Recitatif by Toni Morrison

A skilful and incisive short story by the masterful Toni Morrison Recitatif is the type of short story that seems made to be studied at school/college or discussed in a book club. The ambiguous nature of the central characters’ racial identities will lead readers to analyze every passage, trying to ‘find out’ the answers to a puzzle Morrison leaves intentionally unsolved. Our eagerness to understand this short story plays into Morrison’s social commentary. The reading experience of Recitatif is almost a prelude to the real story, the one that occurs outside of its borders, in which we study, examine, and argue, with others or with ourselves about the characters’ identities and the meaning behind Morrison’s choice not to reveal them to us. Long rambling short, this is the type of story that delivers more substance and depth once it’s actually over. Whereas I found the two full-length works that I have read by Morrison to be riveting and all-consuming, I found myself less immersed in Recitatif. I was more interested in the conception and execution of this idea than in the actual story. The story and characters, curiously enough, felt secondary to the literary device employed by Morrison. The alleged fraught friendship between these two women, one of them Black, the other white, pales in comparison to the fiercely complicated bond between Sula and Nel in Morrison’s Sula. We are given a glimpse into their childhood, where we learn they both have experienced some form of hardship and we later see them encountering one another as adults, except that they now find themselves on opposing sides.
Their complicity in the violence that other girls at the orphanage where they first met perpetrated against an older woman binds them together. While they both harbour guilt over this they disagree on whether the woman in question was Black or white. This will lead readers to wonder why that is. Which of them is right? And does that change anything? As I said, this is the type of story that is the ideal vehicle for generating discussions on race and racism in America. While I admired Morrison’s skill, I found that I was too aware of her presence in this story. That is, while with her novels her voice reeled me into her stories, here I felt more keenly her ‘hand’. As I was reading I knew that she was the architect behind the words on those pages.

Nevertheless, I’m glad that I read this as I did find this to be a thought-provoking short story. Zadie Smith’s introduction adds another dimension to the story and I highly recommend you do not give it a miss.

my rating: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

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