Open Water: Prose for the Poets

Few books have had me enamoured from the prologue.

‘Open Water’ by Caleb Azumah Nelson, the Costa Book Awards 2021 winner, starts off in a barbershop – a simple scene, yet it introduces us very briefly to the main characters, but more importantly, it informs the reader of the unique way the story is going to be told, both in terms of the narrator and the language used.

Published in 2021 by Viking, and then republished in 2022 by Penguin Books, ‘Open Water’ follows two black and British young people who met in a South East London pub.

Both have struggled to find a place to belong in a city that both rejects and celebrates them. Both are artists trying to make it – he a photographer and she a dancer. Both remain unnamed throughout the story, merely becoming universal experiences.

They start working on a project together, and slowly start to fall in love. But I would hardly call it a romantic love.

Both characters are majorly flawed (I’d even go so far as to call them awful people), but Nelson still manages to make us ache along with them.

Throughout ‘Open Water’, he questions what it means to be black, and, more so, what it means to be a “person in a world that sees you only as a Black body”. Nelson explores race, masculinity, love, vulnerability, grief and strength.

The male main character’s family is from Ghana, where most of his family still lives. Nelson writes about how fractured this leaves this unnamed character, especially when his grandmother, oceans away, dies.

“You want to tell her that you miss her mother, to confess that you lost your God in the days your grandma lost her body and gained her spirit, to tell her you couldn’t face your own pain until now… You dial for your brother, but he too carries the house of your father. He will not have the words.”

Most importantly, to me, is the elegant writing in this book.

I could hardly believe this is Nelson’s debut; I would go as far as to call ‘Open Water’ a lyrical masterpiece. It is a story written in verse for poetry lovers, for lovers of flowery language and beautiful metaphors with universal truths.

“A poem about comings and goings, and the gaps between a dial tone, those pauses like percussive breaks where your own breath is the loudest. The poet sees words unspoken in the embrace between you and her. The poet sees the tremble in the water and the sinking stone which caused the ripple. The poet sees you, the poet sees her, and you’re grateful for some lucidity in the mist.”

While I found the first two thirds of this book to be absolutely perfect, I do think the author became too repetitive towards the end, not in terms of the language used, but regarding the topics explored.

Despite this, it is clear why The New York Times called ‘Open Water’ an “unforgettable debut” where “Sally Rooney meets Michaela Coel meets Teju Cole”.

And as a treat for the rhythm lovers, the book comes with a code you can scan to listen to a Spotify playlist specifically created for the book.

This playlist includes artists like Solange, Frank Ocean, Tracy Chapman and Kendrick Lamar.