Toni Morrison’s story “Recitative” for the first time in German

EThe American author Toni Morrison wrote a single story, and it replaces entire research libraries on how everyday prejudices and devaluations work, on which attributions racism is based, starting with what a person eats and how they wear their hair , where he lives.

Morrison (1931-2019) has told novel after novel about life as an African American since her autobiographical debut “Very Blue Eyes” from 1970. She brought this female, black perspective to bear in her literature, an achievement crowned with the Nobel Prize in 1993, which younger authors still refer to today when they say: Toni Morrison showed me how to tell stories from my life, and above all she showed me that it has to be, because otherwise stories go unheard.

In the short story “Rezativ” from 1983, which is now being published in German for the first time, Morrison tells the story of two friends from a children’s home who meet at the age of eight and then meet again at the age of twenty, thirty, forty.

“We didn’t like each other very much at first,” says Twyla, “but none of the others wanted to play with us because we weren’t really orphans with dear dead parents in heaven.” Her path marks stations in American history, beginning before the civil rights movement , wanders through the countercultural sixties into the reform years of the seventies, when school children were driven from one neighborhood to another in what was known as “bussing” so that they could study together. In the protests, for and against, Roberta and Twyla find themselves on opposing sides. And they both always insist that it’s all about their children – children they once were themselves.

Next to each other, says Twyla, we both looked “like salt and pepper”, but Morrison’s text never gets more specific: because it needs this vagueness to develop its dynamic. Is Twyla black? And Roberta knows? Because the mother of one likes to go dancing? The other one goes fishing with her father? Or is it the other way around? But Toni Morrison poses the central question of this story to her audience: How come you think that one is black and the other is white?

You fall into an abyss of shame

The moment you realize that you’ve continued reading this story and have sorted salt and pepper in your own head and are irritated by the fact that it doesn’t seem to work, you fall into an abyss of shame. And read the text again from the beginning, in which not a word is too much and motives and constellations are reflected and intensified. To find the point where you decided to go one way or the other. But that lies much earlier, it lies before reading, it lies in the imprints that one has collected throughout one’s life and reads into this text.

The British writer Zadie Smith has written a carefully analyzing epilogue, which also dissects her own assumptions about Twyla and Roberta into their discriminatory parts: “What about Twyla and Roberta in ‘recitative’ perhaps characteristic black or white is the consequence of history, shared experience and what shared stories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity.”

The epilogue is longer than the narrative itself, at first one is irritated, but it is only proof that stories by Toni Morrison replace entire libraries.