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Recitatif

Introduction

Recitatif was first published in 1983 in Confirmation: An Anthology of African-Americans, an anthology edited by Amiri Baraka and his wife Amina Baraka. (Shirley, pp. 77-86)

The title refers to a style of musical declamation between singing and ordinary speech, but used for dialogic and narrative interludes in operas and oratorios. The term "recitatif" also once included the meaning, now obsolete, "the tone or rhythm inherent in any language. "Both definitions suggest the episodic nature of the story, how each of the five sections of the story takes place in a register that is different from those in ordinary life of his two central characters, Roberta and Twyla. Vignettes of history together the rhythms of two lives in five years, a few moments, all told in Twyla own voice. The story is, then, in various ways, Twyla "recitatif."

"'Recitatif' was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes of a story about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial," says Toni Morrison in his Preface to play in the dark: whiteness and literary imagination. "Recitatif" is a written history of racial pioneers, the race of Twyla and Roberta are debatable. Although the characters are clearly separated by class, not stated as African Americans or whites. (Ann, pp. 41-46)

Twyla and Roberta Fisk first meeting within the limits of a state home for children, San Buenaventura (San Bonny), because each one has been snatched from his mother. Roberta's mother is ill, the mother of Twyla "just likes to dance all night." We learn immediately that the girls look different from each other: one black, one is white. Although initially hostile feelings, which are drawn together because of their similar circumstances. They turn out to be, in the famous words of Maya Angelou, "more similar than different." Girls ...