Recitatif (2022)

Morrison's first short tale, first published in 1983 and reissued in hardback last month, is a formal experiment that simultaneously satisfies and defies the expectations, a chess game she's destined to win. Twyla and Roberta are "dumped" as 8-year-olds at a home for runaway and orphan girls for four months; as Twyla writes, "my mother danced all night and Roberta's was sick".

They are hapless puppets toward the bottom of the social pecking order at St. Bonaventure, just above Maggie, the silent, crippled kitchen help. But Morrison has a trick up her sleeve: one of the girls in white, and the other is black, and Morrison jumbles their racial identities via a sequence of actions that disrupt historical hierarchies and simplistic binaries. When the girls rejoin as women, they set out to discover the truth about what happened all those years ago.

Zadie Smith provides an insightful, startling introduction, highlighting the author's obligations on herself, pushing outside her comfort zone while ceaselessly campaigning for "the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison works".

Link to read: goodreads.com/book/show/34842610-recitatif