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 20-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary
It is still overcast on Carnival Monday, the second day of the festival and the one most known for its parties. The narrator runs into a friend with whom he exchanged letters while the friend was incarcerated. They don’t talk about the hard things that lie beneath the surface of their interaction. They decide that they’ll find each other later that day, though the narrator thinks that unlikely due to bad cell service during Carnival.
He bumps into more friends who take him to a rooftop party, which reminds him of a moment in Zadie Smith’s NW. The party has a great view down into the streets, and one of the guests suggests that there is always violence at Carnival. Though they cut themselves off before explaining why, the narrator asks what they mean. The clear inference is that violence is what happens when Black people gather in large numbers. The party is quiet. Someone gives the narrator stereotypical Jamaican food and tells him to enjoy himself. He becomes angry, especially witnessing signs of racist appropriation at this party.
The narrator returns to the streets where he sees a woman jolted by a heedless man running into her, hard enough that she drops her patty (a savory Jamaican pastry). She makes eye contact with the narrator and they hang out, him telling her about the terrible party. She takes him to dance to music in the street and another person gives him a joint. He lets go of the painful party experience.
Chapter 21 Summary
As the summer comes to an end, the narrator returns to his early seed metaphor to describe their growing relationship. The woman confirms that they are moving forward as a couple and that it is not like her previous relationships. The narrator can’t express how much he wants to know her and how much he loves her, so he kisses her. They stare at each other on a train ride, knowing that even when they are forced to look away their eyes will return. In bed, the narrator reflects that their togetherness feels timeless and unending, referencing the existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
Though the woman has not left yet, the narrator already misses her. As she gets on her train, he reflects on how he fears their intense love changing due to long distance. He feels himself waking up from the summer, coming to the surface of the water they leapt into but in a different place. He is scared of the pain of love.
Once the woman secures an apartment in Dublin, she invites the protagonist to visit, which he does within a week. She enjoys planning a “coupley” trip to the Guinness Storehouse for them. They go to a concert on their first evening. She asks what he thinks she smells like and he already knows his answer: flowers. They get drunk and the narrator wakes up with a hangover.
They walk through Dublin and the woman tells the narrator about her time in the city before they met. She felt able to breathe in Dublin, which sends the narrator into an internal spiral about the times he could not breathe. She notices his distance, but he doesn’t explain. On their way to the movies they see a police van, and the narrator notices the officers inside watching them. He fears being stopped and takes down his hood so his head isn’t covered. She brings up this incident once they are home, and he deflects by talking about the movie they just saw, If Beale Street Could Talk (directed by the same director as Moonlight). The protagonist relates to the film’s imprisoned main character and his lack of words when speaking to his girlfriend.
He dreams that he has been murdered by police and wakes up. He has had similar dreams before and worries that his lover won’t be there in such an emergency. He thinks perhaps the “emergency has already begun” (116), given a litany of racial microaggressions that he endures on a daily basis. The narrator gets up for a glass of water and watches rapper music videos. The free expression of Black men calms his feelings.
Over several days, he obsesses over a scene from the 1990s film Boyz n the Hood, in which a young Black man goes to his lover’s house after a police road stop in which one of the policemen is a Black man “doing this because [he] can” (117). The character does not tell his girlfriend what happened, which the narrator explains by invoking the refrain first seen in Chapter 12: His existence is an apology that means hiding his true self.
The narrator’s lover asks if he is alright, and he lies to himself and her that he is, focusing on the good parts of his Dublin visit. She encourages him to tell her if something is wrong, asking that he not create distance between them.
Chapter 22 Summary
The narrator continues to lie in response to the woman’s questions about his wellbeing. He repeats his sense of himself as apology and the necessity of suppression. He doesn’t have the words even as he weeps. He tries to talk himself into sharing with her so that they will both feel less alone, enjoining himself to have faith.
