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 24-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 24 Summary
On the phone, the protagonist’s lover asks if he’s going to cut his hair before she returns to London. She wants him to look nice and feel confident. It turns out that he is already heading to the barbershop. As he enters, his barber, Leon, is combing a crying child’s kinky (afro-textured) hair. Leon begins to use his fingers gently instead of a harsh comb and the child quiets.
As Leon starts to cut the narrator’s hair, he thinks of how significant barbershops are as hubs for Black communities. Few places make the narrator feel safe, and this place of ritualized self-care is one of them. He and Leon discuss Leon’s recent trip to Ghana and how much happier the barber felt while there. Leon mentions not having “to worry about looking like us when you’re out there” (126) and says that London winters are hard on him—in part because he still doesn’t feel welcome despite many years in the UK. Leon asks if the narrator has a partner and advises the young man to leave London with his lover to find a home where they can be free.
After the haircut, the two men share a joint in front of the barbershop. Leon warns the narrator that it’s a strong one and sings as they get high. At first, the protagonist feels joyful, but he slips into fearful visions of being stuck in shallow water with a monster demanding to see his scars. He tells himself to stop apologizing and forgive himself. Leon calls him back to reality and they discuss Leon’s desire to forget a deep incoherent pain inside him. The narrator is able to share that he understands. He thinks of how he and his mother pray “every day that this will not be the day” (129), referencing the constant threat to Black men’s lives. He wants to take ownership over his life.
Leon gifts the narrator a revolutionary history book, The Destruction of Black Civilization. A young man crashes through the window of the shop, sending glass everywhere. He’s being threatened by five men outside, one with a gun, but they don’t dare breach the sanctity of the barbershop. The young man, Daniel, says that they are mistaking him for someone else. Police sirens approach and the attackers leave. The police come into the barbershop armed and yelling. They violently search everyone inside, reminding the narrator of the image of a cop kneeling on someone’s back. Eventually the police say they’re free, and Leon asks if that is ever true.
The narrator describes his buried blue anger. He’d prefer it were red and could erupt out and away from him. The results of this anger are living in denial and feeling unworthy of love, even though he knows that the latter is not true. He admits that he forgets that he is innocent, yet he also forgets at times that he is perceived as a threat.
Several hours after the police incident, the narrator goes to a Caribbean takeout place. He sees Daniel on a bicycle, listening to music and looking cheery. They greet each other, and the narrator feels like he can release what happened earlier. The Caribbean cook gives the narrator his food for free, saying that he seems like he needs some comfort. As the protagonist leaves the shop, he hears a scream that he likens to “the color of James Brown’s scream” (133), which is the name of a poem by Kayo Chingonyi. Daniel has been hit by a car. The narrator goes to the boy’s side and takes his hand. Someone calls for an ambulance, but Daniel doesn’t want it. The narrator thinks of Daniel as the most recent in a long series of dying Black men.
Chapter 25 Summary
The narrator is back on the phone with his lover, who asks how his haircut was. He sits in his bedroom, which he tore apart after getting home from witnessing Daniel’s death. The woman is worried, but the protagonist doesn’t tell her what happened. He begins to sob and hangs up on her. She calls back to ask what is happening, but he still won’t talk about it. His partner gets frustrated that he has such a wall up. The narrator tells her to forget it and she hangs up on him.
He no longer calls the woman or answers her calls, eventually powering down his phone completely. He has been keeping her at a distance since she went back to Dublin. He finds it easier to push her away than to share “something raw and vulnerable” (136). The narrator slides into a deep depression caused by rage, fear, and pain. Even music doesn’t connect with him. He tries not to think about what it means that Daniel refused an ambulance but believes that it is because he had lived his whole life waiting to die. The narrator’s brother checks on him, asking if he’s spoken to his lover. Freddie encourages the narrator to get in touch with her and asks how he is doing. The protagonist breaks down in tears and Freddie holds him, just as the narrator has held his younger brother.
One week after shutting off his phone, the narrator is leaving home when he is pushed from behind. It is his lover, furious that he has cut off all contact. She has been desperately trying to find out how he’s doing. Noting that he has disappeared like this before, she calls him selfish. Moving him to where she stood on the pavement so that he sees an empty space where he’d been, she asks how it feels to be in her shoes. He admits that it feels bad. She points out how much guilt and shame she pushed through in order to be with him, her ex-boyfriend’s friend, and mentions losing friends because of it. She did it because she thought they could talk to each other about anything.
