Picking Up an Identity: A Postcolonial Reading of Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup

Abstract

This article is an attempt to examine Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup (2001) using Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas in the main. It takes upon itself to discuss the issues of hybridity, identity, nation, globalization and migration. Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup is a scrupulous study of the life in exile. We might dissociate this particular novel from her earlier work, in that it goes beyond the matters of local politics and nationhood and paints a truthful picture of migration and alienation, which are global issues. In fact, the subject Gordimer picks up is a universal topos (that of migration and identity in exile). We will focus on the idea that identity is liminal; it is neither one nor the other, but a negotiation of the both. The migrant/exile/diasporan has to translate differing cultures in order to sur-vive.