He lists all the things that he wants to share with his partner, given that he trusts her enough to sleep alongside her. He compares the sight of her at night to a vision of God. He wants to recount to her his memory of the night that they danced to his friend’s band, drunkenly got takeout, and sat on a stranger’s steps to say they loved each other. He tells himself that he doesn’t “have to be the sum of [his] traumas” (121). Referencing the album To My Queen, which musician Walt Dickerson created for his wife, the narrator tells himself that he may not make music, but he can write words.
Chapter 23 Summary
The narrator considers what it means to have a home. He compares a lack of freedom in life to being a book with a spine broken so it fits in a smaller space. He doesn’t understand his own depression. His grandmother visits his dreams and tells him to let himself be loved and enjoy the home he’s made. The protagonist wants to give his lover the shirt that his grandmother made for him.
He cries on the train back to London, noticing only when he sees wet spots on his notebook. Crying is one way to express something when language fails. He thinks about love as a way to share even traumatic experiences. He reiterates that he has a home at last.
Chapters 20-23 Analysis
The idyll of the lovers’ relationship becomes troubled in these chapters. The pair are still entwined, as shown in the second-person “you” referencing both of the partners rather than just the narrator in Chapter 21. For example, the text includes the line: “When you’re a turn away from her flat, your fingers tangle” (110). The narrator is not interlacing his fingers with themselves, but the ambiguity of the English “you”—used as both subject and object—seamlessly combines narrator and partner with the rest of the text. In the next line, the symbol of plant growth returns when the narrator reflects that “[t]he seed [they] planted so long ago [has] grown” (110), emphasizing the blossoming and intertwining power of their relationship. However, this passage ends on a note of foreshadowing, as the couple kisses “under the canopy of a tree already showing autumnal symptoms” (110). Given the identification of summer with love, this mention of the season turning colder heralds the decline of the narrator and his lover’s relationship.
This romantic collapse is created by The Emotional Consequences of Oppression, a theme that begins to overpower the text in these chapters. Chapter 20 details racist events at a party during Carnival Monday, during a festival that should be a celebration of Caribbean culture rather than an appropriation of it. Hearing the party guests’ “mimicry of broken English,” the narrator feels “the room […] spin in blue anger” (108). This is the first reference to this concept of “blue anger,” which the narrator further explains in Chapter 24 as suppressed anger. This negative experience does end with Black communal healing, however, as the narrator’s “hips break like the language” while he dances to music in the street (109). This simile allows him to reclaim the idea of Black people speaking a less whole language and make it something representative of freedom.
Chapters 21 and 22 mark the beginning of the narrator’s downturn into depression. He knows that “to love is both to swim and to drown” and that “to love is trust, to trust is to have faith” (112). These lines make clear that the narrator doesn’t withhold because he has a warped concept of love. Instead, he is unable to share because he cannot express his wants and desires while experiencing oppression. This state of communications comes because he is triggered by seeing officers in a police van watch him and his lover, “confirm[ing] what [the couple] already know[s]: that [their] bodies are not [their] own” (114), which contrasts starkly with Azumah Nelson’s portrayals of embodied freedom. The idea of “having to seek permission” to breathe returns (114), and Azumah Nelson mobilizes the motif of breath to express the intensity of the narrator’s emotions as his words fail. His identification with a racially profiled Black male character in a movie suggests the commonality of Black men struggling in the face of oppression.
The narrator tries to convince himself to share and trust his lover in the latter part of this section. He invokes his deceased grandmother again, recalling her advice that “[t]here’s no solace in the shade” twice (119), which invokes the seed symbol by suggesting that sun is needed to grow. After thinking of his self-repression as “folding a book in half on its spine to fit into pockets” (122), thus introducing the book as a symbol of the Black body, he imagines a second meeting with his grandmother. She picks up the book metaphor, telling him to “stretch out a spine made crooked by keeping small” (122), which in context means to let himself be his entire self with his partner. Azumah Nelson conveys hope that the narrator will push through his inherited emotional silence. He equates his lover with home, a place of safety and freedom, ending Chapter 23 on a hopeful note that builds tension regarding how the relationship will unfold throughout the remainder of the novel.
