OPEN WATER
By Caleb Azumah Nelson
Only great artists can craft novels from water.
Family, grief, Blackness, Frank Ocean, hip-hop, dancing, growing up, breaking up, London, oppression, beef patties, basketball, diasporic trauma — for Caleb Azumah Nelson, it’s all water. The happy glide when it’s easy; the exhaustion of fighting against the current when it’s not. The threat of drowning always looming in the waves.
And in this unforgettable debut, “Open Water,” all streams are interconnected; the Thames, somewhere in the Atlantic, meets the Mississippi, meets the Rio Grande, the Amazon, the Nile. Which is how a Black reviewer from the South Side of Chicago feels so deeply connected to the story of a Black man falling in love and making art in southeast London.
The prologue captures a quiet moment when our protagonist — an unnamed, 20-something photographer narrating in the second person — and his girlfriend, an unnamed, 20-something dancer, are sitting in a barbershop gazing at each other, “with the same open-eyed wonder that keeps startling you at various intervals since you met. The two of you, like headphone wires tangling, caught up in this something.”
Anyone who was ever a young person in love remembers this feeling, this constant startling, the disbelief, the anxiety when “you lost her gaze for a moment and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity.” But then, just as quickly, the inevitable realization that love is complicated by contradictions: “You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful.”
Azumah Nelson uses this universal sensation as a launching pad from which to dive into a particular Black experience. After meeting one night at a bar, the photographer and the dancer — at first the girlfriend of his friend, then the source of their rift — agree to collaborate on a multimedia project documenting life as they see it in the white spaces around them. Always, their work is intertwined with their feelings: “Love made you Black, as in, you were most colored when in her presence.”
Any person of color understands love occurs in a wider social context. The questions hover: Does this person love all of me? On days when the world is bent on destroying me and my happiness, does this person make me feel safe and cherished? Will this person struggle alongside me, will we hold hands as we grieve all we’ve lost?
Azumah Nelson’s poetic brilliance, his ability to balance the general and the specific, the ambient and the granular, makes for a salient achievement. On each page, the prodigious British-Ghanaian author balances two familiar stories. First, two smart 20-somethings meet, enjoy a brief courtship, succumb to desire, tangle up their bodies and hearts, and struggle when a life-changing opportunity threatens to pull them apart.
Second, a young Black person in a predominantly white city encounters violence, class anxiety, omnipresent systemic oppression, finds comfort in friendship, theory, music, art and literature. It’s Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel meets Teju Cole.
Azumah Nelson is also a photographer, which is almost expected. Chapters read like images, or movie stills, packed with meaning and shade, lighting and angles directing our attention to the subtle and important places. There’s a memory, shown early in the book, when our narrator tells his grandmother about his hopeful love. In this skillfully rendered flashback to the family compound in Ghana, the narrator’s (and author’s) ancestral home, we’re focused on the grandma’s hands, chopping vegetables, putting down the knife. We feel the sun. The layering of death and love, beginning and end on top of each other, provides a warm cinematic sensation. The shot is perfect. In dialogue that elevates the scene, the narrator tells his dead grandmother about meeting the woman he loves: “I think both of us kinda negate that whole encounter. It was too brief. There was too much going on. It wasn’t the right time.” Putting down her knife, grandma says: “It’s never the right time. … When you sow a seed, it will grow. Somehow, someway, it will grow.”
As a general rule in writing workshops, flashbacks don’t work in fiction. They work in film. Something about the reader’s attention, not wanting to upset the flow. Keep it simple, just tell the story. Azumah Nelson upends this convention with beautiful effect. Time is malleable, moving from 2001 to 2017 in two pages as the narrator is hypnotized by the Black M.C.s on MTV in one frame, and watching Skepta onstage from a mosh pit in the next. The order of events doesn’t matter; what matters is the emotional resonance, the close-up, the pause — as real to us as the present.
Throughout the narrative runs a stream of Black musical genius — the first time he hears Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” it brings him to tears; tragedy makes him think of Dizzee Rascal, J Dilla. “The interest in energies and frequencies remains,” Azumah Nelson writes, “and you’ve always wanted to make music, always wanted to know where you, too, could feel just right.”
One imagines here a tweed-jacketed creative writing professor chiding that modern cultural references date the material, alienate certain readers. Warning not to make readers look anything up. To this Azumah Nelson’s prose responds by asking, respectfully, but defiantly: What is the difference between J Dilla and Beethoven? Zadie Smith and Proust? Donald Rodney and Michelangelo? The reader is grateful for his asking, this canonizing, even when the references, at times, clutter the flow.
But the big flouted convention, the big risk Azumah Nelson takes that doesn’t always quite pay off, is the second-person narration. “You turn to him.” “You open your mouth.” “You push them away.” As I read I found myself mentally replacing those you’s with I’s, and going on my way. At best, the perspective adds nothing to the reading experience; at worst, it detracts.
When Azumah Nelson finds his groove, however, we can forgive him all minor annoyances. Whether he’s describing a tense police encounter or lovers intertwined, when he’s great, which is often, his descriptive powers are truly special.
“You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown,” he writes. “But if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.”
Gladly.
"love" - Google News
April 13, 2021 at 04:00PM
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‘Love Made You Black’: Gazes of Desire and Despair in a New Novel - The New York Times
"love" - Google News
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