Recititaf: A Toni Morrison Analysis

Toni Morrison’s short story Recititaf makes a bold statement on racial conflicts of the 20th century, while incorporating the personal struggles of two main characters. The story focuses on Twlya and Roberta, two children who room together in a New York shelter. Over the course of their lives, the two run into each other and the truth about their childhoods unfold.

The element that ties their struggles together is the character Maggie, an older mute woman in the shelter who was bow-legged. Both despise her, hurling cruel names and jokes at her because of her disabilities. Maggie’s character represents parts of themselves that they hated. She is thought of as weak, as a result of being disabled, and is constantly mocked by everyone in the shelter. This vulnerability is a reminder of both Twlya and Roberta’s own fragility.

The narrator, Twlya, compares Maggie’s way of swinging when she walks to her mother; it’s made clear throughout the story that her mother had left her at the shelter so she could go out dancing at night. Maggie was a reminder of her, because she is deaf and is “nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use” (Morrison 17). Twlya finds comfort in Maggie’s isolation and silence, because she “knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t- just like me and I was glad about that” (Morrison 18). She also mocks the childishness of Maggie and her clothes, which is something she has in common with Twyla’s mom; she also refuses to grow up, even as an adult.

For Roberta, her hatred stems from her mother as well. In one of her adult interactions with Twyla, she outright compares Maggie and her mother, stating they both grew up in institutions. Her frustration with her situation with her mother is reflected in her bullying Maggie, just like Twyla.

As two children who are struggling to adapt to shelter life, they do what is needed to assimilate. This means mocking Maggie, just like the teenage girls who abuse her so cruelly. Twyla and Roberta are outsiders, two children whose mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t care for them, and ended up in a shelter of other misfits. But to them, Maggie is even more of an outsider- a physically disabled woman who is marginalized more than these two are. Mocking her and even wanting to physically hurt her is a way of lessening their positions as outsiders, as children who do not fit in elsewhere.

The most important feature is the confusion over Maggie’s race, leaving the answer unknown. Twyla and Roberta fight over whether or not Maggie was white or black, their memories clashing. This brings home Morrison’s philosophy that novels about black culture and history “suggest what the conflicts are, what the problems are” (Morrison) without necessarily solving them. This philosophy was touched on in her interview for the New York Times in 2015. The issue of race is consistent throughout this story, always with a clear historical background to support it, with a level of ambiguity kept at the same time.

Throughout the story, race is the main stressor on the their lives crossing. It is a main theme to the story, a topic Morrison writes about in each of her works. She does not define which character is of which race, even refraining from using racial slurs to get her point across. In her Nobel Prize lecture, she stated that “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence” (Morrison). This powerful stance is exemplified in this short story- a strong statement about racial tension is made without having to use hateful language or force a character to be defined by her race. The conflict between their races is manifested in the Maggie’s character, reflected in the uncertainty of Maggie’s race.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. “Nobel Lecture.” The Nobel Prize. 7 Dec. 1993, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/.

Kaadzi , Rachel Ghansah. “The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison.” The New York Times Magazine, 4 Apr. 2015.

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