Not very often are the subjects of identity, race, racism told through a candid story of love. Open Water, a highly acclaimed novel by 27-year-old British-Ghanaian author Caleb Azumah Nelson is one of the few books that attempts to do just this, and with great effect.
- Open Water Caleb
- Azumah Nelson
- Viking
- 145pp
Hailing from South East London, where he currently lives, Azumah Nelson is also an award-winning photographer. His photograph was shortlisted for the Palm Photo Prize and won the People's Choice Prize. In 2020, his short story Pray was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Open Water is Azumah Nelson's debut novel.
Written entirely with second person narrative -- You as a storyteller -- a rarely used technique of narration in which the actions of the protagonist are fittingly ascribed to the reader, this book speaks a profound range of languages. Alienation, belonging, loss and the breaking of identity channelled through a tunnel of tender love are its bold subject matters.
It begins with a commoner's fairy tale -- love at first sight you might call it. Boy meets girl in underground nightclub. Girl is with another man. Girl quits him to be with Boy. Their story takes off like those of a million other lovers. Instinctive friendship, intimacy without sex. Then love. It's a love of the long summer of 2017. Boy wins Girl, and for a moment, it appears that love can last. Love is new to both. But love can't protect him. It doesn't heal either for he's a wounded child who doesn't know that love is the hardest thing to earn and most painful thing to let go.
Boy and Girl are black. He's a photographer and she's a dancer. Nameless, both are black British, both went to private schools where they struggled to find out who they were. They're now testing out their talents in the country that eschews as well as celebrates their identities. There's a difference between the two. When they meet and fall in love, she changes. She grows in strength. With love, she slowly comes forward. She opens up to him, like a child learning to walk. He, a wounded one, doesn't cross the line. He laments "it's one thing to be looked at and another to be seen". He wants to be seen according to who he actually is; but on the streets, he is searched, twice in a week, by police. His London is one in which "black bodies" aren't being seen but counted by numbers.
He cries often in darkness and at night. He's intelligent, sensitive, introspective and vulnerable. What he experiences in the streets and neighbourhoods makes him breakable, but neither she nor he knows this. When he met her, she was soft and voluminous, like water, opened water. They found each other's body to be comforting; a dwelling place. He was centred, at home, for a while. She was home, he claims.
He breaks when reality sinks in. On the streets he walks he isn't a practising artist, only a black face walking. The colour of his skin is in the wrong. And systemic discrimination has no face.
He never gets used to the part of London he navigates. Fear and insecurity become his name which he painfully carries without knowing. He has no cure to it. Inevitably, he chooses to be distant from her. Closed, shut in. When she returns to Dublin, they grow apart and she can't reach him because he gives up being who he's supposed to be. Her love doesn't save him. The relationship ends, with constant sadness. He hides in his room for weeks, not knowing what to do, and not revealing his weakness to anyone. Unlike women who can bend, he can't. He's a man. He breaks. He, with the history that nurtures him, is a story of heartbreak.
Belonging means acceptance, affinity, association, attachment, inclusion and loyalty. It means closeness, something or someone you want to establish a rapport with. A barber who cuts his hair has recently been to Ghana, and tells him he ought to find somewhere he belongs, like a foreign land. But he's British, black British, from South East London. He's utterly without a sense of belonging.
Azumah Nelson gives a daring insight into a working of black mind; on the fragility of human thought entailed by a perpetual unjust and discriminative system. His sublime poiesis doesn't focus on the nature of violence in which his characters suffer from, but we realise it nevertheless sits as the backdrops of his touching tale of a love story.
In Open Water, love at times feel like one's lost and found language. The pace of the lovers' relationship is well controlled for it is a stillness throughout the book, from the beginning when they first meet until their unspoken farewell. Words fail them at the end.
Equally delightful to read is a portraiture of London youth -- drinking, dancing, getting Chinese takeaway, sleeping over at friends -- simplicities of a thing called life and how young love, albeit shattered by the questioning world which envelops it, should be captured.
A wonderful array of black culture and creativity through music, film, fine art and literature are well referenced in Open Water. For example, through rhythmic words of a rapper, Isaiah Rashad, Azumah Nelson finds a way of expression for his character, but he isn't sure if words can travel and be a vessel of his character's depth of love.
"There was a break, a slight pause where the music fell loose... Don't tell her that it was there, in the slight pauses, that you were able to breathe, not even realising you were holding in air."
The American filmmaker Barry Jenkins whose name is referenced with If Beale Street Could Talk, and the British visual artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye who paints portraits of imaginary black subjects with tantalising raw and dark palettes, are also featured.
Open Water, like its name suggests, is translucent with weight. It's love that wants to say sorry. It's race that wants to hide its colour. It's language that bursts exuberantly with joy and loneliness. An elliptical summer. Monarch butterflies returning home against a high wind. So abstract, so direct, so warm and beautiful.
Sawarin Suwichakornpong can be reached via sawarinnn@yahoo.com.
