This document discusses themes and symbols in the short story "The Pickup" by Nadine Gordimer: 1) The story explores issues of identity and cultural stereotypes as the protagonists, Julie and Abdu, struggle with their identities and how others perceive them. 2) Symbols like Julie's dream of cultivating rice in the desert and references to works like The Arabian Nights and The Odyssey are used to represent the characters' search for identity and place in the world. 3) The desert setting is portrayed as timeless and without boundaries, reflecting the ambiguous and shifting nature of identity.

1. Approaching the text-
“ If you want to have the courage to stand up and speak,
you should also have the courage to sit down and listen.”
Akshay Patil
HS14H006

2.  Edward Said’s Orientalism- Gordimer tends to undermine the stereotyping.
 Structural irony- White South African Woman represents a country within a
continent which is closely allied with the images of the Orient.
 Abdu- “European, but they don’t call themselves that.”- unifying features of
the West.
 Arab country depicted as New South Africa’s Cultural ‘Other’.
 Abdu- sees his own Arabic culture as a prison he desperately wants to escape
from.
 Julie- increasingly finds in it what she had been missing in the liberal New
South Africa.

3.  Identity crisis- Protagonists are either Doubtful or Doubted.
 Abdu- Identity is a luxury only the privileged can afford- unwilling to accept
roles ascribed to him.
 Precariously suspended between Abrogation of his Eastern past and
Appropriation of a Western future.
 Julie- finds identity through radical difference from the bourgeois world-
integrates herself with the social network of liberal friends at LA Café.
 Makes use of Abdu’s difference, the Significant Other, to define herself.
 Julie’s dream to cultivate rice in the desert- possible symbolism for the quest of
her true identity.

4.  The Doll’s House-
We were playing at reality; it was a doll’s house, the cottage; a game, the
EL-AY Café.
 The Arabian Nights-
Outside the haphazard stretch of sheds and buildings either half-
completed or half-fallen down, difficult to say which, she sees for the
first time in her life, two old men actually sharing a water-pipe, the
hookah of illustrations to childhood’s Scheherazade’s stories.
 The Odyssey-
She has been only the Siren to his Ulysses (Latin for the Greek Odysseus).

5. The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of
night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it,
for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to
there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-
traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no
demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-
haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.