Jackie Reviews: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

With book prize longlists and shortlists making their way over the horizon in quick succession at the moment, bringing with them a wealth of books to explore, I was excited to come across the Desmond Elliott Prize for New Fiction 2021 longlist, run by the National Centre for Writing. On the list is a book I have been totally consumed by, Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson, a young British-Ghanaian writer and photographer who lives in south-east London – it is a book which has been on my radar since it was first announced and I have just finished reading it for the third time.

Open Water is a beautiful, tiny jewel of a book and it reads a lot like poetry, almost Shakespearean at times, with repeated refrains which haunt the pages. It is steeped in literature (Zadie Smith and James Baldwin feature prominently), philosophy, music and art – part love story, part exploration of the experience of being a young Black man living in London and of being always on the margins. As Nelson writes, ‘We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard.’ And this is a novel where the narrator, who writes, unusually, in the second person, is constantly searching for a way to be seen and to see others. The ‘gaze’, whether male or female, is central to the narrator’s thoughts about the process of writing and its relationship to photography, and the book does come across as intensely personal – the use of ‘you’ also draws the reader in and we are not always sure who ‘you’ is. Perhaps it is intended to be us as well.

I was drawn to thinking about my own love of music and the importance of ‘rhythm’ from the protagonist’s analysis of what music means to him. It is, for him, about his heritage and a feeling of freedom, the permission to be himself, which he finds in the music he hears in the clubs and bars near where he lives. Music is everywhere – on the streets during Carnival and also in his headphones constantly, as he listens to a favourite Black artist and shares the experience (and the headphones) with the woman he has fallen in love with. His description of the physical feeling of release and being able to breathe on the basketball court, playing a game he just somehow ‘got’ on first picking up the ball, is also powerful, as he articulates the desire to ‘stretch into the limits of your body and beyond’ and to feel ‘something like joy, even if it was small’, away from the pressures of playing games abiding by other people’s rules.

With the grief he feels at the loss of his grandmother, far away in Ghana, central to the novel, and the protagonist’s realisation that he needs to stop ‘hiding’, from himself and others (the idea of ‘an honest meeting’ recurs throughout the novel), the themes here are momentous and universal but the book does not feel weighed down. In many ways, it seems light as a feather and yet it is also emotionally resonant and evocative. As a piece of writing, it feels contemporary and important - it is a wonderful debut novel and I will look forward to reading more by Caleb Azumah Nelson. This book has made me think deeply about many things and I highly recommend it.

You can order a copy of this wonderful book here.