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 27-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary
After releasing his misery, the narrator spends time walking the dog. He appreciates the animal’s freedom to create its own narrative. He wants to send photos of the dog to the woman but doesn’t. He wore the black hoodie that she threw back at him until her scent began to fade. He compares that process to the dissolution of their relationship, which he simply observed happening. He feels like a coward who betrayed his lover.
Six months after the break up, the narrator puts the hoodie on again, deciding to be honest. It is the first morning in months that he has felt like himself. He thinks of a concert he went to where two songs were melded the way he was meshed with his lover. Feeling seems more important than thinking.
Repeating the phrase “you came here to” or “you want to” at the beginning of almost every section (145, 151), the narrator describes everything that he wants to share with his former lover. He likens it to whispering to each other late at night in bed. He wants to tell her about his parents dancing to nostalgic music and to see if she remembers the song that played the time they took the train home with the jazz musicians whom they’d just seen perform. He describes a brief yet profound wordless connection when he met the gaze of another Black man listening to headphones outside the train station. He wishes to tell his lover that he is no longer embarrassed by his pain but accepts it. He wants to ask forgiveness for not allowing her to buoy him in “this open water” and tell the truth of his inner heaviness (146).
The narrator references the Black scholar Saidiya Hartman’s work explaining that people who liberated themselves from slavery were not actually free, due to the systemic racism that continued to depict them as savage bodies. Aching from the effect of this on his life, the narrator considers going to therapy. He wonders if the woman remembers the time they saw a dead seagull—its neck broken but no blood in sight—and couldn’t figure out how it died. This prompts a reference to Teju Cole’s essay, “Death in the Browser Tab,” about the murder of Walter Scott as he ran from a police officer and how death is ridiculous in how surprisingly fast it appears. In the same vein, he wants to tell his lover about the first time that he saw he saw the police beat a young Black man at a gas station, and the narrator’s father turned away. He compares the assaulted boy to the dead seagull.
He describes a memory of chest pain that made him feel like a book with its spine broken. At the time he was thinking of apoptosis, meaning DNA-programmed cell death. The paramedic said that he has a heart murmur but should be fine. The arrhythmia showed up again the year his grandmother died, the same year (2017) that the Black men Rashan Charles and Edson Da Costa died from police brutality. He describes crying in the dark and revises the request in the prologue that the woman not look at him. He is ready to be honest, so he requests her gaze.
Chapter 28 Summary
The chapter opens with a statement that the narrator and young men like him are dying, which destroys their mothers. He describes the exhaustion of everyday not knowing if he will come home. It crushes him as though he is pages torn from a book cover. Such an uncertain existence makes him live cracked into pieces, his body someone else’s property. Black men die “forever unseen” and let down the Black women in their lives (152).
The narrator thinks wistfully of the time he saw four young Black men in a BMW convertible, listening to loud music and having a fantastic time. The sight gave him joy in the midst of his terror. He feels nostalgic hugging his mother goodbye. When she was pregnant with him, her manager got angry at her for refusing his sexual interest and made her work in the freezer for far too long. In the street that day, he saw a homeless old woman where she always is and waved to her. He stopped to check on a young man whose car was out of commission thanks to a traffic cone trapped in a wheel well. The man had given up on getting to an interview because the train would take too long. The narrator called him an Uber, telling the guy to pay him back when he’s able.
The next time the two men ran into each other, they shared a joint and talked about Dizzee Rascal, a rapper who gained prominence in the early 2000s. The narrator took the other man’s photograph and enjoys the truthfulness in his eyes. The narrator remembers when he heard Dizzee’s debut album, Boy in Da Corner, for the first time. He was on a bus with his martial arts team and an older boy who’d just won a fight was listening to it. The protagonist asked the fighter if he could make the narrator a copy, and the other guy simply gave him the cassette tape.
Chapter 29 Summary
The narrator returns to a memory of his from 2001, at a friend’s house. He watched an MTV show with an all-Black cast, one of whom performed the role of a rapper. He saw this actor again years afterwards, with his child in a grocery store parking lot. Diving into a different memory of 2016, the narrator recalls being at a concert of British rapper Skepta and how right the onstage energy felt. He thinks of sitting on a beach in Spain the same year, on the day of Frank Ocean’s surprise release of his album Blonde. It was the perfect timing for the album to come into the narrator’s life and he listened to it by the water. When he was done, he stripped naked and jumped into the waves.
