Open Water by Caleb Azumah / Review

 

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Open Water 

by Caleb Azumah

Caleb Azumah Nelson. Image: Stuart Simpson

There are great loves, and then there’s the love in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water. It’s the story of a photographer and a dancer, whose connection is instant. But as they navigate being Black in a hostile world, and come to terms with grief and loss, their happily ever after is challenged.

Azumah Nelson, who cites Zadie Smith as an inspiration (her novel NW and her writing in general is referred to multiple times by the characters), lost three grandparents, his godfather and an aunt in the year leading up to writing Open Water. He was also working on a collection of essays on a variety of subjects, from music to art to mourning.

"It was a lot, a really heavy time in which I felt like I was in a cloud of my own grief,” he says. "The essays came about as I was trying to afford my grief, and in turn, myself, more form and detail. I didn’t want to feel so hazy anymore. So I was spending a lot of the time at libraries, gallery spaces, cinemas, concerts, trying to go past the level of knowing, towards feeling, and asking where those feelings come from. That’s a question which is written throughout Open Water. How do you feel?”

 

The characters emotions and feelings are palpable, and love touches every sentence of the novel. Azumah Nelson says he learnt “how wonderful and freeing love can be” while writing the book, adding: "There’s a level of vulnerability which love demands. To ask someone to see you is to ask someone to see all of you and trusting someone with all of you can be difficult. To see all this beauty and rhythm and joy but also to see your uglier parts, your pain, your grief. But it’s wonderful when it does happen, when you are no longer being looked at, but being seen.”

Open Water is clearly a very personal novel for Azumah Nelson, who says that he had to make himself vulnerable to write it.

"There’s a poet, Morgan Parker, who talks about her process, of ‘digging so deep you touch bone’,” he says. "I feel like I did this and then some. It is a joy to write but at times, quite heartbreaking. I guess, I’d love for readers not just to know what I’m saying, but to feel it too. The book is written in the second person so it’s very intimate, and in that way when a question is asked, I’m asking both myself and the reader. When I’m asking, How do you feel? That question comes both ways." 

PENGUIN