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ceallaighsbooks 's review for:
Recitatif
by Toni Morrison
challenging
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
“Almost all were real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were the only ones dumped and the only ones with F’s in three classes including gym. So we got along—what with her leaving whole pieces of things on her plate and being nice about not asking questions.”
TITLE—Recitatif
AUTHOR—Toni Morrison
PUBLISHED—orig. 1980; read edition with introduction by Zadie Smith 2022
GENRE—literary fiction; classic lit
SETTING—eastern US
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—where difference lies, perspective, American sociocultural history & systems, race, friendship
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—The introduction to my edition by Zadie Smith was awesome.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“…Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody.” — from The Introduction, by Zadie Smith
So I did what you’re not supposed to do and went into this short story with preconceptions of what it was “about”—based on what I’d heard other readers say about it. And those preconceptions were very misleading 😅 so I got a little confused during my first reading but the last line of the story clued me in so I just reread it again immediately and then I realized what I was supposed to be doing with the story as a reader.
And THEN I read Zadie Smith’s introduction to the edition I was reading and then reread the story a *third* time and my mind was further blown. 🤯😂 So I highly highly recommend checking out the Zadie Smith introduction after you read the story. I recommend going into the story without reading anything about it and sort of see how it strikes you without any foreknowledge of the themes or intention.
I am having a blast reading Toni Morrison’s fiction finally after too long. I’m not going to say anything “reviewish” about the story because really it speaks for itself and if you’re wondering if you should read it, you absolutely should, so that’s that. I’m excited to continue my journey through Morrison’s works with SULA next!
“Your mother. Did she ever stop dancing?” I shook my head. “No. Never.” Roberta nodded. “And yours? Did she ever get well?” She smiled a tiny sad smile. “No. She never did.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
TW // bullying (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- everything else by Toni Morrison
- The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
- Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick, by Zora Neale Hurston
- Zami, by Audre Lorde
Favorite Quotes—
from The Introduction, by Zadie Smith:
“Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it.”
“With “Recitatif” she was explicit. 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.”
“…Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody.”
“…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.”
“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. And I admit I do begin to feel resentment—actually, something closer to fury—when I realize that merely speaking such facts aloud is so discomfiting to some that they’d rather deny the facts themselves.”
“Like Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. …there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us.”
“And it is extremely galling to hear you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one.”
[On Morrison’s works:] “Out of this history she made a literature, a shelf of books that—for as long as they are read—will serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving.”
“…alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it.”
“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…”
“Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them.”
“…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”.”
“We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization. We hope for a literature—and a society!—that recognizes the somebody in everybody.”
“What surely is common, in the general population, is complicity, silence, prejudice, and the desire not to be made uncomfortable by the sufferings of others. The most common contemporaneous response to the horrors of the plantation, gulag, or concentration camps was indifference.”
“Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting… The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all share—you might call it our most depressing collective identity.”
from the Text:
“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.”
“Almost all were real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were the only ones dumped and the only ones with F’s in three classes including gym. So we got along—what with her leaving whole pieces of things on her plate and being nice about not asking questions.”
“At that hour the sun was all the way clear of the hills behind the restaurant. The place looked better at night—more like shelter—but I loved it when the sun broke in, even if it did show all the cracks in the vinyl and the speckled floor looked dirty so matter what the mop boy did.”
“Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. 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.”
“Your mother. Did she ever stop dancing?” I shook my head. “No. Never.” Roberta nodded. “And yours? Did she ever get well?” She smiled a tiny sad smile. “No. She never did.”
“Strife. Racial strife. The word made me think of a bird—a big shrieking bird out of 1,000,000,000 BC. Flapping its wings and cawing. Its eye with no lid always bearing down on you. All day it screeched and at night it slept on the rooftops.”
“I wonder what made me think you were different.”