Open Water

Hand in hand with the theme of oppression comes the narrator’s reliance on the liberating power of Black art and community, which alters the novel from one solely of Black pain to one of joy. Experiencing Black art, especially in communal settings, makes the narrator feel safe and free when the rest of the world does not. Music, in particular, allows him to access the emotions that he has buried and helps him to heal after racist encounters.

From Chapter 1, dancing with other Black people in public spaces is painted as a force for liberation. The narrator points out that “to move in this way was but one of a few freedoms afforded to those who came before” (3), creating a link to earlier generations with fewer rights. The novel explores dance as a universal medium connecting ancestors and descendants, as when the narrator sees his parents “grooving in their own living room, slow croon” (145). While dancing at a jazz concert, the narrator finds profound joy in “moments like these, where [he doesn’t] have to hide” (80), meaning that the pressure of a white supremacist society is not present in such spaces. This is reiterated on Carnival Monday, where the narrator experiences an “unexpected miracle in these moments of freedom” (108), dancing in a Black crowd after leaving a party with racist people and finding some release for his anger.

Private moments of consuming music also contribute to this theme. The first time the text depicts the narrator breaking down emotionally is when he is listening to a song that features a sample of several Black women’s voices, describing the experience as “a tender croon stretched across drums designed to march you towards yourself” (35). In the same scene, after a cleansing cry, the narrator feels that “from [his] solid ache comes a gentle joy” while listening to an upbeat song by Solange (37). After a nightmare about being murdered by police, the narrator calms his night fears by watching Black rappers. He takes heart from “watching a Black man asked to express himself on the spot, and flourishing” (116)—the opposite of the way society asks Black people to minimize themselves. When the narrator listens to Frank Ocean’s album Blonde for the first time, he has a similar reaction of internal expansiveness, saying that he’s “been waiting for something [he] didn’t know [he] needed” (159). This suggests that the album fills an empty place inside the traumatized narrator, creating healing. The expressive power of music makes the narrator feel liberated to express himself in private moments.

Painting and writing are also celebrated as powerful art forms in the novel. When discussing the work of artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who is British Ghanian like the narrator, he describes her work as “externalizing her interiority, which isn’t something Black people are afforded very often” (99). Again, he is explaining that this act of creation pushes back against the stereotyping and diminishment of Blackness. When the narrator meets author Zadie Smith, he is overwhelmed by “what the book meant to [him]” and cannot articulate the depth of NW’s influence on him (44). He reflects on how well he understands a Smith essay that states the precarity of young Black men’s lives in London.

The theme of Black art as a liberating influence also has a metatextual aspect. The narrator implies several times that he is writing the book, as when he states that he “came here, to the page, to ask for forgiveness” (146). In a novel shaped by Black creativity, these self-referential moments suggest that part of the purpose of Open Water is to add to the wealth of Black art and therefore offer its own liberating power to Black readers. Furthermore, Viking Press has an official Spotify playlist to accompany the novel containing the music mentioned within it, emphasizing the metatextual aspects of its exploration of Black art.

The depiction of language as a flimsy form of communication that often fails is a paradoxical and self-referential theme in Open Water. Its presence captures a core truth about language as imperfect and undercuts racist perceptions of a monolithic Black experience by demonstrating that the characters have such complex relationships and inner lives that language is insufficient to represent them. This theme also reflects that people suffering from trauma are so often unable to speak about their experiences.

One aspect of language’s failure is familial. The protagonist and his partner both struggle to connect with their fathers, who are unwilling to express themselves. The woman observes of her father that “[l]anguage fails us, especially when he doesn’t open his mouth” (21). The novel implicitly suggests that this is the result of enduring oppression as a Black man of an earlier generation, as more clearly suggested when the narrator considers reaching out to his father. Knowing that “he will not tell [the narrator] how much he hurts too, even though [the narrator] can hear the shiver in the timbre of his voice” (35), the protagonist ultimately does not call his father. This suggests that words are insufficient to undo generations of racist oppression.

Words also collapse in intensely emotional situations in the novel. The inclusion of a poet character who has “a cyclical poem about things which go unsaid” encapsulates this element of the theme (53). Through the power of the gaze, which is a companion theme to the insufficiency of speech, the poet “sees words unspoken in the embrace between” the narrator and the woman (53), referencing the sexual desire and emotional connection that they have refused to accept. When weeping, the narrator explicitly describes crying as “how [he says] those things for which there are no words” (123). After he cuts off his lover while in the depths of his depression, the narrator “wish[es] [he] had the words” to explain to the woman what is going on with him, but he cannot (140). The novel therefore celebrates aspects of communication that express complex emotions when words fail.

The language of English was and is a colonizing force, a reality that Open Water gestures at during the appropriative and racist Carnival rooftop party. The narrator hears people imitating Caribbean speech, “like patois was a luxury, rather than a necessity, like the language did not emerge from Black body being split” (108). This references how enslaved Afro-Caribbean people were forced to use English, and therefore English will always be a fraught language for their descendants. This emphasizes the fact that English is an insufficient language to express the characters’ feelings about racist oppression.

Despite an emphasis on language’s flimsiness, Open Water is, after all, a written novel. This theme allows Caleb Azumah Nelson to demonstrate English’s biases, weaknesses, and breakdowns, while still using his voice to create a uniquely Black narrative.