The narrator knows that her words are all true but repeats his sentiment that it is “easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable” (140). He knows that he had a safe place with his lover, but he can’t make himself try to connect with her. She tries to touch him and he steps away. He feels the woman see what he is in that moment. She takes off his hoodie, which had become hers, and throws it at him before walking away. He does not follow.
Chapter 26 Summary
Despite what just happened, the narrator goes to a studio to keep his photographer appointment. Music still can’t make him feel anything, and the harmony he created with his lover is silent. At the portrait session, he asks his subject to relax. The narrator realizes that the man he is trying to photograph is reflecting his own tension and self-disgust. He goes to the bathroom and stares at his reflection before breaking down in tears. He hugs himself, permitting himself “to be soft and childlike in [his] own arms” (142).
Chapters 24-26 Analysis
These chapters enclose the climax to Open Water, as the narrator witnesses firsthand the death of a Black man he knew and sinks into depression. Azumah Nelson makes this turn of events poignant given that Chapter 24 opens with the barbershop as a key space for The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community. The narrator’s lover in fact encourages him to go to the barbershop, saying that she wants him to “look and feel good” (124). This demonstrates her interest in the narrator’s self-care, which he, too, identifies in the barber’s chair. He states that he “can be free here” (125). This is the result of the barbershop being a Black-owned, Black-inhabited space, explicitly existing to tend to Black bodies. This is emphasized when Leon switches from a harsh comb to his own gentle fingers to make the child stop crying, mirroring the soothing properties of Black community when oppressive tools are set down and the needs of Black people are centered. The narrator claims that “[w]ith every visit, you are declaring that you love yourself” (125), the “you”s in this line referring both to the individual narrator and the reader.
Leon, acting as a vision of Black fatherhood in opposition to the narrator’s own paternal relationship, emphasizes the theme of Black community while also affirming the narrator’s experience of systemic racism. Leon’s singing, a quotidian example of Black creativity, first feels like an “ecstatic recital” to the narrator, but then “leads [him] deeper, darker” (128). This is similar to the protagonist’s experience of music opening the door to emotion in Chapter 7. In this instance, the protagonist connects his own pain to Leon’s through the motif of water, understanding them both as “bobbing and weaving in the ocean and it’s a fight [they] didn’t sign up for” (129). This line is a metaphor for the overwhelming weight of negative feelings, made worse by the “oil swimming in [the] water” that symbolizes oppression (129). It seems that the narrator might emerge strengthened by his encounter with Leon, given that he states that he does “not want to die before [he] can live” (130).
However, the events of the barbershop raid and Daniel’s death during the climax result in the novel’s most overt example of The Emotional Consequences of Oppression. During the police’s violent search of the shop, the narrator again sees the twin images of “[a] knee on a crooked back, a book folded in on its spine” (132), mirroring his intrusive thoughts through the novel that his body is controlled by white supremacist forces. Unable to tell his lover about what happens, he describes himself as “hiding [his] whole self away because [he hasn’t] worked out how to emerge from [his] own anger” (135). He pushes away his own feelings so much that he feels that they are separate to him and out of his control. When his lover confronts him, he wants to connect but does not have “the courage to climb up from whatever pit [he has] fallen into” (140), again demonstrating that he is not in control of his emotional state.
A profound element contributing to this depression is the narrator’s reflection on self-worth and the desire for life. His own lack of self-worth is paralleled by Daniel’s refusal of an ambulance. The narrator understands this as evidence that Daniel took his own early death as an inevitable fact, and the narrator is not “ready to confront these facts and what it might mean for [him]” (137). Yet even avoiding that line of thought doesn’t prevent the narrator from feeling that his anger renders him “ugly and undeserving of love and deserving of all that comes to you” (132). Azumah Nelson depicts the force of internalized racism here by showing the narrator as literally afraid of himself: “You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so” (136). The protagonist passes along his self-hatred to the man that he attempts to photograph in Chapter 26, noting that his subject “hold[s] himself, folded inwards” (141)—body language of someone trying to minimize themselves, as the narrator so often does, like the “folded” book spine. Moreover, the narrator’s pain causes him to hurt his lover, showing that the consequences of oppression are in no way limited to any single person experiencing it.
