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Intersections at Play

Playing With (Un)Marked Cards: Intersectionality in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Begoña Simal-González
p. 97-113

Résumé

“Recitatif” (1983) de Toni Morrison constitue la première expérience avouée de l’autrice visant à dissimuler les marqueurs raciaux dans un récit, une tactique audacieuse que l’écrivaine décrit dans Playing in the Dark (1992) et qu’elle déploiera également dans Paradise (1997). En utilisant les perspectives acquises dans le champ des critical race theories, et partant des études menées sur le travail de Morrison, cette contribution aborde la stratégie narrative de Morrison comme un exemple de ruse littéraire avec laquelle l’écrivaine nous oblige à reconsidérer la question raciale dans le texte et à l’affronter dans toute sa complexité. “Recitatif” explore l’amitié interraciale de deux jeunes filles, qui « se ressemblaient comme sel et poivre », sans que le narrateur ne précise jamais qui est qui. Le fait même que l’écrivaine voie clair dans son jeu, tandis que nous devons nous contenter de « cartes d’identité raciales » incomplètes, pique notre curiosité en tant que lecteurs et nous pousse à nous lancer dans le jeu trompeusement trivial consistant à identifier qui est blanc et qui est noir. Morrison laisse derrière elle une piste d’indices intrigants, menant vraisemblablement les lecteurs dans une direction avant de déposer des indices quelques lignes plus tard pointant vers la direction opposée. Beaucoup de ceux qui, tels des détectives, s’engagent dans ce jeu peuvent alors se demander s’il est possible de vérifier l’identité ethnoraciale de chaque personnage. Bien que cet article tente de révéler le code et de jouer cartes sur table, pour ainsi dire, le résultat effectif du jeu est moins important que ce que l’on apprend en s’y prêtant. En essayant de démêler ces indices narratifs, en particulier certains dérapages et contradictions apparentes, on est finalement contraint de reconsidérer la manière dont l’intersectionnalité des catégories de race et de classe opère dans notre lecture du discours et de la réalité qu’il véhicule.

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Auteurs étudiés :

Toni Morrison
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The publication of this article was made possible by the generous funding received from the Spanish Research Agency (AEI), Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (research project FFI2015-66767-P, AEI/FEDER, UE).

  • 1 Writing in 2001, Juda Bennett showed his surprise at the scarcity of scholarship on Morrison’s (at (...)
  • 2 The specific contours of “ethnicity” and “race” have been debated for decades (see Sollors; Holling (...)

1When I was still a fledgling scholar, back in 2001, I was given the chance to elaborate the syllabus for a new subject, “Short Fiction in English.” One of the short stories that I revisited at that point was Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” (1983),1 a text that proved both befuddling and intriguing not just to me but, as I would soon discover, also to my students. The paradox seemed to lie in the fact that, while the narrative foregrounds the racialized body from the very outset, at the same time it also erases the particulars from the text. To be more precise: although Morrison’s story explicitly focuses on a friendship that cuts across “the color line,” it never specifies who is black and who is white. By leaving us “in the dark,” Morrison is impelling us to read between the lines, to read “race” back into the text.2

“Identity Cards”

  • 3 This is a strategy that she will later deploy, to a lesser extent, in her novel Paradise (see Krumh (...)
  • 4 According to Morrison, her “writing expects, demands participatory reading, and that I think is wha (...)
  • 5 To prove the vital importance of such identifying documents, Gray invokes one of the most terrible (...)

2“Recitatif” constitutes Morrison’s first self-avowed experiment at erasing specific racial markers in a narrative (Morrison, Playing xiii).3 Morrison’s insistence on not-showing, on withholding the moment of “phanein”—to use the Greek term—of the visible pheno-type, forces readers to become literary detectives.4 In other words, the authorial strategy of (intended) “color-blindness” effectively foregrounds that which is hidden or kept secret: the racial card. Suspense works in color-blind texts because we lack the visual clues, because we cannot see the specific “identity cards” of each of the characters. In Jeffrey Gray’s apt words, language can both “prevent our being reduced to bodies” and be employed “to reintroduce the body” (33). One of “the most authenticating texts we possess,” the critic reminds us, is the “identity card” in all its variations: passports, birth certificates, etc. (33).5 In the case of “Recitatif,” the very fact that Morrison is playing with marked cards, while we are left with unmarked (identity) cards, pricks our curiosity as readers and impels us to embark upon the (misleadingly trivial) game of deciding who is white and who is black. To make things more entertaining, Morrison, in the spirit of true literary tricksterism, leaves a trail of intriguing clues that apparently lead in one direction, only to provide new hints pointing in the opposite direction a few moments later.

