Their desires aren’t left out a playful push and pull of intense affection runs heavily through the text. When the photographer and dancer fall in love, we expect a relief, a level of calmness that only love can afford. Nelson best demonstrates the afflicted self, and his command of details, in his illustration of masculinity and vulnerability. What makes Open Water more than a reflection of what it means to be a Black man in the United Kingdom is the intimate look into what living in a world like that does to the Black man - the unending vigilance, constant trepidation, and inevitable consequence of an identity that appears to disintegrate by the day. You don’t fit in the box but he has squeezed you in. He looked scared, behind the crumpled forehead, the hard eyes, he looked scared because instead of questioning himself, of interrogating his beliefs, of not filling in the gaps, he continues to look at you as a danger. He had an index finger gripping the trigger, like he was holding onto a lifeline.
This world is not implied Nelson offers an unflinching depiction and examination of racial profiling and fatal police shootings of Black men throughout:
The main voice in Open Water is of a young Black man who is fragmented and deeply afflicted by the world he lives in, one where he finds himself unseen, unheard, mislabeled, scared, and suppressed. The experience is as imaginative as it is engaging.įor people who think this point of view can be alienating, it can be. This is because the novel is written in the second person - the reader is not a distant observer but a character playing along. They dip and down we go with them they turn round and round, and the dizziness hits us too. But the reader feels like a part of the dance too, as if they are being escorted to the floor - a hand cupped over their shoulder blade, and the other in a firm clasp. In under 200 pages, Nelson places us in London and in the middle of a slow-dance romance between two Black British artists - a photographer and a dancer. Caleb Azumah Nelson certainly delivers these goods in Open Water, but he encases his core story in a more significant tale of violence and crippling racial trauma. In the beginning, there is some hesitation, but when love takes two tender hearts hostage, it is almost impossible to run from it.
YOU’VE HEARD THIS story before - two friends fall in love with each other.
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