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.
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