Recitatif is the only published short story by luminary African-American novelist Toni Morrison. It appeared in a 1983 anthology of writing by African-Amercian women entitled Confirmation, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka.
Recitatif tells the story of the conflicted friendship between two girl – one black and one white – from the time they meet and bond at age eight while staying at an orphanage through their re-acquaintance as mothers on different sides of economic, political and racial divides in a recently gentrified town in upstate New York.
While Morrison typically writes about black community from inside perspective in this story she takes a different approach. The story explore how the relationship between the two main characters is shaped by their racial difference. Morrison does not, however, disclose which character is white and which is black rather than delving into the distinctive culture of African American, she illustrates how the divide between the races in American culture at large is dependent on blacks and whites defining themselves in oppsition to one another. Her use of description and characterization in the story underscores the reader's complicity in this process. Morrison has considered similarities in her book of criticism. Playing in the dark and whitness and the literary Imagination, which explores how language enforces stereotypes in the work of classic American author such as Melville, Poe and Hemingway. Recitatif may therefore be understood as part of Morrison's ongoing response to the mostly white and male classic literary tradition of the United States.
Morrison writes her works in order to display the discrimination that suffered by the black people and their pursuit to freedom. The work Recitatif reflects that the author wants to realize her purpose by reconstructing the image of the black and their history. However, the people,like Maggie who is unable to recitatif, absolutely become the stumpled stone to the author's reconstrution image.
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