Weekly English Post #4 - Some Insight

I finished The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison last week on the plane to Indiana University. It helped passed the time while I was flying over the Midwest. I am not going to rant and hate on the book anymore, I did enough of that in the last post. The book ended decently, but was overall a sub par book. Now its time to be focusing on the project I’m going to do, I think I’m going to do the Imovie of a dramatic reading. There is a perfect scene in the book at the end with Pecola talking to herself in the mirror. She is admiring her eyes and due to the abuse she sustained, she has created an imaginary friend to speak too. I believe I can direct this scene very creatively and make it a good watch. While I have trouble reading out loud, I’ll do my best speak clearly (possibly with an accent) and act it out well.

Before I finally decided on the dramatic reading I was thinking about possibly doing the compare contrast essay based on a short story by the author. So I used the Internet to see what other novella/short stories Toni Morrison wrote and the only one that came up was one called “Recitatif.” Recitatif is defined as the tone or rhythm peculiar to any language. I found the title as well as the story to be very interesting. The story centers around two characters, Roberta and Twyla, one of whom is black and the other white. The most intriguing part of the story is the fact that Morrison does not tell the reader which one is which. They first meet while rooming together in an orphanage. What follows is five different vignettes with the girls meeting at different ages in life. All scenes portray the characters in different lights with different attitudes towards one and another.

Due to the lack of information about each character it allows for the reader to formulate his or her own opinions. Morrison intentionally restructures “the drama of ambiguity so that it involves the reader in the impulse to fix racial meaning and to know the racial status of its characters,” (Bennet, 2001). Upon first read through of “Recitatif” I thought Roberta was the African American due to the fact that her mother wore a large cross, carried a Bible, and refused to shake Twyla’s mom’s hand. As the story progresses I switched my opinion and began to think Twyla was the African American. That’s the beauty of the story, Morrison leaves the story up for interpretation and allows the reader to think the whole time. The story refuses to solve the mystery of racial identity and instead asks “its readers to examine the importance they place on fixing racial identity, hardly allowing them to remain passive readers or disingenuously uninterested.” (Bennet, 2001).