  • 6 Interestingly, while most critics have noted the relevance of this maternal absence, they consisten (...)

3Morrison’s “Recitatif” revolves around the poignant memories that the narrator, Twyla, has of her childhood friend Roberta. Twyla and Roberta first meet when they are forced to share a room at St. Bonaventure’s, an orphanage. The first paragraphs introduce the element of difference that will always stand between the two girls: “The minute I walked in and the Big Bozo introduced us, I got sick to my stomach. 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” (“Recitatif” 1776). Their different racialization, however, does not stop the girls from forging an alliance on the painful common grounds they share: they are both un-orphaned orphans whose parents (more explicitly, their mothers) cannot take care of.6 As Twyla puts it at the beginning of the story: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s” (1776). Thus, we could venture to conclude that, although the construct of race, in the form of a different “skin color,” is present from the outset, it is not initially perceived as insurmountable by either girl. Their shared sense of abandonment seems to trump their racial (identity) cards: Roberta “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…” (1777). Twyla even fantasizes about their respective mothers overcoming racial prejudices and becoming best friends, as the girls themselves have done (1778). However, the meeting between the two mothers does not go as expected, and Roberta’s impressively tall and self-righteous mother “looks down” on Mary, Twyla’s mother, in both literal and figurative ways:

I looked up it seemed for miles. She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.

Mary, simple-minded as ever, grinned and tried to yank her hand out of the pocket with the raggedy lining—to shake hands, I guess. Roberta’s mother looked down at me and then looked down at Mary too. She didn’t say anything, just grabbed Roberta with her Bible-free hand and stepped out of line, walking quickly to the rear of it. (1779)

  • 7 Such narrative ellipses also echo the “parenthetical” legs that characterize the key figure of “dum (...)
  • 8 It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the formal implications that arise from analyzing t (...)
  • 9 An intermedial reading of the story would show that while jazz has served as inspiration for other (...)

4Formally echoing the intended authorial silence as regards their specific racialized bodies, the story is likewise structured in sketches separated by temporal gaps or “silences.” The sequence of memories described by Twyla follows a chronological order, as each vignette is apparently triggered by a chance encounter of the two friends; however, these narrative ellipses7 and the constant revisiting of certain topics and past events invite more complex readings. With its temporal discontinuities and repetitive elements, the story’s structure lends itself well to interpretations that capture that structure of repetition with variation. This emphasis can be found in psychological mechanisms explored in trauma studies, but also in the realm of music, so relevant in Morrison’s oeuvre.8 This is reinforced by the title of the story, “Recitatif,” with its obvious musical echoes. Thus, it could be productive to read Morrison’s story as five jazz-like variations on the same leit-motif: a friendship across racial lines, but, at the same time, much more than that.9 This musical interpretation of Morrison’s narrative form in “Recitatif” can be complemented by readings more visual or pictorial in nature, as the one put forward by Anna Ioanes, who approaches the short story as a good example of Morrison’s “silhouette aesthetics” (117). According to Ioanes, the author uses this formal strategy at two levels, in the “language play of racial difference without racial identity,” and in “the unresolvable narrative gap at the heart of the story” (118): what happened to Maggie, the kitchen lady at the orphanage. Yet, just as important as what exactly happened to her is how each of the main characters, Twyla and Roberta, remember that primal scene in the pseudo-Edenic garden where Maggie “falls”: their active/passive participation in the bullying and, equally relevant for the narrator, the way the victim’s body is racialized.

5This takes us back to the game of (identity) cards we were playing. When we next see Twyla and Roberta, several years after leaving St. Bonny’s, they are now young women. The two friends happen to meet at the café where Twyla works as a waitress. The musical reference and the iconography of the scene conjure up the late 1960s: Roberta now wears an Afro and she is on her way to see Jimi Hendrix with two male friends. Twyla does not seem to fit into that group at all, a lack of belonging especially conspicuous when she unwittingly proves her ignorance about Hendrix and she is openly scorned by Roberta:

“Hendrix? Fantastic,” I said. “Really fantastic. What’s she doing now?”

Roberta coughed on her cigarette and the two guys rolled their eyes up at the ceiling.

“Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix, asshole. He’s only the biggest—Oh, wow. Forget it.”

I was dismissed without anyone saying goodbye. . . . (1780)

  • 10 And yet, in the late sixties, Hendrix apparently “appealed more to white than to black audiences” ( (...)
  • 11 These misrecognitions would support Hollinger’s belief that “culture” has to be decoupled from the (...)

