Color vs Toni Morrison

I remember being sixteen years old and going through a grocery aisle picking up whitening lotions, whitening soaps, whitening deodorants, white Safe Guards, White Rabbits, pretty much anything that said "white". In Kindergarten, white was just a color you never use, the last crayon in the Crayola box, but white eventually came to mean beauty, perfection, credibility, power, and so on.

But white was also and really just, as Toni Morrison would say, a color. Just as black is only a color, and brown is only a color, and there are many other colors in between them. Morrison's writings are about these colors. She examines how they affect us socially and personally. She illustrates the consequences of colorism at the very basic cognitive and emotional level. She shows how relationships and communities are made and torn because of colors. But in Recitatif, and some of her other works like Paradise, Morrison paints with these vibrant colors, and then dips it in paint thinner for hours before putting it up the wall.

I loved Recitatif. For me, it was interactive. Morrison's deliberate ambiguity through the unreliable Twyla and the shady Roberta became a mirror from which I saw my own prejudices and assumptions. I thought I would understand it more if I knew the colors of the two girls, but in hindsight, I really wouldn't. The story was not about who was which color, but the consequences of this colorism. Symbolically, it's only until you let go of the identification of color that you really see the bigger issue about color that Morrison is trying to say in the story.

It's really a clever way to infuse such a substantial message into a short story. And it's even more fascinating to see how Morrison pulled this off.

Recitatif was told in "chika" structure - as if you're just sitting in a high school reunion with your old best friend - as Twyla jumps from point to point, recalling images from her childhood up to her adulthood, with complementary snide remarks here and there. When you read a story, you really have no choice but to trust the narrator for the first few paragraphs, but this is a narrative studies class, and we have been reading weird things in here.

I immediately took the first chance I got to mistrust narrator Twyla. But who to trust now? Who else but dear old Roberta... who eventually proves untrustworthy as well when she admits that she lied about who really pushed Maggie, which basically happens at the end of the story, so you're only given a few more lines to make up your mind. Who do you trust? This would've been just any simple question you can decide literally however you want. But it's the color element that Morrison adds that makes it bigger than that. It's about racism now. It was an ethical decision for me. Who I trust would most likely depend on who I think is black and white, and what I think of blacks and whites. I was very careful for my decision not to be based on that.

In the end I decided to trust no one. “What the hell happened to Maggie?” Who knows, and who cares. Recitatif isn’t a riddle. It’s Morrison’s commentary on colorism, and man, did she make her point.

CONCLUSION

A magisterial-looking woman called Toni Morrison picked a fight with color. She won, with the power of narration and deliberate ambiguity.

And that, kids, is how you get a Nobel Prize for Literature.

Works Cited

Morrison, T.. “Recitatif”. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. Las Vegas: Norton. 2014. 131-47. Print.