‘‘Recitatif’’ was published in a 1983 anthology of writings by African-American women entitled Con- firmation. The purpose of the anthology—edited by Amiri Baraka, one of the most prominent voices of the radical Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, and his wife Amina—was to confirm the existence of several generations of black female writers whose work was often ignored or undervalued. Baraka writes in his introduction that the intention of the anthology is ‘‘in distinct contrast to the norm in American letters where ‘American literature’ is for the most part white and male and bourgeois.’’ This is in keeping with Morrison’s view of her mission as a writer. Saying that she is foremost a reader, she claims that she writes the kind of books that she wants to read but hasn’t been able to find.

The Confirmation anthology marked the beginning of a period when an unprecedented number of black women writers—Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Gloria Naylor, and Morrison among them—rose to prominence and ‘‘crossed over’’ for commercial success among a mostly white reading public. While Morrison had already published several notable novels by 1983, including Song of Solomon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is considered to have signaled her status as an author of the first ranks, she had not yet reached her present level of distinction. She is now considered not only the foremost African-American woman writer but among the foremost living writers of any nation, race, or gender.

Morrison’s greatest fame came with the publication of 1987’s Beloved. When this emotionallygripping and tragic story of an ex-slave and the daughter she murdered failed to win any major American prizes, a group of prominent black writers and intellectuals published a letter of protest in the New York Times Book Review decrying the lack of national attention to her work. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year and contributed to Morrison’s selection in 1993 as the recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s highest literary honor. In addition to profuse critical and scholarly praise, many of Morrison’s novels have been bestsellers. In 1992 Morrison published a novel and a work of criticism which were on the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists simultaneously.

Morrison’s precipitous rise and her mastery of the novel form have perhaps overshadowed her other achievements. Though she has written a play and a book of criticism, Morrison is known first and foremost as a novelist. ‘Recitatif’ is Toni Morrison’s only published work of short fiction and the story has received little critical attention, especially when compared to the huge amount of scholarship concerning Morrison’s major novels. It differs signifi- cantly from her novels aesthetically, for it lacks the dimension of magic that has led critics to compare her writing to the Latin American school of magical realism. It shares, however, with her principal works a concern with history, memory, and the power of naming within the racial culture of the United States.

In an interview with Elissa Schappell for the Paris Review Morrison explains that her objective as a black writer in a white-dominated culture is to attempt to ‘‘alter language, simply free it up, not to repress it or confine it, but to open it up. Tease it. Blast its racist straightjacket.’’ This is her intention in not naming the races of the two women in ‘‘Recitatif.’’ Morrison admits that she intended to confuse the reader, but also to ‘‘provoke and enlighten. . . . What was exciting was to be forced as a writer not to be lazy and rely on obvious codes.’’...