6Many readers might take it for granted that, at that time, an African American girl was bound to be familiar with a fellow African American rock star like Hendrix, so these comments would lead us to think that Twyla is not black.10 This would be consistent with previous clues that have triggered readerly (mis)recognition of ethnoracial signs, such as the fact that Roberta “wasn’t good at anything except jacks, at which she was a killer” (1777).11 At the same time, the prim, contemptuous attitude displayed by Roberta’s mother when she meets Twyla and Mary would refute the previous assumptions and would help us reach the opposite conclusion, it is Twyla who is an African American; after all, in the late 1950s, when they first meet, racist attitudes might be more common among whites. On the other hand, it could be argued that the contempt shown by Roberta’s religious mother might have been prompted not so much by Mary’s racialized body as by her coarse manners and her questionable “dancing” job. According to this interpretation, then, it is out of a misguided sense of moral superiority that Roberta’s mother looks down on Twyla’s.

  • 12 Interestingly, the first critics who ventured to identify who was black and who was white, like Abe (...)
  • 13 This is reminiscent of the famous Woodstock three-day concert, which took place in 1969 in Wallkill (...)

7Elizabeth Abel, the first critic to analyze “Recitatif” in detail, calls the aforementioned clues “disaggregated cultural parts” (471). For Abel, Morrison has chosen to replace the racially marked body with those cultural elements like “large hoop earrings, expertise at playing jacks,” or “a taste for Jimi Hendrix” (471).12 However, it is my contention that, even more than cultural factors, class issues intervene in order to (mis)lead readers into choosing one or another racial card. Even in the café scene, which has just been read in terms of ethno-cultural allegiance and familiarity, social class transpires: the very fact that Twyla is working as a waitress while Roberta is the fashionable girl traveling to see Hendrix, probably at a concert,13 introduces a class differential, pointing at the complex, inextricable ties between race and class.

8In an attempt to tease out the implications of the race-class confluence in Morrison’s story, two relevant concepts that date back from the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, can be redeployed: “intersectionality” and “ethclass.” Although it is Kimberlé Crenshaw who is generally credited with inaugurating the practice and theorization of intersectionality in the United States, we need to look back to the early 1960s, to the work of a social scientist, Milton Gordon, to find one of the first seeds of the intersectional approach.

Race, Class and Intersectionality

  • 14 Although ethnicity and race are not coterminous, for the sake of simplicity, in the discussion of i (...)

9With the advent of “identity politics,” especially with the birth and consolidation of the discipline of ethnic studies in the late 1970s and 1980s, the social sciences started to navigate between the two looming axes of class and race/ethnicity.14 By the time Morrison’s “Recitatif” was first published, social and cultural theorists were arguing for the “persistence of ethnicity” (Nelson 534; Banks 464) in social and cultural behavior, to the point that the very concept of “class,” so central to social sciences until then, had to become ethnoracially inflected. As James Banks puts it, it was no longer possible to take for granted that “social-class groups within the non-White populations and those within the White population are equivalent” (463). In exploring the aforementioned “persistence of ethnicity,” social scientists revisited Gordon’s concept of “ethclass.” When Gordon first coined the term, in 1964, he used it to refer to “the social space created at the intersection of the vertical stratifications of ethnicity with the horizontal stratifications of social class” (51), a horizontal axis that Gordon still deemed to be the most relevant of the two in the 1960s (52; see Steinberg). Gordon’s preferences notwithstanding, his concept of “ethclass” provides a way out of the embattled dichotomy “ethnicity versus class,” and becomes a useful tool to render not only the intra-ethnic differences but also the interethnic similarities more visible. As it turns out, it is this last aspect—the similarities displayed by members of the same class across ethnoracial barriers—that Morrison plays with in her story. When Morrison acknowledges that, in “Recitatif,” she wanted to explore the interactions of class and race (Abel 476; Bennett 212), she is also implying that there is a certain degree of overlapping between the two social axes that most readers, consciously and unconsciously, bring to bear when they approach a narrative about interracial friendship.

  • 15 Patricia Hill Collins prefers the term “interlocking” to “intersectional”; see also Ivy Ken, who pr (...)

10By the 1980s, the increasing attention to the way in which different social vectors intersect was also visible in several fields. One movement to emerge and consolidate in that decade was anti-racist feminism (Combahee; Davis; Mohanty; King), intent on examining how race altered the way gender issues were perceived and negotiated. Similarly, in the discipline of American Studies, Alan Wald emphasized the need to examine the interlocking systems of oppression. Thus, instead of the exclusive and, in his opinion, distorted view of the “ethnicity school,” he opted for a multidimensional approach: the “class, gender and race methodology” (21-22). Finally, in different publications deriving from her legal practice in the United States, Crenshaw (“Demarginalizing”; “Mapping”) coined the term “intersectionality” in order to capture the result of combining more than one (discriminatory) social factor.15 One of the insights provided by the intersectional approach concerned the nature of the result of combining race, gender and class. When two of these factors interacted with each other, they could do so in an accretive way, merely adding, but, more often than not, in the process of overlapping each other, they also altered the first category in significant ways. It is not my intention to read each character in “Recitatif” “intersectionally”; instead, we can (and should) become “intersectional” observers ourselves, by interlocking race and class in our close reading of Morrison’s story.

