Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
At a South East London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black Britons who received scholarships to attend exclusive institutions where they battled to fit in. They are now working as artists—she is a dancer and he is a photographer—and are attempting to leave their imprint in a community that alternately accepts and rejects them. They fall in love tentatively and tenderly. But even when two people appear to be meant to be together, fear and violence have the power to separate them.
Open Water questions what it means to be a human in a world that only sees you as a Black body, to be weak when you are only appreciated for strength, to find refuge in a relationship that is both an achingly beautiful love tale and a powerful insight into race and masculinity.
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
1 used from $11.85
Amazon.com
Caleb Azumah Nelson has written the most important British debut of recent years with a lovely, emotional passion. This is an outstanding romantic short story about a young black man’s attempts—more accurately, “struggle”—to locate and ultimately live a “life,” to find purpose, fulfilment, and love while battling racism, classism, and developing manhood. What it would be like to live a life without the constraints of racial profiling, cultural marginalization, community and class isolation, and how to fully express and be noticed in “said” life.
The subject of this work is a close friendship between two young people that develops into something else. The idiom “two becomes one” appears frequently in the novel. Their relationship is incredibly strong and consuming despite the fact that they never actually identify themselves as boyfriend and girlfriend. Has the relationship always been destined to fail? If you were hoping for a happily ever after ending, you will be sorely let down. Although this book could be categorized as romantic, it is so much more on every level. Both find it difficult to express their ideas and emotions and find that silence and deeds speak louder than words. All throughout the book, our male protagonist is facing his own demons.
He is tormented by these demons on the inside and the outside, and this aspect of the character is revealed. The marriage is set up to be torn apart in every sense of the word by events, but how they choose to respond to those events is what makes the story so compelling and touching. This book has a new, distinctive, and difficult feel to it. Not because of the subject matter, but rather because of the way it captivates you and won’t let go.
