69 pages • 2 hours read
Caleb Azumah NelsonOpen Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 12-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary
The narrator begins to talk about the “suppressions”. First, he describes being on Battersea Bridge, staring at the river as he talks to the woman. He expresses that their five days of constant contact and bed-sharing was significant. She argues that it was not, saying that it’s too complicated for her to pursue a relationship with him. When they talk again the following day, they keep things light until the woman reveals that she had sex with someone the night before for the first time since breaking up with Samuel. She senses that the narrator is upset, and he is, but he pretends he doesn’t care.
Later that day the narrator is going to a friend’s house, and he is stopped by the police. They tell him that he matches the description for someone who has been stealing in the area and say that he showed up out of nowhere. The police search the narrator, spreading the contents of his bag on the ground, then say that he is free to go. He walks the short distance to his friend’s house but stands in front of the door for a long time before getting an Uber back to his house.
The narrator doesn’t tell anyone what happened. He also kept a previous road stop to himself, one in which his friend was driving. They’d been having a wide-ranging and profound conversation before being pulled over and ordered to the ground at gunpoint. His terror caused the narrator to faint briefly. Upon waking he registered the fear in the policeman’s eyes: the result of assuming that all Black men could be criminals.
Once again, the narrator is profiled by police on his way home. A lurking police car snaps on its headlights and drives slowly by the narrator before continuing on.
A few days later, the narrator wakes up late at home and senses that something is wrong. His parents are lately returned, and he finds his father crying. He embraces his dad and learns that his grandfather has passed away. Even though they are at odds, the narrator calls the woman to share his grief. She listens and supports him, but he holds back his now-shameful memory of a phone conversation in which his grandfather asked him to call more.
The chapter ends with what will become a refrain: that to be the narrator is to live apologizing for his own existence, which means that he hides parts of himself away rather than embraces vulnerability.
Chapter 13 Summary
Months later, in the spring, the narrator goes to his oldest friend Imogen’s house. He hangs out drinking with her family, enjoying the sun. He and Imogen go inside and sit on the couch together, reminding the narrator of secondary school, when she’d wait for him to finish basketball practice. Imogen asks what he’s thinking, and he expresses reluctance to see the woman, who is back from Dublin. Imogen’s advice is to “just go with [his] instincts” (69), but the narrator goes to meet the woman and her poet friend anyway. He immediately feels the fever dream take hold once more. The poet repeats their warning from after the photography session.
As the pair hangs out alone, they witness the police violently detaining a woman who, the text implies, has a mental illness. Onlookers discuss the situation, and one states that there is no way to help such people. The narrator is furious and can’t stop seeing the policeman kneeling on their prisoner’s back. The pair leaves and continues to drink.
The woman confronts the narrator about him running into Samuel but not telling her. In the interaction, Samuel asked immediately if the narrator was in a relationship with the woman. The narrator gave an ambiguous answer that angered Samuel, who said that he’s sick of being lied to. Though Samuel waits for the narrator to elaborate on the situation, he does not, and his ex-friend leaves. The woman wishes that the narrator had told her about this meeting.
Back at the woman’s apartment, the pair cuddles on the couch. There’s a young man rooming with her and her mother, and he’s sleeping in her bed, so she informs the narrator that he cannot stay. She kisses him on the chest and cheek. The man feels like it is a shared confusing game. She suggests that he ought to go home.
The narrator walks home—an hour’s journey. He thinks about feeling lust for his closest friend and how he’s suppressing it. He wonders if he can ever take back what he’s shared. He lies on the grass at dawn.
Chapter 14 Summary
Each section of this chapter begins with the line, “[i]t’s summer now” (75-86). It begins with the narrator working his day job at a Nike store. The air conditioning isn’t working, and the heat makes the narrator yearn to go somewhere else. He remembers flying to Seville the previous summer, living a slow life of writing and eating and sitting by the riverside. He wants this kind of simplicity again, to drink and dance. The oncoming extended daylight and outdoor activities are exciting to him, partly because they alleviate “the existential dread which plagues [him]” (76).
Back for the summer break from university, the woman surprises the narrator at work and they embrace. They haven’t seen each other in at least a month but still have a connection. Language remains unhelpful between them.
The narrator reflects that the rhythm of life slows down in the summer. This pace allows the protagonist to speak powerfully and to breathe. Resting in between playing basketball, he accidentally takes a photograph that captures this slow experience: all the players watching the basketball suspended in the summer sky, waiting to see if it will go through the hoop.
Though language is disappointing, the narrator writes the woman letters while sitting in his garden. He listens to the band A Tribe Called Quest, noting that their album The Low End Theory revolves around freedom and acknowledgement. Once again, the narrator thinks of dancing as a source of release, joy, and communal recognition.