Reading Race-Class in Morrison’s “Recitatif”

  • 16 In a conversation with Abel, Morrison is explicit about her intentions: in this short story she wan (...)

11The novels Morrison published in the 1970s and 80s often explored the intersection of race and gender, which led critics like Elizabeth Abel or David Goldstein-Shirley to stress that “Recitatif” departs from what used to be the norm until then. Focusing as it does almost exclusively on women, the gender factor seems to be suspended or, in Goldstein-Shirley’s terms, “bracketed” in her short story (99; see Abel 471). Nevertheless, scholars like Helane A. Androne and Susana M. Morris claim that gender issues continue to be relevant in the short story and they have attempted to bring gender back into the reading of Morrison’s text. In contrast, comparatively less attention has been paid to the interaction of class and race in “Recitatif,” even though Morrison herself planted such (misleading) clues in quite an intentional manner.16

  • 17 While the ethclass approach predicts the similar likelihood of being illiterate among poor white an (...)

12The way class factors, albeit in an unobtrusive manner, subtend and underlie the first sections of the story has already been mentioned. In the café scene this takes the form of assumptions about who used to serve and wait on whom—and, secondarily, who could afford going to a concert in the late sixties. Even earlier in the narrative, when Roberta is leaving the orphanage and Twyla describes that difficult moment, our prejudices about illiteracy seem to work in a similar way. The narrator explains that her friend “Roberta promised to write every day, which was really sweet of her because she couldn’t read a lick so how could she write anybody” (1779). If social class is closely related to educational opportunities, our assumptions upon learning that one of the girls could not even read are to be ascribed to a class-inflected interpretation. Still, ethnoracial factors are also at work here: due to the disparate literacy levels at the time when the story is set, one presumes that the illiterate girl belongs to the disadvantaged group, the African American community. Obviously, an ethclass approach complicates matters, because, in terms of literacy levels, there may be more similarities, across racial lines, between members of the same class, than between members of different classes within the same racialized community. In this particular case, literacy levels in impoverished families belonging to both black and white communities might be more similar than those of lower and upper classes within the same racial group. Therefore, assuming the two girls share a “humble” economic extraction, both are likely to be illiterate.17

13Class becomes even more conspicuous and prominent in the following episode, which takes us to Newburgh, the neighborhood where Twyla, now an adult, is living. Newburgh is far from fancy since “half the population [there] is on welfare” (1780). Twyla leads a small, contented life together with her husband, a fireman, and their child. One day she bumps into Roberta while shopping at a new supermarket and this time, in contrast to their last meeting at the café, Roberta seems to be eager to have a real conversation. Not only has Roberta’s attitude changed, her looks are also very different from those of their previous chance encounter: “her huge hair was sleek now, smooth around a small, nicely shaped head. Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich” (1781). Roberta’s appearance bespeaks her high-class status, a status confirmed by the limousine and her living in Annandale, “a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives” (1781). This conclusion is reinforced by Twyla’s feelings of resentment and envy of Roberta’s “easy” life: “Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world” (1781).

14At noticing the obvious money and power differential in this scene, many readers—and certainly most of the students in my class—made a guess: it was Twyla who was black and poor, while Roberta was white and wealthy. Yet, this is a clear case of slippage between the social factors of race and class. Although it is generally assumed that class status goes hand in hand with white skin, this was not always the case at the time the plot is set. Not only that, but we ignore the ambivalence of Twyla’s resentful remark: while it can allude to “the history of economic supremacy that has often granted whites a marked social advantage,” it can also suggest “the inroads social programs such as affirmative action made for historically underrepresented groups, inroads that have been met with skepticism or outright hostility by some whites” (Morris 169).

