The Pickup Summary

In post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa, a woman’s car breaks down one day in the middle of the street, causing an uproar of obstructed traffic. Her name is Julie Summers, a white South African, the socially and financially privileged daughter of an affluent businessman. She sends the car to a garage and the mechanic she meets is neither white nor black but Arab. He calls himself Abdu and discloses his status as an illegal migrant worker, with a degree in economics, from an Arab state left unnamed throughout the entire novel.

Julie finds herself instantly drawn to Abdu and does not hesitate to ask him out for coffee – an act which would have been considered disgraceful and scandalous only a generation earlier. It is evident that Julie is the one who is first interested in him, and being in his precarious situation, Abdu first maintains his distance from her. Julie actively tries to have him sink into her circle of “Table Friends” at a café she frequents called the EL-AY Café. The members of the Table Friends are diverse in race and individuality – for example, one is a poet, and another is Buddhist. In spite of their differences, they share their youth and their values of postmodernity in their globalized, post-apartheid world. Yet, though they are friendly and welcoming of Abdu into their circle, Abdu is clearly not impressed by their gathering and talk. He not only finds them “patronizing” but also pretentious, as he views their interest in him and the topics of their conversation as making “a show” of their “conviction of their equal worth.” The novel even describes her Table Friends of EL-AY Café as a “net” which Julie uses in “catching the garage mechanic.”

Although the Table Friends are kind to Abdu, they would refer to him as “Julie’s man” or “grease monkey” behind his back (grease because as a mechanic his clothes are often covered in grease, and monkey because of his dark skin – a term allotted by the whites of the early, more explicitly racist days). They would also ask one another, time and time again, where it was Julie “picked him up” – emphasizing the significance of the novel’s title and the idea that Julie’s affluence entitles her to picking up whomever or whatever she pleases.

As Julie is the character who holds the social and financial power in the novel, she inevitably succeeds in forming a romantic relationship with Abdu. The two could not be more different. She came from a background of financial prosperity, a life in “The Suburbs,” which can be inferred to be an area of residence for the extremely wealthy. Yet, she found her family’s materialistic values deplorable and left her home to live in a modest part of the city. Abdu, on the other hand, left his home in search for material gain. Like Julie, he is ashamed of his background, but he is ashamed of its poverty, of the fact that it is a desert without opportunities, with a corrupt government and a culture whose ideals the western world considers old-fashioned and oppressive. He calls it a “dirty place,” and even, “hell.”

Throughout the first half of the novel, as the two spend their days in South Africa as a couple, Abdu shows great interest in Julie’s family. He admires her father, who is wealthy and powerful in social status and who holds Sunday lunches for people of the elite class like himself. Abdu yearns for the kind of privilege “her father’s kind of people” have: people “who may move about the world welcome everywhere, as they please.” Whereas he is someone who will only “go where they’ll let [him] in”; someone who “has to live disguised as a grease-monkey without a name.”

During one of Julie’s visits to Abdu’s room behind the garage he works at, she finds that he is not there and leaves a message with his boss. When Abdu’s employer hints that Julie should not be mingling with people like Abdu, she is sure that her message will not be delivered. She is not deterred and continues her relationship with him. Later, when Abdu receives a letter stating that his stay in South Africa is long overdue and that he must leave the country as soon as possible, Julie and her Table Friends are certain that it was Abdu’s employer who revealed his illegal status to the officials.

Julie is terribly distraught – more than her Table Friends have ever seen her with regard to previous lovers. They remark amongst one another of how “taken” Julie has become of her “oriental prince.”

Julie uses her connections with those of her father’s kind of people to try and get Abdu a visa to resume his stay. But their efforts are to no avail. Prejudices against Abdu’s kind also play a manifest role in this failure. Abdu prepares himself to return to his home country, but when Julie presents him his flight ticket she holds two instead of one. Her decision to go with him outrages Abdu. He scorns her decision as that of a naïve “adventure” which a rich girl like her wants to take on. He is in disbelief that she should still wish to go to that country he has so often degraded and criticized. He was sure that she would leave as soon as she stepped foot into his country, that she would leave him at the sight of a desert that was not up to the stereotypical expectations most white people have of the orient.

