1. On page 1177 when Roberta’s mother visited her and brought different kinds of foods including “chicken legs and ham sandwiches”. Roberta drank the milk and left the food sitting there on the table and Twyla says “ The wrong food is always with the wrong people”. I think Twyla is saying that she should be eating that food instead of Roberta because she is a picky eater and doesn’t appreciate the food that is given to her. As a reader, I can see from the food that is mentioned and what Twyla said , that there is a race issue. I think “ chicken legs and ham sandwiches” is considered to be African American foods or “soul food” and the fact that Twyla said that “The wrong food is always with the wrong people” makes it more obvious that Twyla is the black girl and Robert is the white girl.
2. Being an immigrant and not speaking a single word in English was the hardest part of making relationships when I first arrived in NYC around 2010. I was put in a middle school with students from different backgrounds and most of them were Latinos. Even though they didn’t speak English, they had their own language to communicate with. For me it was difficult because I had no other way to communicate unless I learned the English language. There was times where i end up fighting with some of those students, not because i started the fight or i wanted to fight, it was because there was language barrier and race difference between us and if i talked in my language, they would think that I’m talking about them and if they talked in their native language, many times i thought they were talking bad about me. Soon after I became an English language speaker, I learned that I live in a society that is completely different from the society I was born and raised in, and the only way to adapt to this new society is to learn to act like i belong to this society. What I noticed as an immigrant living in New York and English is not my native language is that people underestimate you when speaking English with an accent. Because of that, I’m able to speak English fluently without an accent and it only made me more confident when speaking to others.
Ali – Thanks for both of these responses. It’s interesting to see how our own assumptions come into play when we assign racial identities to the two characters in “Recitatif.” I think calling our attention to those judgments is precisely what Morrison had in mind when she conceived of this story. Your experience as a new immigrant is further evidence of how complicated it can be to find our way in diverse communities and how often we draw the wrong conclusions about things based on externalities, like an accent.