Recitatif Quotes

“Difficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.”
― Zadie Smith, Recitatif

“We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.”
― Zadie Smith, Recitatif

“it’s hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to reexamine a shared history.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself?”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“Did I tell you? My mother, she never stopped dancing.’ ‘Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well.’ Roberta lifted her hands from the tabletop and covered her face with her palms. When she took them away she really was crying. ‘Oh Shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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.”
― Zadie Smith, Recitatif

“I couldn’t help but smile to read of an ex–newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, “I think comfort does matter. I know people say, ‘Oh, we must be uncomfortable.’… Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am?” 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?”
― Zadie Smith, Recitatif

“Elements of this fascist playbook can be seen in the European encounter with Africa, between the West and the East, between the rich and the poor, between the Germans and the Jews, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the British and the Irish, the Serbs and the Croats. It is one of our continual human possibilities. Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“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]”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“Far beneath the “black-white” racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation, the wretched of the earth…”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“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. It’s what creates difference.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“Some hints at alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins…”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“Difficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“enriched by that which is new or alien to me, especially when it has not been diluted or falsely presented to flatter my ignorance—that dreaded “explanatory fabric.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“Difficult to move on from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif

“Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist's right but an activist's indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done (xxxiv).”
― Zadie Smith, Recitatif

“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.”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story

“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?”
― Toni Morrison, Recitatif: A Story