In her introduction to Toni Morrison’s short story, Zadie Smith offers insight into the Nobel prize-winning author’s intentions. Recitatif, Smith explains, was planned by Morrison as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial”. In telling the tale of Twyla and Roberta, who meet as eight-year-old roommates in an orphanage, Morrison never reveals which girl is Black and which is white, an omission that forces us to confront our racial biases. “When [Morrison] called Recitatif an experiment, she meant it,” Smith says. “The subject of the experiment is the reader.”
Actor Bahni Turpin goes on to narrate Morrison’s story, which was first published in 1983 and which charts the lives of the girls through a series of chance encounters. It opens as they meet for the first time and discuss how they ended up in an orphanage. “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick,” Twyla says. Turpin expertly captures the bluntness of the protagonists’ childhood selves: “All I could think of was that she really needed to be killed,” Twyla says when her mother groans loudly in church.
