The spaces of the desert in Nadine Gordimer's "The Pickup"

The essay tackles the crucial, anti-exotic role given to the desert by N. Gordimer’s post -apartheid novel The Pickup (2001). It figures as the third main character, besides the two protagonists Julie Summers – the white, young South African daughter of a well-off family of European descent– and Ibrahim ibn Musa, the Arab illegal migrant living in hiding in post-apartheid Johannesburgh. This urban space is now a globalized, multicultural and multiracial urban environment whose notorious high rate of crime testifies to the persistence of social inequality complicated by recent black migration from the continent. The change of scene as to the natural and human space and landscape in the second part of the novel is sudden and striking: we are plunged into Ibrahim’s little Islamic village in an undefined postcolonial Arab region. This change involves different spaces and realities of inclusion and exclusion, and the ways through which Julie and Ibrahim relate to the adjoining desert qualifies their diverging destinies. Not only is the desert given as a living, material reality but the textual ‘spaces’ of the desert in The Pickup are many, asking for being linked into a hermeneutic configuration.That said, it is Julie’s relationship with the desert that plays a pivotal role in narrative construction. Concerning it, Zinato’s essay aims to contribute an interpretative hypothesis that diverges from the mainline of the compelling criticism proposed so far and often tinged with a problematically quasi-orientalist mood. It approaches the desert as a living and ever-changing natural and human/cultural space, neither empty, nor immobile, nor silent. In Deleuzian terms, an unboundable, unmappable, “deterritorialized” palimpsest, the opposite of the violently hyper-territorialized/-mapped space enacted by the apartheid regime in South Africa.