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This extraordinary story you hold in your hands was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” [*1]
The subject of the experiment is the reader.
Recitatif, recitative | ˌrɛsɪtəˈtiːv | noun [mass noun] Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative. The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language obs
and although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to.
uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.[*3]
Which is the experiment.
As Twyla and Roberta discover, it’s hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to reexamine a shared history.
Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you. As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives? The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. It’s what happened. It’s not the moral equivalent of a football game where your “side” wins or loses.
Difficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.
Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of “Recitatif” is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact they are both “somebody”—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies.
serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving.
the experiment “Recitatif” performs in fiction: the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.
The forces of capital, meanwhile, are pragmatic: capital does not bother itself with essentialisms. It transforms nobodies into somebodies—and vice versa—depending on where the labor is needed and the profit can be made.
Our racial codes are “peculiar to” us, but what do we really mean by that? In “Recitatif,” that which would characterize Twyla and Roberta as black or white is the consequence of history, of shared experience, and what shared histories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity. What belongs exclusively to them is their subjective experience of these same categories in which they have lived.
we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences.
Yeah, intersectionality. She didn't invent this.
White may be the most powerful category in the racial hierarchy, but if you’re an eight-year-old girl in a state institution with a delinquent mother and no money, it sure doesn’t feel that way.
Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.
Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this: Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion. Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy. Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing
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Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure.
Fascism labors to create the category of the “nobody,” the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the “somebody” for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel.[*13] Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.[*14]
And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us.
Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later—to match up the right people with the right food.
Perfect. Just perfect writing.
Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.
Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.
