أول تجربة مع الكاتبة الجنوب أفريقية نادين غورديمر والحاصلة على نوبل في عام 1991 لكنني قبل ذلك قرأت حوارا جميلا مع نادين كان مشجعا لكي أبدأ هذا المشوار مع هذا القلم الخصبجولي ذات البشرة البيضاء تنتمي لطبقة برجوازية من أصحاب الإمتيازات في جوهانسبرج لكنها لا تشعر بهذا الإنتماء لذلك تنأى بنفسها عن هذا العالم تتعرف على شاب من أصول عربية مهاجر غير شرعي يعمل في كاراج للسيارات وتبدأ قصة الحب بين عرقين مختلفين وتسير الأمور سيراهادئا حتى يصل إنذارا من السلطة بترحيل الشاب إلى بلده التي لم تُعرّف الكاتبة عنه إلا إنه من خلال سير الأحداث يبدو بلدا عربيا وإسلاميا ملتزما يضطر إبراهيم للرحيل غير إن جولي تتشبث به وتقرر الرحيل معه تاركة مجتمعها البرحوازي خلف ظهرها وسط دهشة الشاب وعدم رغبته في تحمل مسئولية شخص آخر في بلد فقير تنقصه مقومات الحياة الأساسية لم يكن أمام إبراهيم إلا أن يتزوج جولي حتى يستطيع أن يقدمها لأسرته الملتزمة بوصفها زوجته هذا هو الجزء الأول من الحكاية .. غير أن الجزء الثاني هو الجز ء الأهم والأجمل من قرأ السماء الواقية لبول بولز سيدرك تماما كيف يتغلب سحر الشرق وكيف يمكن أن يفتتن الأجنبي بالصحراء العربية للدرجة التي قد يختار أن يصبح جزءا منها وربما يختار أن يموت فيها أيضا إن أهم فكرة تقدمها غورديمر من خلال هذا النص هو إشكالية الهوية والإنتماء فالمكان الذي ولدت فيه جولي لم يحقق لها هذا لقد كانت تلك البرجوازية المحيطة بها ترف بالغ لم يكن ليتماشى مع سمو روحها في الوقت الذي كان إبراهيم يرى في هذه الصحراء الشاسعة سجنا له وهو يحاول الفرار كلما أتيحت له الفرصة فلا عائلته ولامكان النشأة حددا هويته مازال عالقا في المنتصف بسبب صعوبة الحصول على تأشيرة خروج بلا عودةمن أجمل الفصول التي كتبت فيها غوديمر هو فصل العودة إلى بلد إبراهيم ، حيث تتضح الصورة في الإختلاف الجذري بين العالمين العالم الذي هرب إليه إبراهيم والعالم الذي فرت منه جولي حيث حضن العائلة والقيم الروحية والتواطىء بين النساء بحكم الفصل بين الجنسين في اللقاءات الأسرية وما إلى ذلك حسب عادات وتقاليد المجتمع ، الحميمية بين الأخوة علاقة الأم بأبناءها تبدو أمورا جديدة على عالم جولي السطحي والمنحصر في لقاءات الإصدقاء في مقهىظل في ذهني هذا التساؤل هل أقام إبراهيم هذه العلاقة من أجل تعديل وضعه في بلد أجنبي ولذلك كانت النهاية أكبر من إحتمالهمن ملاحظاتي على النص هو أن غورديمر ركزت في بداية النص على بشرة إبراهيم السوداء وبياض جولي وكأنها أرادت أن تشير إلى التمييز العنصري لكنني وجدتها تتجه بعد ذلك إلى أصوله العربية مما أوقعني في حيرة تجاوزتها لاحقا شدني حقيقة أسلوب غورديمر فهي تكتب بلغة مركزة شفافة تفاصيلها مصقولة شديدة الدقة لم تغفل دور الصحراء في البطولة ركزت على إختلاف الثقافات وإصطدامها أو الإندماج بها الإنسان وإختياراته هي من تحدد ذلك بلاشكرواية شيقة
tNot infrequently I think of the job of writing fiction as picking at things that make us uncomfortable. This means novels, in particular, have changed a good bit in their function over the centuries. Once upon a time novels confirmed the social order--think of Jane Austen. Now we have writers like Nadine Gordimer who was born into the white discomfort of black South Africa, and she manages to write plausible, discomfiting stories that make us dissatisfied, appalled, sympathetic, and even, occasionally, energetic.tIn the case of The Pickup Gordimer assigns herself a task that at first I found a kind of fairy tale, not every credible.tReaching beyond South Africa, she places a man from the Arab world in South Africa, has a white South African rich girl take a shine to him, and then, in the first part of the novel, traces his descent into deportation--for he has come to South Africa, as he has gone elsewhere, illegally. And the authorities have caught up to him, and this time he can’t fight it, he has to leave.tOkay, but it’s challenging to believe in Julie’s love for Abdu. She is recognizable, a young p.r. professional who hangs out in cafes. He is intentionally vague, doesn’t want to be seen. What country does he come from? We’re not told. Where else has he been? Not told. Is there more here than Julie’s social rebellion and his fugitive’s allure?tThe novel’s first 75 pages tumble along from past tense to present tense, first person to third, and are short on quotation marks, distinguishing who’s talking or thinking.tSort of thin.tWhere does this guy come from?tWell, Julie decides she’s going back there with him. What do you think of that? tIt’s hard to know, but it happens. He’s deported and she goes right along with him.tMy guess is that they go to Yemen. I could be wrong, and I’m not sure exactly how important it is that I’m right, but I find, as I read, that I like thinking, “They’re in Yemen. They’re in his home village outside the capital, on the fringes of the desert, in a ghastly place.”tTurns out his name isn’t Abdu, it’s Ibrahim, he has a family that has seen him deported back home before but never in the company of a white female non-Muslim.tThis is where the novel becomes interesting. It doesn’t take a turn toward Ibrahim having been some kind of failed sleeper in an al-Qaeda cell. It focuses on him expending all of his energy trying to get a visa to some other country that might give him a chance in life. And it focuses, more importantly, on the crushing process of Julie learning how to be a woman in the cramped difficult confines of Ibrahim’s family’s house--and life.tI find myself highly skeptical. Experiences like this really don’t work very well. They turn out as Ibrahim constantly fears: she’ll decide to call Daddy and get a ticket back to South Africa. But Gordimer keeps pounding