For much of the world, the late Toni Morrison was a novelist, famous for such classics as ‘Beloved’, ‘Song of Solomon’ and ‘The Bluest Eye’.
But the Nobel laureate did not limit himself to one type of writing.
Morrison also completed plays, poems, essays and short stories, one of which will be out as a book on February 1. Written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen in the ensuing decades, ‘Recitative’ follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults. Zadie Smith adds an introduction and the audio edition of the story is read by the actor Bahni Turpin.
According to Autumn M. Womack, a professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University (where Morrison taught for many years), the author had written short fiction since college at Howard University and Cornell University, although she had never published a short story collection. . “Recitatif” was included in the 1983 edition “Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women”, co-edited by poet-playwright Amiri Baraka and now out of print. that you come to see her as someone who experimented with form. You’ll move away from the idea that she was just a novelist and see her as someone who tried all kinds of writing,” Womack said.
“Recitative” refers to a musical expression defined by Merriam-Webster as “a rhythmically free vocal style that imitates the natural inflections of speech,” a style Morrison often suggested. The story tells of a series of encounters between Roberta and Twyla, one of whom is black and the other white, although we have to guess which one that is.
They meet as girls at the St. Bonaventure Childcare Center (“It was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl of a completely different race,” recalls Twyla, the narrator of the story). And they run into each other every now and then years later, whether that was at a Howard Johnson’s in upstate New York, where Twyla worked, and Roberta walks in with a man scheduled to meet Jimi Hendrix, or later at a nearby Food Emporium. ‘ says Twyla. A black girl and a white girl meet in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and have nothing to say. One in a blue and white triangle waitress hat – the other with a male companion on his way to Hendrix. Now we acted like sisters who had been separated for far too long.”
As Womack points out, “Recitatif” contains themes that appear elsewhere in Morrison’s work, whether it’s the complicated relationship between two women that was also central to her novel “Sula” or the racial blur Morrison used in “Paradise,” a 1998 novel in which Morrison refers to a white character within a black community without clarifying who it is. Morrison often spoke of race as an invention of society, once writing that “the realm of racial difference has acquired an intellectual weight that it cannot lay claim to.”
In her introduction, Smith likens ‘Recitatif’ to a puzzle or a game, while warning that ‘Toni Morrison is not playing’. The mystery begins with the opening lines: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick: ‘Well, what kind of mother tends to dance all night?’ Smith asks, ‘A black or a white one?’ Throughout the story, Morrison will reference everything from hair length to social status, as if to challenge the reader’s own racial assumptions.
Like most readers of ‘Recitatif’, I found it impossible not to starve to know who the other one was, Twyla or Roberta,” Smith admits. , get cold in the other. To feel for the somebody and fire the nobody.
“But this is exactly what Morrison willfully and methodically won’t let me do. It’s worth wondering why.”
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