“Recitatif” and “Notes From a Fragmented Daughter”
These two texts differed greatly in terms of the weight that the characters’ intersections had on the stories. However, they each respectively tackled different and equally important intersections — race (as well as culture) in the case of Fragmented Daughter, and class in the case of Recitatif.
In Fragmented Daughter the writers’ notes reflected the experiences of someone who thinks of, and has thought of, their racial and ethnic identity quite a lot. And the writers’ human experience as well as her interactions with the dominant culture seems to have been shaped by this. The writer illustrates this throughout the piece. In one part in particular, the writer recounts a micro-aggression she experienced by her friends’ aunt. The aunt merely looks at her and then recognizes an otherness in her, and then exotifies and separates her through the callous comments she makes about her and her culture.
Fragmented Daughter also highlights the Western generalization of Asian culture very well throughout the text. When experiencing the micro-aggression I mentioned earlier, the writer is also mistaken for Chinese. In another part following this one, the writer notes that when being bullied by another girl, the girl calls her “a flat-faced Chinaman.”1 Asian culture is vast and varied, with different nuances for every individual country’s equally individual culture. Using “Chinese” as a blanket term for Asians at large is racist and damaging. The piece communicated this aspect of the lived experience of being an Asian American very effectively.
In contrast, the characters in Recitatif almost seemed to use race as a vehicle for the story, possibly even an excuse for the characters to be hostile towards each other, even though the races of the characters were not explicitly mentioned within the text.
In one section of the text, Roberta uses a rather vague sentence to explain her snubbing of Twyla when they meet at the diner, for the first time since the girl’s home, saying, “Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.” 2
And in another section, when Twyla and Roberta were picketing, Twyla was not picketing for the same reasons as the other people of her race. All of Twyla’s signs and posters were personally targeted towards Roberta, rather than centered on the racial issues (or “racial strife”3, as the Twyla puts it) taking place within the events of the text. However, in Recitatif, one intersection that displayed itself somewhat more prominently was class.
The extreme change in financial standing between the two girls as they grew up undoubtedly served as added tension between them. The fact that they both started at the girl’s home, but as they grew older, one experienced significant upwards mobility while the other did not, was probably a driving factor in their aggression towards each other. Twyla drove a Volkswagen while Roberta rode in a limousine. Twyla presumably wore average clothes while Roberta is written as wearing diamonds to the grocery store, and furs in other scenes. All of these small but obvious differences in class status added to the grievances between the two.
Another example of this is the way that Twyla and Roberta meet for the first time after so many years away from the girl’s home. When they meet, it is at a diner — Twyla’s place of work — and there is a clear difference in the positions of power for the duration of their conversation. Twyla is in her full waitress uniform (hat, stockings, dress and all), having just finished her shift. Meanwhile Roberta is merely there socially. The idea of power in class plays out from thereon throughout their conversation, as Roberta is cold and clipped, while Twyla merely tries to make conversation.
It should be noted that the actual issues of the relationship between Twyla and Roberta are far more complex than just their differences in class. However, the class differences (similarly to the racial differences) do serve as a powerful conduit for those feelings and repressed experiences to emerge. Lingering anger that Twyla feels towards Roberta manifests itself disguised as somehow both racial tension and class tension, exemplified when Twyla sees Roberta at the supermarket, and makes this remark to herself, “I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.”4
In conclusion, both pieces touched on very important, and widely misunderstood intersections that largely shape a person’s interactions and human experience, in greatly varied ways. Fragmented Daughter explored ideas of living as a mixed person, and the different implications, assumptions and frustrations that come along with such a thing. Recitatif, on the other hand, used ideas of race and class largely as plot devices, as rich ingredients to a very layered story.
Bibliography:
1. Notes From a Fragmented Daughter, Elena Tajima Creef.
2. Recitatif, Toni Morrison.
3. Recitatif, Toni Morrison.
4. Recitatif, Toni Morrison.
