The Economics of Illegal Immigration
Multiple themes related to immigration—specifically illegal immigrants—is explored through the relationship that develops between a South African woman and an illegal Muslim immigrant. By first situating the hard-working immigrant as an outsider seeking a better economic future and then transporting the couple back to his homeland when he is deported, the novel’s take on what is really the driving force behind illegal immigration removes it from the simple-minded and ill-informed contextual displacement fostered by the politics of fear.
Culture Clash
The backgrounds and cultural differences experienced by the two figures who comprise the romance of the story could not be more starkly defined except by showing this divided from two perspectives. Which the novel does by first showing how the illegal immigrant from an unnamed Islamic country is out of place in the western world of a “global city” and then by making the women the outsider as she follows him when he is deported back into closed, patriarchal society of his homeland. The culture clash is not designed merely for the effect of star-crossed love, but to further explore the author’s recurring theme that only through immersion in a foreign culture can a stranger ever really reach a point of intelligent discourse on the subject.
South African Identity in a Post-Apartheid World
Gordimer became famous and set a track for her eventual canonization as a Nobel laureate with a series of books excoriating the South African system of Apartheid. So powerful was her critique that ironically she could not even go into a store and buy one of her own books in the country while in the pre-Mandela era. The collapse of any long-established institution—even one as abhorrent as Apartheid—will inevitably create a crisis of identity for the whole nation when it is abolished. It is this fragmentation of South Africa’s post-Apartheid identity which is the backdrop against which the story plays. In the process The Pickup becomes another important addition to the volume of stories in which Gordimer explores issues of self-identity juxtaposed against the imposition of stereotypes upon entire sub-cultures.
