is a potent reminder of what a loss Toni Morrison is not just to the literary world but to the world. With her usual mix of heart and head, she has penned an experimental story whose real point seems to be to force each reader to confront the extent to which, and how, they/we construct fictions of race in their/our heads. This would be playful, if it weren't so revealing. For she gives us two girls, one white, one Black - but the game is that she never tells us which is which. The story thus forces us to catch our own desire to allocate a race to Twyla and Roberta, and also to foreground the clichés that supposedly characterise race: is the 'dancer' mother Black or white? What about the sick mother?

I have to say that some of the racial codes are specifically American - I didn't understand the geographical implications of where people might live or the significance of 'bussing' (taking kids by bus to schools that are a distance from their homes) - is this to do with segregation?

There's a sleight of hand moment when the girls realise that a woman described as 'sand-coloured' who worked in their school, who was mute, is remembered by one as Black and the other as not. What she was, though, was abused - for being 'othered' by both girls and dehumanised.

This is only short but is an intriguing thought experiment that I immediately wanted to discuss with other readers.