Six months ago, the narrator saw someone sitting at Daniel’s memorial in the middle of the night, even though all the candles were extinguished. He wondered if the stranger was also weeping for Daniel and reveals that Daniel was the young man with car trouble who later shared a joint with him. The police visit the neighborhood to pay lip service to investigating the car accident that killed Daniel, but they do not speak to the narrator, though they stare at him. He feels comforted by the familiarity of his interaction at the Caribbean takeout place.
A drummer friend of the narrator’s invites him to record a music demo as a rapper, and he does. He thinks that the moment could be freedom. He thinks about “his own relationship to open water” and how to keep his traumas from being turned into spectacle (161). He returns to the “you came here” formulation and reiterates the same lines about wanting to request forgiveness from his ex-lover for not “let[ting] her hold [him] in this open water” (161).
Chapter 30 Summary
The woman has been praying during rainy nights, wondering about the narrator and what their relationship meant. It is a year later but she still cries about him, and she accepts that. She cried recently because she remembered the time they were both in the barbershop, and the barber saw from their eyes that they were deeply connected.
Although the narrator is aware that language is insufficient, the woman is grateful for his writing about what happened. She has gotten herself a camera to capture a reality outside of words, as prompted by a photographer of a couple that reminded her of them. She knows now how hard it is to truly see people.
In the present, they sit in the park together at twilight. The narrator gives the woman his jacket and they appreciate the silence between them. She takes a photograph of the narrator that shows him in all his honesty and sorrow, because she truly sees him and always has.
Chapters 27-30 Analysis
Chapters 27-30 are the denouement of Open Water, meaning that they depict the results of the climatic events of the novel. The bulk of the chapters are marked by the narrator emerging from six months of depression, ready to “speak [his] truth” (144). The phrase “you came here to” returns from the prologue, an example of anaphora throughout a chapter which grounds the novel in its immersive quality of the here and now created by the present-tense, second-person writing. The metafictional quality of the text is emphasized by this, specifically the line “[Y]ou came here, to the page, to ask for forgiveness” (146). This equates the narrator with the author of the text, suggesting that Open Water as a whole is an apology to a hurt woman. The narrator, indeed, sees his own existence as an apology.
The narrator compares The Emotional Consequences of Oppression with the very tangible ones: “young boys are dying” (152). This includes a litany of secondary characters who build a greater sense of the scale of oppression of Black people in Britain. For example, he thinks of how his mother’s manager forced her to work in the freezer in retaliation for her rejection of his sexual interest. Visiting the memorial for Daniel, the narrator also sees someone there whom he describes as “dancing to the sound of silence” (159), which portrays the mourner as having the life-giving music drained out of him by the death. Systemic racism even renders “joy [as] not always pleasurable” (153), which comes up as the narrator enjoys a group of Black boys in a BMW and tries to separate them from “the usual terror” (153). In referencing Saidiya Hartman’s work, the narrator bluntly identifies that Black people “are being framed as a container, a vessel, a body” (147), dehumanizing them. This litany repeats in the next chapter: “Black body, container, vessel, property” (152), drawing the clearest connection in the text from slavery to contemporary oppression of Black people.
However, the narrator is also moving through his own self-repression, describing himself as “on the other side of freedom” after his depressive episode (143). He communicates his growing capacity for life through the motif of water. He repeats that he wants to tell his ex-lover that he is “sorry that [he] wouldn’t let her hold [him] in this open water” (146, 161). It is self-reflection that leads the protagonist to this, revising his belief that “if [he] opened [his] mouth in open water [he] would drown, but if [he] didn’t open [his] mouth [he] would suffocate” (161). He chooses drowning over suffocating for the time being but realizes that if he’d let himself be held, there would have been another option. That said, the narrator remembers that he has positively experienced being submerged in the ocean, after listening to Frank Ocean’s album Blonde for the first time. Like the other music in the text, the album frees the narrator, allowing him to taste “[t]he salt of the sea mingling with your tears” (159). The music helps the narrator consider love again, emphasizing The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community.
The theme of The Difference Between Looking and Seeing creates narrative closure in these final chapters. Calling back to the prologue in which he asks his lover not to look at him, the narrator says: “You came here to ask if she will look at you, while you tell her this story” (151). He is saying he is prepared for the intimacy of a gaze that sees him rather than just looks. The novel ends with a metaphorically weighted scene in which the woman asks to take a photograph of the narrator, and he accepts. Her work with photography has already taught her that “[s]eeing people is no small task” (162), once more pointing at the intensity of recognizing other people for who they really are. Reversing their roles as photographer and subject takes away the narrator’s control and ability to hide. Concluding his character arc and offering the slight hope that the couple might get back together, this moment depicts that the narrator is at last ready to be himself.