15Once more, Morrison seems to lead readers to one conclusion, only to leave us in doubt when we ponder on the possible motivations underlying Twyla’s resentful comment. In addition, the author includes “details about their husbands’ occupations that encourage an alternative conclusion” (Abel 476). As Morrison herself explains, most readers ignore certain historical facts that prove significant: for one thing, the fact that IBM tried “to recruit black executives” at the time suggests that Roberta’s husband may indeed be a wealthy African American professional; similarly, the author notes “the racial exclusiveness of the firemen’s union in upstate New York, where the story is set,” which would mean that Twyla’s husband has to be white. According to this interpretation, then, critics would “read Roberta as middle-class black and Twyla as working-class white” (Abel 476). However, this argument turns out to be radically flawed, because it is predicated on the premise that, in both couples, husband and wife are equally racialized, whereas the short story is never explicit about this.

16Another memory from the past intrudes and disrupts our game of (identity) cards: the blurry image of Maggie. According to Roberta, Maggie was an old black, disabled woman working at the orphanage, who was kicked by Twyla. The narrator, however, denies both memories: that of Maggie being black and that of participating in her humiliation. Amid the two women’s increasing anger and mutual resentment during the school integration conflict, Twyla cannot help feeling guilty about the incident with Maggie. She is especially sensitive about the issue of racialization, and she keeps repeating: “She wasn’t pitch-black, I knew, or I would have remembered that” (1785).

  • 18 Critics have read Maggie as a sign of “racial undecidability,” an interpretation reinforced by her (...)

17The final section takes us to the time when Twyla’s son is already attending university, several years after the women’s last chance encounter. By the time the two friends meet, Roberta is ready to make a clean breast of it: she tells Twyla that they had not really kicked old Maggie when they were kids, but they had certainly wanted to join in the attack. The question of Maggie’s “color” is left unclear, reminding us of the very aim of the whole story. Maggie’s slippery phenotype, which eludes fixation in the narrative but is open to several interpretations, echoes the reader’s hesitation in establishing the two main characters’ racial identity cards (Abel 472; Bennett 212-14). More importantly, the narrator’s desire to fix Maggie’s racial identity, tinged by a sense of guilt like that emerging from her (un)conscious desire to participate in the harassment, could be construed as the readerly “guilt” associated with our (un)conscious desire to ascribe a definitive, unambiguous racialized body not just to Maggie, but to the other main characters. In addition, the disabled woman can also be interpreted as the girls’ Doppelgänger, reminding them not just of their respective mothers (Abel; Androme), but of their own victimized selves (Stanley 76), which they need to disavow.18

Breaking the Code

18Many of us who have tried to play the game of “who is who” in “Recitatif” may end up wondering whether it is at all possible to ascertain the characters’ ethnoracial ascription. According to Linda Krumholz, in this kind of narrative, “the reader’s foothold in racialized judgments is [constantly] undermined” (28). Abel similarly concludes that Morrison’s story “resist[s] a totalizing reading,” since all sorts of evidence point at different directions (476). Juda Bennett, who reads the short story as a “passing” rather than a guessing game, concludes that the mystery cannot be resolved, or else “metafictional playfulness” would end; much the same conclusion is reached by Trudier Harris in her comparative analysis of Baldwin’s and Morrison’s short fiction. For David Goldstein-Shirley (“Race/[Gender]”), the story is a “nineteen-page distillation of Morrison’s grand project of deconstructing race and racism” (97), while Seongho Yoon claims that, in both Paradise and “Recitatif,” Morrison engages in a “critique of essentialism” (77) and evokes a “postethnic” moment in her “racial house” (78; see Hollinger, Postethnic America).

  • 19 In Morrison’s words, writers need to devise “ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinist (...)
  • 20 Writing in 2001, Bennett noted that previous scholarship had failed to “historicize” Morrison’s “Re (...)

19I concur with these critics, and with Morrison herself, that “Recitatif” is first and foremost a game of (identity) cards that problematizes our assumptions about race and, I would add, resorts to ethclass slippages in order to confuse (and enlighten) readers. In planting apparently contradictory clues in the text, Morrison seems to be setting up “traps” for readers. However, rather than setting traps, as Bennett convincingly argues, the story “simply reveals the traps that are everywhere around us” (212) in language and discourse.19 In contrast to these scholars, however, I contend that it is not impossible to determine the characters’ racial identity cards. It is precisely historical clues—often employed by Morrison to provide ambiguity—that hold the key to breaking the code, so to speak, and disclose the racial identity cards of each of the characters. While the detective game between reader and text is both entertaining and revealing, it is this less glamorous historicist approach, sidelined or neglected by most critical analyses to date, that needs to be adopted if we want to go beyond undecidability.20

20The penultimate vignette in “Recitatif” openly introduces the issue of racism, while still leaving us to wonder how each character is racialized: “Strife came to us that fall. . . . Strife. Racial strife” (1783). This is the 1970s and the strife is caused by school integration and the bussing system used to implement it. Twyla sees Roberta demonstrating against bussing and asks her why she is doing it. According to Roberta, this has nothing to do with them or their friendship, it is just for the sake of their children:

“It’s not about us, Twyla. Me and you. It’s about our kids.

