Twyla And Roberta In Recitatif By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (1931- ) is an African-American author who has written many important and challenging narratives of the contemporary era. Her excellent illustrations of African-American experiences and the issues of women, in particular, are studied and debated at high literary levels (Lacy 86). She is recognized as a leading player on the international literary stage because of her exceptional perception on American historical account and her ground-breaking writing tactics. One of the main issues in Toni Morrison’s novel is the 'Issue of Race'. This paper deals with the short story ‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison (1983). It demonstrates that ‘Recitatif’ is an exceptional literary work, as it challenges the reader to try and determine the racial

Twyla describes Roberta as ‘a youngster from a whole other racial identity’; therefore, one can conclude from the very start that these two girls have two very different ethnic identities (Morrison, ‘Recitatif’ 2979). Her statement underlines the fact that next to each other they are looking like ‘salt and pepper', indicating that one's skin color is white and the other one is black (2079). What does the reader not learn from the narrative is; which one is Twyla and which Roberta? Neither one name nor the other sounds African American nor typically white. If anything, Roberta could almost sound like a Latina name. As young Roberta seems to be less educated than Twyla, ‘she could not read at all', one might stereotypically assume that she is an African American of the two (2079). However, it is told that Roberta excelled in playing jacks and one wonders if this is an indicator; if black children usually played jacks or if it were white children. Though, in reality, it was probably a game enjoyed equally by kids of both races. Twyla's mother Mary seems to leave her at the shelter for the purpose of going out, which is indicated by Twyla’s innocent description of her mother ‘dancing all night’

She is wearing fine clothes, uses a limousine and has two servants. At this point, one might question whether a black woman would have any issues with employing servants and whether this indicates that Roberta is, in fact, white. Twyla only has one son. The number of children they have could once again be used by the reader to try and categorize them into races, but as Roberta has not given birth to any of ‘her' children, the ‘data' seems void for this kind of analysis. The fifth encounter they have is when they end up protesting on different sides about the desegregation busing. Twyla looks beautiful with her son being bused away, while Roberta protests against her children sent to a different neighborhood. Still one cannot determine which race the women or their children belong to, even less so as one does not know whether any of them is in an interracial marriage, which might be possible as they must have gotten married after Jimi Hendrix death, in the 1970s, after miscegenation laws got abolished. Furthermore, Twyla makes a comment that sounds potentially racist, ‘Who do they think they are? Swarming the place like they have it’ (Morrison,“Recitatif” 2088). The following comment is of similar character as one earlier made by Twyla that particularly catches the eye, ‘Everything is easy for them. They think they own the world’ (2088). However, Twyla might refer to white people with this comment