The woman arrives and remarks that it is summer. They relax outside, snacking and drinking, before retreating inside. She wants a nap, so they go to the narrator’s room. He has records in addition to books now. They cuddle as before, but she catches her breath, saying that she realized the narrator could murder her while she is asleep. He promises that she is safe.
They sit on the woman’s balcony and talk about the film Moonlight, a coming-of-age piece about a young gay Black man in Florida. The narrator related deeply to the main character. The text details the scene in which the young man learns to swim with the help of his father figure. After seeing the film, the protagonist wept with hope.
The woman asks the narrator to read some of his writing to her. The last piece he read to her was about when he saw the police arrest a young Black boy who had murdered another Black person. The narrator understands this act as the anger that results from unrelenting oppression exploding into violence. He turns to writing because photographs cannot capture his feelings. This piece felt representative of his true self and he knew that she would understand. He reads her a new piece about watching a video of policemen shooting a Black man to death, the details of which align with Stephon Clark’s death in Sacramento in 2018. He falls back into the painful, angry memory of seeing this video for the first time, focusing on the policemen warning each other that their victim has a gun (though he did not). He references Clark, Alton Sterling, and Michael Brown—all Black men murdered by police—and includes himself among them as someone who has received a useless warning that they are always in danger. He cries, and the woman tells him that he’s safe.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
These chapters rotate about the oppression of Black people and the structural racism that creates the conditions for police brutality. The Difference Between Looking and Seeing appears in its more dangerous form in the police’s profiling of the narrator, which is described three times in Chapter 12. The first and second are examples of a policy referred to as stop-and-frisk, which is active in both the UK and the US. It allows police to stop anyone and search their possessions if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect that person. Because “reasonable grounds” is a nebulous term only defined by the specific police officers in that moment, it often leads to racial profiling and disproportionate stops of Black men.
Being stopped outside his friend’s house, the narrator identifies that the police “see someone, but that person is not [him]” (63). This reflects the earlier school incident in which the students implied that all Black boys look the same. The police tell the protagonist that he “appeared out of nowhere” (63), which suggests that Black people are rendered invisible in a racist society until they are perceived as a threat. The gaze is similarly dangerous in the road stop, during which the armed policeman “continues to look at [the narrator] as a danger” (65). Azumah Nelson uses the verb “look” in opposition to the verb “see” and its more intimate connotations. Compounding this impersonal visual examination of the narrator is when a police car’s “headlights flick on, full beam” (65), literally placing the young man under a spotlight so that they can decide if he is a threat.
The narrator witnesses police brutality again in Chapter 13, when he and the woman see “too many policeman for one woman” (70), underscoring how the police use excessive force due to authoritarianism and their own fear of Black people. The screaming and smashing beforehand suggest that the woman is having a mental health crisis; the police still drop “a knee on the woman’s back” (70), an image that will haunt the narrator for the rest of the story. Although the narrator sees Stephon Clark’s death on video rather than as a first-hand experience, this imagery also sticks in the narrator’s mind. He is able to easily remember “how [Clark’s] body crumpled, and he fell onto his hands and knees” (85), a view of murdering creating abjectness in a Black body that contrasts with Azumah Nelson’s portrayal throughout the novel of Black people moving, dancing, and playing in a liberated spirit.
These traumatic images result in the narrator’s retreat from his own honesty and vulnerability. The crux of the novel and the clearest summary of The Emotional Consequences of Oppression appears first at the end of Chapter 12: “To be [the narrator] is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression” (67). This describes the way the narrator pushes away his anger and pain to keep it from society, and the collateral damage is that he keep it from his lover, too. Furthermore, while the narrator calls the woman about his grandfather dying, “even here, [he is] hiding” (66), as he does not tell her about a shameful memory in which he feels that he failed his grandfather. Although the woman is able to be quite open with the protagonist, she, too, is affected by the violence around them, realizing that “if [he] wanted [the narrator] could kill [her] in [her] sleep” (82). This does not reflect fear of the narrator as an individual but both the insidiousness of brutal imagery and negative stereotyping of Black men and the threat of violence to Black women in a racist society.
Attendant to these chapters’ focus on police violence is Azumah Nelson’s use of the motif of breath. During the road stop, the narrator inadvertently “let[s] out a skinny whimper […] the sound rattl[ing] in [his] chest” and faints (64), it is implied, from lack of air due to fear. Later, he thinks about “being allowed to breathe” as “a strange turn of phrase” because it “seek[s] permission for something so natural” (78). He is aware, in these lines, of his body not belonging to him but instead being controlled by a racist society that doesn’t value him. At the same time, he is led to these reflections through enjoying slow music in the summertime. He finds that, “in slowing down to speak, [he] can breathe” (78), offering a glimpse of The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community.
