What the hell happened to Maggie? Memory and History of Race in Toni Morrisons's "Recitatif" (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1.3, University of Constance, language: English, abstract: "On all of its levels, memory is defined by an intricate interaction between remembering and forgetting. "This statement certainly includes the term "race", a term that has, for a long time, been very present in American history and is still of high importance today. Toni Morrison deals to a great extent with this term in her writings, for example her only short story "Recitatif", where two girls of different races witness a beating incident in the orphanage "St. Bonny's" they live in and who, in the course of the story, revisit their memories of the incident several times. In the 20th century, many analyses of "Recitatif" therefore focused on putting racial markers on the two protagonists, showing how Morrison wants to make her readers aware of their own racial stereotypes.

This approach is justified and certainly reveals much of Morrison's intention as the author, but I suggest that the story does not merely deal with racial markers. Hence, this paper will focus on a character that has often been left out: Maggie, the kitchen worker of St. Bonny's. Androne, Stanley and Benjamin are major voices in a small body of Recitatif scholarship that centre on Maggie: Androne offered a ground breaking study focusing on maternal figures, whereas Stanley analyses the story in the light of disability studies. Thus, it will be shown that Maggie has several functions in the text that add to the meaning of the text as well as the understanding for the reader.

This paper will investigate "Recitatif" in the light of the concepts of memory and history. I claim that through the character of Maggie, readers can better understand the memory and history of the term "race" in American history. It will be shown how the returning and dividing memories of the incident with Maggie challenge Twyla and Roberta to not accept their memory as complete. Furthermore, it will be shown that Maggie's interstitial narrative provides, at least to a certain extent, answers to the implied question driving Recitatif: if memory is so unstable, how can whites and blacks ever communicate effectively about the history they share?