But there is no stopping her – “She was the one with the choices. The freedom of the world was hers.” Abdu insists that if she follow him, they must be married, for it was unacceptable that he should return home with a woman “as though she were some whore” and not his wife. The two marry before leaving South Africa.

Now Abdu is referred to as Ibrahim, for his real name – Ibrahim Ibn Musa – can be freely used in the country of his birth, where he has now regained the rights he did not have as an illegal immigrant elsewhere. Julie is often referred to as “Ibrahim’s wife” or “the foreigner.” She receives a warm welcome by his family, who hold a grand feast celebrating his return with his foreign wife. Julie does not complain of the lifestyle she must grow accustomed to. She does what she can in the beginning to keep herself preoccupied, to adjust to the conservative and extremely modest ways of the Arabs. Ibrahim makes it known to the women of his household that Julie was not expected to perform any of the domestic tasks the women carried out, such as fetching water, and would much rather do it himself. He continues to see Julie as a spoilt rich white girl who has not known hard work and could not be relied on to undertake such duties which the blacks of South Africa had always done for her.

Julie finds herself teaching the women and children English. They are eager to learn from her and befriend her. She does not disturb Ibrahim’s mother in prayer and voluntarily fasts during Ramadan, the holy month in the Islamic calendar where Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. She also finds herself drawn to the desert where she enjoys morning strolls. In short, Julie adjusts herself very well in the new country, forging close bonds with Ibrahim’s sister Maryam and one of his nieces Leila.

In the meantime, Ibrahim is continually applying for visas to enter another country – Canada, Australia, America – anywhere that he might be accepted. It is a long and arduous process as his applications are repeatedly declined. He is so determined to escape the country he loathes so much that his bags have not been fully unpacked, always there in preparation to leave at any time. In his attempts, he has persuaded and implored Julie to contact her father for assistance, because he knows that her father has the power and connections to help him if he pleased. But Julie’s severed bond with her father is not something she is willing to overlook. It is a request too humiliating for her to accept. Eventually she does, however, reluctantly turn to her mother in America for some kind of consultation if not aid. Ibrahim takes advantage of this opportunity to secretly maintain some connection with Julie’s mother through the exchange of letters. He asks for some kind of work – any kind at all – and finally, with her mother’s help, Ibrahim is granted a visa to America.

He is thrilled to leave as soon as possible. He convinces Julie to ask for money from some family member or friend to buy their plane tickets and to help them settle down when they are there. Naturally, he first persuades her to contact her father for money, but Julie refuses yet again. She finally succumbs to asking her beloved uncle Archie for money. She asks for five thousand dollars, and he sends her six thousand. They purchase their flight tickets to America and Ibrahim makes practical plans on how and where they would stay. While he cannot contain his elation, Julie is extremely reluctant to leave. In the end, just as before, she decides for herself where it is she will be. Only two days before their flight, Julie declares that she will stay in the Arabian land.

Just as before, Julie’s decision enrages Ibrahim. He repeatedly asks her, “Are you mad?” – thinking to himself in a wild scramble of thoughts of this ignorant girl and her foolish “adventures.” But in Julie’s mind it is the opposite. She knows what it is like in those poverty-stricken parts of American cities, where he will be reduced again to a job that the whites will not do for themselves, such as a grease-monkey, or in the case of his new work, a janitor at some multi-storeyed corporate building, where he will be given a basement for a home. In her eyes, he is moving away from the richness which she finds in the desert land he detests so much. The richness of a warm, loving family; of a land where he can even inherit his uncle’s relatively prosperous workshop – handed to him almost on a silver platter; a land where he can be himself, with his own name and integrity intact.

But Ibrahim’s values and hers have always been polar opposites. Ibrahim leaves, and Julie stays.