Racial Dynamics in “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison

The short story “Recitatif” is the only published story by Morrison. “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 (Morrison 1)”. The two main characters in this story, Twyla and Roberta, are from different races. “And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny (Morrison 1)”. When she first arrives at the asylum, Twyla is disturbed to be moving to a strange place, but she is even more disturbed to be placed with a girl of a different race. Her mother taught her racist ideas, and these ideas seem more significant to her than the more serious aspects of her abandonment.

“We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky (Morrison 2)”. Morrison allows readers to observe the periodic conflicts between the girls, from when they are children to when they become adults. Some of these conflicts appear to be affected by their racial disparities, but, interestingly, Morrison never specifies which girl is black and which is white. “Oh, she nodded her head and I liked the way she understood things so fast. So for the moment it didn’t matter that we looked like salt and pepper standing there and that’s what the other kids called us sometimes (Morrison 2)”. However, , Twyla and Roberta have a lot of similarities, they do not succeed in school and they respect each other’s privacy and do not complain.

Work Cited

Morrison, Toni. Recitatif. Routledge, 2021.

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StudyCorgi. "Racial Dynamics in “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison." August 10, 2023. https://studycorgi.com/racial-dynamics-in-recitatif-by-toni-morrison/.

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StudyCorgi. 2023. "Racial Dynamics in “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison." August 10, 2023. https://studycorgi.com/racial-dynamics-in-recitatif-by-toni-morrison/.

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