Approaching the text-“ If you want to have the courage to stand up and speak, you should also have the courage to sit down and listen.”

Akshay PatilHS14H006

The Cultural Approach Edward Said’s Orientalism- Gordimer tends to undermine the stereotyping. Structural irony- White South African Woman represents a country within a

continent which is closely allied with the images of the Orient. Abdu- “European, but they don’t call themselves that.”- unifying features

of the West. Arab country depicted as New South Africa’s Cultural ‘Other’. Abdu- sees his own Arabic culture as a prison he desperately wants to

escape from. Julie- increasingly finds in it what she had been missing in the liberal New

South Africa.

The Psychological Approach Identity crisis- Protagonists are either Doubtful or Doubted. Abdu- Identity is a luxury only the privileged can afford- unwilling to accept

roles ascribed to him. Precariously suspended between Abrogation of his Eastern past and

Appropriation of a Western future. Julie- finds identity through radical difference from the bourgeois world-

integrates herself with the social network of liberal friends at LA Café. Makes use of Abdu’s difference, the Significant Other, to define herself. Julie’s dream to cultivate rice in the desert- possible symbolism for the

quest of her true identity.

The Doll’s House- We were playing at reality; it was a doll’s house, the cottage; a game, the EL-AY Café. The Arabian Nights- Outside the haphazard stretch of sheds and buildings either half- completed or half-fallen down, difficult to say which, she sees for the first time in her life, two old men actually sharing a water-pipe, the hookah of illustrations to childhood’s Scheherazade’s stories. The Odyssey- She has been only the Siren to his Ulysses (Latin for the Greek Odysseus).

Reference to other Works

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity.