Written in the early 1980s and rarely seen since, the story follows the lives of two women — one Black, the other white — from their childhoods.
To much of the world, the late Toni Morrison was solely a novelist, celebrated for such classics as “, did not confine herself to one kind of writing.
Morrison also completed plays, poems, essays and short stories, one of which is coming out as a book Feb. 1. “Recitatif,” written by Morrison in the early 1980s and rarely seen over the following decades, follows the lives of two women from childhood to their contrasting fortunes as adults.contributes an introduction, and the story’s audio edition is read by the actor Bahni Turpin.
According to Autumn M. Womack, a professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton, where Morrison taught for years, the author had written short fiction at least since her college years at Howard and Cornell universities, though she never published a story collection. “Recitatif” was included in the 1983 release “Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women,” co-edited by the poet-playwright Amiri Baraka and now out of print.
They meet as girls at the St. Bonaventure children’s shelter . And they run into each other on occasion years later, whether at a Howard Johnson’s in upstate New York, where Twyla works and Roberta comes in with a man scheduled to meet with“Once, twelve years ago, we passed like strangers,” Twyla says. “A black girl and a white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say.
As Womack notes, “Recitatif” includes themes found elsewhere in Morrison’s work, whether the complicated relationship between two women that was alsoor the racial blurring Morrison used in “Paradise,” a 1998 novel in which Morrison refers to a white character within a Black community without making clear who it is. Morrison often spoke of race as an invention of society, once writing that “the realm of racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it has no claim.
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