Recitatif by Toni Morrison General Analysis

Recitatif by Toni Morrison contains many issues in society. By looking at the background of Toni Morrison, often writes a story about the issue of the friendship between two women (Morris, 2013) In her other work, Sula (1974) tells about the friendship of two black women who are brought together with great power in their lives. Also, Paradise (1997) displays the friendship of a multiracial woman who ends up being killed because she is considered a threat to the city's repressive community. Recitatif (1983) is the first short story by Toni Morrison. This story describes two childhood friends who are forced to be separated for many years until they meet again by accident as women. Along with the women’s friendship issue, this short story also represents the racial issue between them, which commonly happens in society. Because I have read the short story before, I remember the racial issue that this story brought. I think it would be nice if I discussed this story with those issues in it.

The first thing I want to portray is the plot of the story. So basically, there were two main characters in this story. They are Twyla and Roberta. Twyla and Roberta were two little girls who met as a roommate at the orphanage. They both are dumped by their mother. Their bond became closer since they were the only occupants of the room. They are always together and share thoughts to the point that they have the same ‘enemy’.

They were friends even though they came from different races. This statement can be proved by the second sentence in the second paragraph on page one. The sentence reads, “It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” This scene happened in their first meeting when Big Bozo introduced them. This sentence clearly stated that they did not come from the same race. Another piece of evidence showing that they came from different races is the sentence located in the middle of the only long paragraph on page ten. “A black girl and a white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say.” This sentence appeared when Twyla and Roberta finally met again for the second time. That was not a sentence that describes the situation at that time. It seemed on Twyla’s mind when she remembered their accidental meeting twelve years ago in front of Twyla’s workplace. Toni Morrison never specifies which woman is white and which one is black so that readers could guess from their own perspective (Kumamoto, 2011)

There was racial strife at that time. That happened during the fall. Twyla’s and Roberta’s children were on the list of kids to be transferred from one junior high school to another. Twyla knew she was supposed to feel unfair, but she did not. Twyla drove past the school they were trying to integrate one day, and she saw a line of women marching. And one of them was Roberta. Roberta saw Twyla too, and she approached her. Twyla started asking what is Roberta doing there, and the conversation happened. Roberta was furious when she realized that Twyla did not care about her son going to be transferred. They were then arguing tensely over the integration of their children. Twyla said the picketing women were swarming all over the place as they owned it. The women started moving, surrounding Twyla’s car, and began to rock it. Roberta just stays still and watches. The crowd finally moves away from Twyla’s car with the help of four policemen.

There was a character named Maggie. Maggie symbolizes the helplessness faced by ‘weak’ people. Maggie was born with the inability to speak. She often receives unpleasant treatment from her surroundings, but she is helpless and unable to fight back. She cannot even scream for help. If this applies to Twyla and Roberta, they cannot ask for help from their mother because their mother was incompetent that could not take care of them. Maggie even became the topic that brought Twyla and Roberta to another strife. It happened when they meet again at different moments in the future. They naturally brought up the topic of Maggie. It stated in paragraph “don't know why I dreamt about that orchard so much. Nothing really happened there. Nothing all that important, I mean. Just the big girls dancing and playing the radio. Roberta and me watching. Maggie fell down there once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. And the big girls laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencils. Maggie couldn't talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute.” It was the thought of Maggie that Twyla had. On their strife, the thing that Twyla remembered is that Maggie fell down, it started with the sentence, “I don't remember a hell of a lot from those days, but Lord, St. Bonny's is as clear as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she fell down and those gar girls laughed at her?” but Roberta keep saying that Maggie did not fall down. They had different memories of how Maggie went that day. Maggie's experience in the orchard is framed by their memories of their mothers. This is so because Maggie personifies the overlapping pasts of Twyla and Roberta. Instead of dealing with their parental realities of presence and absence head-on, they fight over memories of Maggie. The racial bias between Roberta and Twyla is insufficient to overcome how their identities have been "dumped." They are too different in class to be able to forget about the similar experience of being abandoned physically, emotionally, and financially (Androne, 2007) Maggie is a symbol of how their identities connect with their need to rewrite their pasts to better understand who they are today.

There are several themes we can see in this story. The main theme in this story is family and friendship. This story talks much about Twyla and Roberta’s friendship from they were kids and adults until their children grew up. The relationship between Twyla and Roberta with their mother also emphasizes the family theme. The second theme is race. This story represents how black and white people can make a friend even though they come from different races. Racial strife is also mentioned in this story; it illustrates how the issue of race can cause a commotion. And the last one is childhood and adulthood. The story tells Twyla’s and Roberta’s story from childhood to adulthood. This story shows how the different attitudes when childhood and adulthood. One example was the scene when Twyla’s car was surrounded by the women picketing in front of the school. One part on page 15 says, “Automatically I reached for Roberta, like the old days in the orchard when they saw us watching them and we had to get out of there, and if one of us fell the other pulled her up and if one of us was caught the other stayed to kick and scratch, and neither would leave the other behind. My arm shot out of the car window, but no receiving hand was there. Roberta was looking at me sway from side to side in the car, and her face was still.” This part shows that Roberta is no longer the same as before. She did not grab Twyla’s hand when she was about to fall like in childhood. The change in reaction occurs because of their mental development, which is now an adult. Disagreement regarding their children makes Roberta reluctant to help Twyla.

Through their own racial, social class, and gender experiences, Twyla and Roberta observe life in the United States in the twentieth century. Morrison asserts that "Recitatif' is an experiment in the erasure of all racial norms from a story about two characters of different races for which racial identity is important, therefore the critical deletion of themes of gender and friendship in the story is not altogether surprising. Twyla and Roberta, according to Morrison, rely on one another to make sense of their worlds rather than on others. Not only do they negotiate race, class, and gender with one another, but they also engage in friendship, a form of closeness and interaction that is essential to our ability to understand ourselves.

References

Androne, H. A. (2007). Revised Memories and Colliding Identities : Absence and Presence in Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Viramontes’s “Tears on My Pillow.” 32(2), 133–150.

Kumamoto, S. S. (2011). Maggie in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”: The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies. 36(2), 71–88.

Morris, S. M. (2013). “Sisters separated for much too long”: Women’s Friendship and Power in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.” 32(1), 159–180.