“What’s more us than that?”

“Well, it is a free country.”

“Not yet, but it will be” (1784)

21Twyla’s retort seems to settle the matter: for her, America is not a free country yet, but she holds hopes for the future, and one of them lies in school integration. At this point, readers knowledgeable about the history of the Civil Rights in the United States start to see privileged Roberta as white and Twyla as African American. Abel interprets this scene differently, favoring class over race; for her, Twyla’s resentful answer should be attributed to “class rather than (or perhaps compounded by) racial resentment” (476). History, however, proves this interpretation wrong, for the opposition to bussing in the 1960s and 1970s originated in the white community (Cashmore and Troyna 136-38), as both written and audiovisual records attest to (e.g. Regain Our Alienated Rights movement in Boston, in 1974). In this case, historical facts trump postmodern undecidability.

22There are those, of course, who may remain unconvinced by my argument, or who may wield the blatantly undecidable character, Maggie, to prove their point. This figure, an ambiguous “floating signifier” (Abel 472) during the entire narrative, also continues to haunt Twyla and Roberta as adults. The two friends, like we readers, engage in a contest to decide not only what exactly happened to Maggie in that vaguely remembered past, but also the role played by the woman’s multiply racialized, disabled body. Since Maggie is described as “sandy-colored,” we cannot read that character as unproblematically white. As the tragic mulatto figure—or as a black lady, in Roberta’s view—she functions as the African American girl’s (racial) shadow: an embodied site where she sees herself not only as an abandoned child but also, like Maggie, as an object of racist discrimination. Read in this way, Twyla’s desire to participate (or actual participation) in the bullying scene should be understood not just as a projection of her general frustration and anger on someone perceived as weaker or more vulnerable, but as an instance of what Sau-ling Wong calls the “racial shadow,” a mechanism of internalized racism whereby a character disavows her own racialized body by projecting that self-hatred onto her double. Thus, by “punishing” Maggie, her oblique “racial shadow,” the African American girl is rejecting both her mother, a woman she is embarrassed by and whom she considers flawed, and herself, whom due to the historical dynamics of racialization in the United States, she has learned to see as constitutively flawed as well.

23Detective work can be tiresome, even for literary critics. Many Morrison scholars, defeated in their search for a final answer to the who-is-who game, give up and admit that “conclusive evidence simply isn’t there” (Goldstein-Shirley, “Race/[Gender]” 106). However, this conclusion is belied by a realist, (neo)historicist reading, one engaged in the particularly fraught period in which the story is set. The solution of the puzzle described in the previous pages does not detract from Morrison’s expertise in planting misleading clues for our detective work and, in so doing, exposing the racialization dynamics implicit in the discourse in which our reading proceeds.

  • 21 In Deans and Truants (2007), Gene Andrew Jarrett confirms that Morrison’s postmodern exercise at de (...)

24It may be useful here to remember that, while Morrison’s intention in writing “Recitatif” is usually invoked by scholars, the last part of her description is often neglected: she owns that she intended to remove “all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial” (Playing xiii; emphasis added). Morrison may have wanted to demystify the construct of race; after all, the labels “black” and “white,” like the signs Roberta and Twyla parade during the anti-bussing demonstrations, do not make sense in isolation; like all binary constructs, they need each other to mean something. However, deconstructing race is not the same as denying racism, which continues to be a very real pheno-menon.21 Moving beyond the dictatorship of an essentialist understanding of (ethnoracial) identity may be as urgent as being aware of the ongoing existence of racism: races do not exist, but racism does, as Morrison herself affirms (Playing xiii; see Hollinger, Postethnic America; Coates xi).

25While acknowledging and valuing the necessary anti-essentialist thrust of Morrison’s work, I argue that it is the very history of US racism that can put an end to our speculations when we read “Recitatif.” And even if we leave history aside and concede the opposite interpretation—that the story works as a game of eternal deferral and undecidability—reading “Recitatif” would nonetheless be a valuable, eye-opening game: in teasing out the import of the clues provided by Morrison, we are confronted with our own prejudices and forced to reconsider how racialization works—usually in deeply intersectional ways—and how trapped we are by its discursive forces. This may be more than enough reward for those readers who have accepted the invitation to play with (un)marked identity cards: after all, it is not who wins the game that matters, but who learns the most from it.

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Bibliographie

Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 470-98. Print.

Androne, Helane A. “Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Viramontes’s ‘Tears on My Pillow.’” Melus 32.2 (2007): 133-50. Print.

