69 pages • 2 hours read
Open Water
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Background
Authorial Context: Caleb Azumah Nelson
Content Warning: This section of the guides discusses systemic racism and police violence.
Caleb Azumah Nelson is a British Ghanian author born in the early 1990s. Open Water, his debut novel, catapulted him to international prominence. Though Open Water is not described as an autobiographical text, the book has its roots in a series of essays that Azumah Nelson wrote prior to the summer of 2019, and the narrator of the novel reflects much of Azumah Nelson’s own background.
Like his protagonist, Azumah Nelson was raised and still resides in Bellingham, an area in south-east London. As did both central characters in the novel, he received a full scholarship to an elite and traditional private school, Alleyn’s School. Before publishing Open Water, Azumah Nelson worked at an Apple store, paralleling his unnamed narrator’s day job at Niketown in downtown London. In addition to being a writer, Azumah Nelson is a photographer whose work has been honored with the Palm* Photo People’s Choice prize. Open Water’s unnamed narrator is also a photographer who writes, specifically personal essays to complement his photography. The narrator discusses the act of writing the text of Open Water, creating a metatextual framing for the novel.
The many references to Black artists, musicians, and writers in Open Water reflect Azumah Nelson’s own inspirations. In a 2022 interview, he listed his role models as author Zadie Smith, painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, musician Kendrick Lamar, and director Barry Jenkins. All of these creators and their work appear in Open Water, often within highly thematic or emotional scenes.
Socio-Historical Context: Police Brutality & Black Lives Matter
Taking place in 2017-18, Open Water revolves around the narrator’s experience of racial micro-aggressions, racial profiling, and police violence. The book is a response to the many deaths of Black people at the hands of police officers and lays bare the experience of being a Black man in an anti-Black society. Notably, in findings published in 2023, the UK government found that between April 2021 and March 2022, Black people were arrested at 2.4 times the rate of white people (“Ethnicity Facts and Figures: Arrests.” UK Government, 2023). Though the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not found in the novel, the text is also informed by the Black Lives Matter movement, which was founded in 2013 by three Black women responding to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for his murder of Black teenager Trayvon Martin.
Open Water names many Black victims of police brutality in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The text describes its protagonist watching the video of Stephon Clark’s murder by police in Sacramento in 2018 and references the violent shootings of Alton Sterling in 2016 and Michael Brown in 2014. The narrator also invokes Black men Rashan Charles and Edson Da Costa, who both died in 2017 after police encounters in which, according to police reports, they swallowed bags of drugs, suffocating them. In the novel, the narrator only uses the first names of these men.
Although Open Water takes place in the late 2010s, it was published in 2021 after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States and the subsequent grassroots uprising against police violence. Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” became a clarion call and slogan in the summer of 2020. Suffocating and having to ask permission to breathe are constant threads throughout Open Water.
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