Writing Process for “Paper”

Two of my favorite short stories are Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” and Ernest Gaines’ “The Sky is Gray.” Each of these stories, in different ways, interrogates the deployment of language and how language serves as a foundation to the social construction of race the subversion of that false construction. Morrison states that “‘Recitatif’ was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”

Throughout “Recitatif,” we, as the reader, do not know which character, Twyla or Roberta, is Black and which is white. This is the point of Morrison’s “experiment.” She calls upon us, as readers, to become co-creators of the text where we actively engage with the social construction of race within the narrative because we, in our minds, determine the race of each character, and that causes us to look at ourselves and our own assumptions. As Joyce Irene Middleton puts it, “Morrison positions her reader, a co-creator of the text, as an active participant who not only interprets the text but also, responsibly, creates an empowering language of one’s own.”

Ernest Gaines, in “The Sky is Gray” and other works, subverts language by using “they” or other pronouns without any clear antecedents. Eight-year-old James narrates “The Sky is Gray,” and when he and his mother board the bus to Bayonne, he…