Banks, James A. “Ethnicity, Class, Cognitive, and Motivational Styles: Research and Teaching Implications.” The Journal of Negro Education 57.4 (1988): 452-66. Print.

Benjamin, Shanna Greene. “The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif.’” Studies in American Fiction 40.1 (2013): 87-106. Print.

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Notes

1 Writing in 2001, Juda Bennett showed his surprise at the scarcity of scholarship on Morrison’s (at that time) only short story, not just because of the writer’s notoriety, more pronounced after the 1993 Nobel Prize, but also because of “the rich opportunities” proffered by the story (211). After surveying the bibliography on “Recitatif,” it appears that, for the first two decades after the publication, only a few scholars (Abel; Goldstein-Shirley; Bennett and Krumholz) had paid critical attention to Morrison’s short story. This has since changed, and the last fifteen years have been especially productive in this regard. Although I will be complementing my reading with recent scholarship on Morrison, I will return again and again to those early critics, not only because they offered valuable insights into the story but also because they provided the necessary starting point for the rest of us.

2 The specific contours of “ethnicity” and “race” have been debated for decades (see Sollors; Hollinger; Gilroy). Some scholars like Werner Sollors favor the term “ethnicity,” understanding racialized groups as a subset of ethnic communities; others, like Alan Wald, argue for the primacy of “race,” understood as a social construction rather than as a biological given. In order to encompass and problematize both concepts, “ethnicity” and “race,” David Hollinger uses the adjective “ethnoracial.” While Hollinger tries to demystify the conflation of “culture” and “blood” (187-88), and envisions a “postethnic America” in the first edition of Postethnic America, in the postscripts to later editions, he admits that the black-white color line has not eroded as clearly as the other ethnoracial boundaries—an African American exceptionalism that he has continued to explore in more recent publications (“Obama”; “The Concept of Post-Racial”). However, despite the persistence of racism in the US, Hollinger continues to hold on to his belief in “postehnic America,” for, as he puts it, “to be postethnic is not to be anti-ethnic, or even colorblind, but to reject the idea that descent is destiny” (“Obama” 1034). In 2011, I argued that, this postethnic future, albeit desirable, is still premature; furthermore, in postulating a postethnic perspective (instead of a transethnic one), Hollinger’s words could be misused to deny continued racial profiling and discrimination. All in all, we might be better served by the less naïve approach, one that remains very much aware of the obstacles faced by racialized minorities, while acknowledging the complexity of ethnoracial matters. In an article also published in 2011, Hollinger addresses the ongoing resistance to the postethnic/postracial hypothesis and he argues that the problem with his theory may lie precisely in the terms used to describe it (“The Concept of Post-Racial” 176, 181).

3 This is a strategy that she will later deploy, to a lesser extent, in her novel Paradise (see Krumholz).

4 According to Morrison, her “writing expects, demands participatory reading, and that I think is what literature is supposed to do. It’s not just about telling the story; it’s about involving the reader” (“Toni Morrison: Interview” 164).

5 To prove the vital importance of such identifying documents, Gray invokes one of the most terrible instances of ethnic cleansing, that of Ruanda’s genocide, as described by Fenton: “when it came down to the matter of deciding who was a Tutsi, the killers relied first on identity cards, which were introduced by Belgians during this century, and secondly upon knowledge of a person’s ancestry” (Fenton 9, qtd. in Gray 33).

6 Interestingly, while most critics have noted the relevance of this maternal absence, they consistently ignore the absolute absence of fathers.

7 Such narrative ellipses also echo the “parenthetical” legs that characterize the key figure of “dumb” Maggie. These “parentheses” have caught the attention of numerous critics, from Elizabeth Abel to Shanna Greene Benjamin. They have often been associated with loss or absence. For David Goldstein-Shirley, they “conjure the image of zero itself” (“Race and Response” 82). For Bennett, the image of Maggie’s parenthetical legs “invites us to imagine all that remains parenthetical to or buried within the main story of two girls of different races. As the tragic figure in the margins of this story, Maggie functions as a foil for Twyla and Roberta” (214). More recently, Benjamin interprets Maggie’s parentheses as a commentary on silenced history.

8 It is beyond the scope of this essay to examine the formal implications that arise from analyzing the story from the standpoint of trauma studies, but I would like to suggest that the few articles focusing on the figure of Maggie, especially Sandra Kumamoto Stanley’s, already point in that direction.

9 An intermedial reading of the story would show that while jazz has served as inspiration for other narratives written by Morrison, this time the title of the story directly echoes the world of opera, as discussed by Kerem Omry.

