Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Don’t let generic phrases like romance and black love fool you: this is a novel about photography, mental health, pain, joy, music, vulnerability, and ultimately salvation. From Toni Morrison’s Beloved to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, stories of black love have repeatedly found incomparable success all over the world, and there is a reason for it. An old saying is that black love is self-love, but Nelson’s novel reminds everyone that if black love is truly self-love, then self-love must also be black love. People often like to say that love sees no color, that love is blind. While that is true, it is also true that love is about seeing. Here, it is about the sacred safe spaces of black love, where the black woman sees beneath the black man’s tears to bring out the “the smile of king” in a world where “regicide is rife”.  

Our protagonist is a photographer, and it is no coincidence that Open Water is told in a Calvino-esque, immersive second-person narrative functioning like a type of tunnel vision trained on the subject at hand. As the protagonist is finally reconciled to his love interest who has now also picked up photography, the motif of seeing is ultimately turned on the black man who is rarely seen “as [he] is meant to be seen”. Nelson told Bad Form that when he began writing he “wanted to write a book that read like an album … from which you could pick up individual bits, like you listen to individual songs”. But while this novel is an ethereal, lyrical snapshot that meditates on the multi-medial nature of black art, it is also unafraid to play with traditionally literary conventions. Even in the so-called postmodernist era, novels told in the second person are still rare. If Calvino uses it to situate you, the reader, firmly in the fantastical, Nelson’s uses it to situate you, the reader, right in the reality of black British manhood, to situate you right in front of the world’s lens. It is also no overstatement to say that this is a decidedly dream-like read, with languorous sentences that reconcile once paradoxical images with masterful ease. Sometimes it is too impressionistic, and the narrative’s forward movement is occasionally weighed down by introspection. But after a tragic summer of black men not breathing, the title image of this love’s painful, yet peaceful, open waters where the two “surface … only to plunge once more” becomes increasingly powerful with every appearance. 

While it is wrong to reduce this standalone work of art into a novel about this or about that, it truly makes incredibly unique contributions to understandings of black masculinity, black love, and the space between the two. There is no nonsense about superhumanly strong black anything: the black man is allowed to be vulnerable, to cry, and finally to break. And he does not have to do it alone because she is one who can sympathise, who can see him, and who can hold the whole sweep of him, gently. Open Water is, also, a testament to the beauty of black womanhood in a world where their desirability is always proportional to the degree of darkness in their skin. In the US, around 1 in 3 college-educated black women have not, are not, and will never marry. In the same vein, 1 in 3 black men have been, are, or will be incarcerated. Despite its countless victims like Stephen Lawrence and those of the New Cross Massacre, Britain loves to profess itself innocent of white supremacy and police brutality, quickly pointing an accusing finger at its wayward offspring across the pond. Open Water makes it clear that the difference, if any, lies solely in gun legislation. Rejecting the media’s fetishisation of beaten black bodies, it also makes clear that “this moment is older than all of us”: the fact “that [our] bodies are not [our] own” is wholly historical. 

This title is destined to be a Black classic about the essential relationship between black masculinity and black love. Open Water is a story of love – for black men, for black selves, for black life, for black art, for black community, for black love – that is, for better or worse, political. We will continue to come back to it a long, long time from today. Much like her as she holds him and whispers, this novel too says: “It’s OK. You are safe here”.