About Recitatif

For her short story Recitatif, Toni Morrison apparently intended for the reader to be in the dark about the racial identities of Twyla and Roberta. Without racial reference points to go to, the reader is supposed to engage with Twyla and Roberta at a deeper level, to study them in their complexity.

Toni Morrison

The story's characters are in the same boat as its readers; Twyla and Roberta, too, lack stable reference points in each other. They keep changing as they grow older, but they aren't involved in each other's lives for any extended period of time, so it's like they're meeting each other over and over again. They constantly surprise each other with their changes: Roberta is to Twyla friendly then dismissive then friendly again; once intimate, later they find themselves protesters behind opposite battle lines. It's surprising for people to change so radically, but one expects what one understands as the basic facts of the past to be consistent. Yet each time they recall Maggie, the deaf girl from their childhood in the shelter, Twyla is forced to alter her picture of her, as a new impression of her comes to the surface, displacing details from the old one. Was she black or white? Did Twyla participate in her subjugation or not? Neither her nor the reader come to a final verdict on these questions.  

Which made for a somewhat disorienting reading experience. In Recitatif, there isn't an emphasis on character development, which, I guess, is perhaps true for most short stories. But the characters don't develop, in the sense of changing gradually, evolutionarily. Rather, they jump around, and they oscillate. Without constant identities, Twyla and Roberta are hard to pigeonhole or stereotype; but for the same reason, they're hard to get a hold of at all.

It's an interesting experiment that Morrison created.