10 And yet, in the late sixties, Hendrix apparently “appealed more to white than to black audiences” (Abel 474).

11 These misrecognitions would support Hollinger’s belief that “culture” has to be decoupled from the “ethnoracial pentagon,” much more pragmatic in nature (Hollinger, Postethnic America 221); in his opinion, the ethnoracial blocs should be understood as a convenient means to prevent or reduce discrimination caused by perceived difference—namely by the racialization of bodies—rather than as the vehicles of consistent, genuine cultures.

12 Interestingly, the first critics who ventured to identify who was black and who was white, like Abel or Goldstein-Shirley, opted for Roberta as the African American character.

13 This is reminiscent of the famous Woodstock three-day concert, which took place in 1969 in Wallkill, New York. It bears reminding that Woodstock was not initially designed as a free event, and advance tickets were rather costly.

14 Although ethnicity and race are not coterminous, for the sake of simplicity, in the discussion of intersectionality the adjective “ethnoracial” (Sollors; Hollinger) will be used as it can be applied to both ethnic and racialized groups.

15 Patricia Hill Collins prefers the term “interlocking” to “intersectional”; see also Ivy Ken, who proposes an alternative culinary terminology to describe the phenomenon.

16 In a conversation with Abel, Morrison is explicit about her intentions: in this short story she wanted “to substitute class for racial codes in order to drive a wedge between these typically elided categories. . . .” (qtd. in Abel 476). Still, even those critics, like Susana Morris, who argue for the need to explore “the confluence and intersection of race, class, and gender” (163), fail to conduct an intersectional analysis in a sustained or thorough manner, at least as pertains the interlocking dynamics between race and class.

17 While the ethclass approach predicts the similar likelihood of being illiterate among poor white and African American girls, gender is also a relevant factor here.

18 Critics have read Maggie as a sign of “racial undecidability,” an interpretation reinforced by her body—her legs—resembling “parentheses”; in Abel’s apt words, Maggie’s “silent self [is] a blank parenthesis” (472). Thus, Abel concludes, “their readings of Maggie become in turn clues for our readings of” the two girls (472). For Bennett, Maggie’s function is similar: she becomes “a text for Twyla and Roberta to read race upon” (212). Stanley similarly concludes that, despite the fact that she “initially provid[es] Twyla and Roberta with a vehicle for their own epiphanies, Maggie stubbornly remains an elusive, haunting figure at the conclusion of the story” (84). Later interpretations of Morrison’s story concur on the crucial role played by Maggie. For Trudier Harris, for instance, the character functions as the symbolic locus where the two girls “can exercise their mob psychology” (113). Following Twyla’s interpretation at the end of the story, scholars like Abel or Androne claim that Maggie echoes and signifies the girl’s absent or “unresponsive” mothers. See Androne for a comparative analysis of Maggie and La Llorona, archetypes used by Morrison and Viramontes, respectively, to explore “the pervasive trauma of absence/presence mothering” and “its on-going haunting effects on women’s consciousness” (135). While the previous interpretations are all valid, it is important to heed Stanley when she emphasizes the need to read Maggie not merely as a symbolic character performing an ancillary function for the two girls in the story. If we approach her merely as a subsidiary or instrumental character, Maggie will end up being “twice muted – first in the text, and then by the critics” (72), which, for Stanley, has actually been the case.

19 In Morrison’s words, writers need to devise “ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains” (Playing xiii).

20 Writing in 2001, Bennett noted that previous scholarship had failed to “historicize” Morrison’s “Recitatif,” yet he does not do so either in his essay (212).

21 In Deans and Truants (2007), Gene Andrew Jarrett confirms that Morrison’s postmodern exercise at destabilizing racial readings does not cancel or rule out “racial realism” (178).

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Begoña Simal-González, « Playing With (Un)Marked Cards: Intersectionality in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 75 | 2020, 97-113.

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Begoña Simal-González, « Playing With (Un)Marked Cards: Intersectionality in Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 75 | Autumn 2020, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2022, consulté le 23 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3263

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Begoña Simal-González

Dr. Begoña Simal-González is Full Professor at the Universidade de Coruña (UDC), where she coordinates the American Studies Research Group (CLEU). She has published extensively in the field of US ethnic and diasporic literatures, specializing in Asian American diasporas. Her articles have appeared in indexed journals, as well as in essay collections of international academic publishers like Palgrave-Macmillan, Brill-Rodopi, LIT Verlag, or Routledge. Her more recent publications combine her earlier research interests, like ethnic studies or magical realism, with a transnational and ecocritical approach: “Disrupting Globalization” (Journal of Transnational American Studies, 2018), “The Waste of the Empire” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2019), or Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

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