at the situation into which Julie becomes more and more embedded, finding a meaning in certain relations, times of day, beliefs, methods of preparing food that she never found in the emerald belt of South African suburbs where she was raised.tThe territory we’re in is Paul Bowles’s territory, but that’s just one take on it. It’s also Gordimer’s. She’s got the right feeling for the desert, the trash, the dust, the limited options, the minor flashes of tackiness, the turbulent emotions within Ibrahim’s family, and Julie’s gradual realization that she has built a life for herself there.tI’m not going to take this description of the book to its narrative end. That would spoil it for you. I want to go back to where I started: the fiction writer today is bearing a burden that a lot of journalists, politicians, health workers, business people and scientists are bearing: how to bring the First and Third Worlds, the Christian and Islamic worlds in particular, closer together.tThis isn’t Jane Austen, who is wonderful in her way. This is a writer of relentless intelligence and aesthetic vision.tOne can “buy” a percentage of the ending in terms of believability and yet value this book; you don’t have to take it 100%; it could be less; would still be worth the time to read it.
What do You think about The Pickup (2002)?
New millennium, new rhythm. I think that's what's going on here. South Africans walking to the beat of hyphenated identities, flow and stutter, bounce and glide, at the mercy of beauty and ruthlessness… Gordimer's ear to the ground heard this as it heard the sweet cadences of Ibrahim's unaccustomed English and the mashed jerkiness of Julie's cosmopolitan consciousness. The style! Attractively typeset to soften the mess all these pauses and interjections make of the page, it rushes, it breaks, it drives along like we're in bad traffic, the enervated tailbacks of the millennial mind.White authors need to write diverse books, so props. It's hard to do because you don't want to continue the long crappy tradition of speaking for people you've prevented from speaking for themselves, taking the place of people you've disenfranchised. Before I even start I think, why am I writing this, I should leave it to people of colour to write about themselves... and here we go round the mulberry bush. And no matter how carefully and subtly you go about it, having a brown guy from a Muslim country end up being a bit of an agent of regressive patriarchy and white woman's freedom and superior judgement (or is it?) carrying the day seems kinda awkward. What's this superior judgement about? That's what's really interesting, the lifeways and worldviews on offer to a economically privileged white woman in South Africa end up seeming equally spiritually unsatisfactory. There's entry into the heartless hypercapitalist overclass, or the soulless camaraderie of rootless hipsters. Confronting the desert, Julie meets a silence so sweet it melts into poetry in her eyes and mind, it speaks to something buried, transforms her. She responds to the lure of a life of cooperation and mutuality with an expanded family and in communication with the land; she finds the rhythm her soul can dance to. Meanwhile Ibrahim values the stress on individual success that defines the milieu of Julie's father. When they fell in love, he overlooked their incompatibility on such a deep philosophical basis and Julie lacked the awareness to formulate it. The upshot of betrayal puts the confrontation between individualist and communitarian values in a framework of gender dynamics, posing a thought provoking dilemma for feminist thought.
—Zanna
The Pickup is a very deep story, plenty of meaningful pictures. The story happens at Africa. First at South Africa, and after that at some unknown country, probably Morocco.Julie is a white rich girl who is not satisfied with her life. She has restrictions to her father, and his business.Abdu is an african man, and he is working ilegally as a car mechanical.They meet at his work, and they start a relationship.One of the meaninful pictures is his job, under the belly of the cars. He is hided, and in this condition he can work ilegally. But he appears to the world, dating a white girl, going to the popular café, and even to a party in her father's house. After that he is expulsed.They go to his country where the great difference, poverty, and lack of freedom is a big contrast.Nadine had a different style. The text MAY look difficult to follow, because there is no indication that someone is speaking, and who is the person talking.But she is a master in the post collonial literature. The dennounce of the governments, and its justice.Very good reading!
—Flavio
Ugh. I hate this book. I want to cry everytime I pick it up ): I hate Gordimer's writing style, I can't understand what she's trying to say, or even trying to describe. And it pains me that i have to study it as a postcolonial text for school. If you love this book and want to send me a detailed analysis of: "In what ways does this text reflect upon and make sense of the time and/or place in which it was composed?" - including the relationship between the chosen text and postcolonial theory and practice... that would be amazingly appreciated.
—Bree
