Taking a slight detour from recommending books, today I am recommending the only short story that Toni Morrison ever published – “Recitatif”. The publisher Chatto and Windus published it as a book – Recitatif – with a sprawling introduction by novelist Zadie Smith.
A Nobel Laureate, a towering figure in the literary arts, a tireless activist for justice, reading Morrison is akin to feeling spiritually enlightened. Every time I read her work, I’m struck by the feeling that there is something miraculous about her greatness. And not strictly limited to the pages in front of me, but a clarity and resolve that reverberates in each of her works, every interview she has given, every speech she has made, and every life she has touched. There’s the halo of genius around her, yes, but she is truly alive – and always will be – for equipping her readers with the tools lets them see themselves for who they really are.
An experiment
In “Recitatif”, Morrison’s infuriatingly slippery story, refuses to yield itself – just like its creator. Instead, it melds, shifts and rattles the readers in a way that confirms and inflates their own biases and prejudices. Almost as though Morrison has given you a canvas with some shapes drawn across it, and you are free to fill in the colours as you please. Only, what you think is beautiful or worthy of admiration might be utterly ugly or bland to someone else.
As Zadie Smith writes in her Introduction, Morrison had frankly admitted to “Recitatif” being an “experiment”. Only, the subject – much to our chagrin – is the reader.
The story opens with a simple enough sentence: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” The narrator is a girl/woman named Twyla. A few paragraphs later, we read, “It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed in the morning – it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” The “strange place” in question is a shelter where the young girls Twyla and Roberta have been taken because their mothers are indisposed. Unlike the other children there, these girls aren’t orphans. Their mothers are very much alive. No one can say where the fathers are.
They do not have a difficult time at the shelter. The food is okay enough, Roberta and Twyla get along all right, and even the rude older girls do not bother them too much. However, Maggie, the mute kitchen woman with “legs like parentheses” is an anomaly in this somewhat normal existence. The girls speculate if she can cry, and what she would do if she were in trouble, they jeer at her by calling her “dummy” and “bow legs”. Maggie perhaps cannot hear them or thinks it best to ignore them. Twyla leaves after four months but later she’ll learn she’s not done with Roberta. The two keep bumping into each other and form something of a friendship through the different stages of their lives. What stays constant through the years is the guilt that each girl carries for misbehaving with Maggie.
The reality of race
There is one question that looms over the entire narrative – what are Twyla and Roberta’s racial identities? We are told one is Black and another, White but nowhere does Morrison spell out in clear terms who is what. Perhaps she knew chaos would ensue if the reader is left to make this decision, and indeed it does. Race is never far from the realities of each childhood and its role does not shrink as both of them grow into women and have children of their own. Everything that happens, everything they say, and even the guilt that they both feel is underlined and defined by the complexities of race.
As you guess and guess some more and try to crack the puzzle with the clues – that you think are – given, the clearer it becomes that whatever answers you have come up with are the results of your own prejudices. How do you slot a person into a race if you do not know their skin colour or how the hair looks on their head – the way they speak? their outfit? the roles women play in their community? There are obviously no universal answers. Whatever conclusions you draw expose your private biases.
Secondly, even without the question of race, it is evident that Twyla and Roberta are the scraps of society. No one wants them, not even their mothers. Still, that does not stop them from being cruel to Maggie. They are yet to assert their own identities but are ever ready to cast a more vulnerable person into the role of a “nobody”. Another “ethical complexity” of the short story as Smith points out.
There is little that goes right in Twyla and Roberta’s lives. The matter of race that becomes so crucial to the reader has always been a matter of urgency for Morrison. She came from the labour class and did not experience the destitution of her characters but it is the richness of her imagination that allows her to create a world where both races, in truly desperate situations, can not be better off than the other.
However, she is cognisant of reality and the hierarchies created by arbitrary things like the colour of the skin. In her own words, Morrison thought of Blackness as “wealth” and refused to view it solely as a negative binary in the racial hierarchy. For what it is worth, we have created a world where race will be “essential, eternal, and primary” in categorising human life. Zadie Smith adds to this by saying, “How can we throw out this dirty bathwater of racism when for centuries we have pressed the baby of race so close to our hearts, and made – even accounting for all the horror – so many beautiful things with it?”
Deceptive, mysterious and utterly compelling, the joy of reading “Recitatif” is in not knowing the answers. To let the not-known be. And this joy is made double-fold by Zadie Smith’s Introduction and her deep admiration for Morrison the writer, and the person.
Recitatif, Toni Morrison, Chatto and Windus.
