Recitatif

by Toni Morrison

“an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”

no matter how closely we read—is which of these girls is black and which white.

The music of Morrison begins in “ordinary speech.”

For many words are here to be “sung on the same note.” That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, 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.

And beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as “peculiar to” one kind of person or another.

But one of the questions of “Recitatif” is precisely what that phrase “peculiar to” really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean: That which characterizes That which belongs exclusively to That which is an essential quality of

These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws.

attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.

Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?

The wrong food is always with the wrong people.

Children are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right.

Geography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes,

Such reexaminations I sometimes hear described as “resentment politics,” as if telling a history in full could only be the product of a personal resentment, rather than a necessary act performed in the service of curiosity, interest, understanding (of both self and community), and justice itself.

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?

To give an account of an old English country house that includes not only the provenance of the beautiful paintings but also the provenance of the money that bought them—who suffered and died making that money, how, and why—is history told in full and should surely be of interest to everybody, black or white or neither.

Not for the shallow motive of transhistorical blame, much less to induce personal comfort or discomfort, but rather in the service of truth.

whatever your personal allegiances, when you deliberately turn from any human suffering you make what should be a porous border between “your people” and the rest of humanity into something rigid and deadly.

But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a person—or is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering. People suffered to build this house, to found that bank, or your country.

Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless.

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.

If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference.

She could parse the difference between the deadness of a determining category and the richness of a lived experience.

That people live and die within a specific history—within deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codes—is a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one.

there are ways to deal with that difference that are expansive and comprehending, rather than narrow and diagnostic.

my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture.

Blackness, as Morrison conceived of it, was a shared history, an experience, a culture, a language. A complexity, a wealth.

a pessimist’s right but an activist’s indulgence.

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.

It is always looking for new markets, new sites of economic vulnerability, of potential exploitation—new

These days Roberta—or Twyla—might march for women’s rights, all the while wearing a four-dollar T-shirt, product of the enforced labor of Uyghur women on the other side of the world.

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.

Some of these experiences will have been nourishing, joyful, and beautiful; many others prejudicial, exploitative, and punitive. No one can take a person’s subjective experiences from them.

we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences.

By removing it from the story, Morrison reveals both the speciousness of “black-white” as our primary human categorization and its dehumanizing effect on human life. But she also lovingly demonstrates how much meaning we were able to find—and continue to find—in our beloved categories.

We feel they define us. And this form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.”

The direct descendant of slaves, Morrison writes in a way that recognizes first—and primarily—the somebody within black people, the black human having been, historically, the ultimate example of the dehumanized subject: the one literally transformed, by capital, from subject to object.

This despite the fact that in America’s zero-sum game of racialized capitalism, this form of humanism has been abandoned as an apolitical quantity,

Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel.

Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody.

A pretty mother on earth is better than a beautiful dead one in the sky even if she did leave you all alone to go dancing.

There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well.