Alongside the main narrative, other topics fleetingly referred to include the difficulties of being a black person in a private school, curling at the Winter Olympics, the Notting Hill Carnival, basketball, Kierkegaard, the loss of grandparents. Given its slim size, the novel sometimes seems slightly crowded – not just with these enthusiastic references to black artists, but in other ways too. There is a rather lovely Zadie Smith cameo, too: the photographer goes to hear the author read and is inspired by her banter as he nervously waits for her to sign his copy of NW. You don’t tell her that you had repeated the song ‘Brenda’, an ode to the artist’s grandma, so much that you knew when the bassline would begin to slide under the strum of guitar chords, when the trumpet would riff and reverb, when there was a break, a slight pause where the music fell loose …You don’t tell her that it was there, in the slight pauses, that you were able to breathe, not even realising you were holding in air, but you were.ĭizzee Rascal, Kendrick Lamar, the painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the film-maker Barry Jenkins are also referenced as Azumah Nelson suffuses the narrative with the achievements of black creativity. You don’t tell her that the album had soundtracked your previous summer.
During a tube journey, when speaking to the dancer about the American rapper Isaiah Rashad, the photographer is circumspect in expressing the impact this music had on him. This is beautifully shown in a vignette early on in the novel. As the protagonist explores the influences underpinning his own work, and in tender dialogue between the lovers, Azumah Nelson namechecks black artistry of all kinds, often drawing attention to its immersive power and transcendental effect. The photographer stresses that he and his community are “more than the sum of traumas”. Running alongside is a glorious celebration of the exuberance of blackness. Azumah Nelson emotively demonstrates how these pressures influence black men’s psychic lives and their forging of connections with others. The police profiling that the photographer endures as a young black man moving through the city is recounted with painful emphasis on the effects of feeling constantly observed. In its interweaving of the romantic arc with meditations on blackness and black masculinity, this affecting novel makes us again consider the personal through a political lens systematic racism necessarily politicises the everyday experiences of black people. The fissures that emerge in their relationship partly arise because he struggles to communicate the depth of his suffering and feelings of loss prompted by the racialised inequities of his south-east London neighbourhood. While an elegance of style is a hallmark of Azumah Nelson’s storytelling, there is bold risk-taking in his choices too: he writes in the second person, using its immediacy and potency to create an emotional intensity that replicates the emotional intensity with which the protagonist experiences his bond with the dancer and his wider world. She slides down her bed a little, so she can tuck herself in the space between your chest and your chin, the mane of soft curls ticklish against your neck … The hand holding your arm reaches for your own, spreading your digits between hers. With her foot, she traces a line across your own, finally settling her lower limb between your calves.
The arm which isn’t trapped between her body and yours stretches towards her, and she pulls it across her body like a blanket, curling in tight. At the beginning of their relationship, the photographer and dancer are tentative in their interactions with one another – and yet these moments are freighted with possibility. Azumah Nelson’s descriptions of his lovers’ physicality provide the clearest examples of his supple prose. His presentation of the narrative in sensual but precisely paced sentences with elegant refrains and motifs imbues Open Water with a rhythm of its own. It is Azumah Nelson’s expressive style that most startlingly reanimates this formula.