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 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
This chapter summarizes a phone conversation between the narrator and the woman, who has gone on a trip. The narrator describes watching a dog play in the snow for the first time in its life. He remembers that his grandmother saw snow for the first time when she was in London waiting on his birth; the experience prompted her to pray for her family. On that same day, the narrator’s pregnant mother survived an armed man threatening the bus she was on. The protagonist says that while he is not a religious man, this kind of story makes him want to pray—and he is praying for his parents to have a safe return to London from Ghana. The glow of the night sky after a snowfall makes him want to touch it, so he prays instead. He prays for the woman’s safe travels.
She describes being alone on a warm beach, in a place that must be in the Southern Hemisphere due to her noting it is “[s]ummer in January” (21). She needed a vacation and the space to breathe, though this trip required her to try to develop her relationship with her father. She struggles to connect with him, as he is quiet, and language isn’t sufficient in any case, so she tries to just enjoy the place. She thanks the narrator.
The protagonist describes a piece of visual art entitled In the House of My Father. It depicts a tiny house constructed with pins in the middle of a Black palm. He references it to explain that he may want to refuse the weight of his ancestry, but it is important to look inside the house. The narrator’s shares that his own father is “a man for whom love was not always synonymous with care” (22). He says that he will always shed tears for his father and agrees that language isn’t enough. He returns her thank you.
She agrees that words and parents can both fail but points out that everyone fails their loved ones. She describes it as a fracture of a joint that she hopes never becomes a break. She will be happy to go back home, where she understands things better.
Chapter 6 Summary
On the phone, the two main characters decide to order Chinese takeout, brushing off Caribbean as taking too long. The narrator gets home and puts away the groceries that he’s bought for the woman. They are meeting to look over his sample photographs for her archive project.
The narrator’s house is empty, as his parents remain in Ghana and Freddie is back at university. The narrator usually likes the silence but now panics about what music to play. The woman arrives and examines the living space, asking about the protagonist’s family in the displayed photos. The narrator reflects internally that Freddie is both his mirthful buddy and his emotional responsibility due to their father’s lack of care. It is and always has been hard for the narrator to tend to both himself and Freddie. The woman says that the narrator resembles his mother but says nothing about his father.
The woman says that, later, she is going back to her former secondary school (high school) as some kind of inspirational alumna. When the narrator says that he also had to do that recently, they realize that they both went to elite private schools. The narrator recollects that he received a scholarship; his interviewer implied that it was related to his marginalized race. They discuss the experience of being Black at fancy, predominantly white institutions. The woman explains that she “never felt unwelcome but there was always something [she] didn’t feel privy to” (28). This parallels the narrator’s feelings. He remembers a group of seemingly friendly boys who decided that he looked like another Black boy at the school. When he met this other boy, they performed a handshake and silently acknowledged the racist conflation of the two of them.
The woman says that she was one of three Black kids in her year. The protagonist was one of four. He feels less alone because they had the same experience. Basketball was one of the ways that he coped with school, as the skills came naturally to him. The game became an important aspect of the narrator’s mental health: “a new way of seeing, a new way of being” (30). He references NBA Star Allen Iverson when describing how hard he practiced. While training, he didn’t think about the microaggressions that he was experiencing at school, and he felt free and joyful. Similarly, the woman used dance to keep herself grounded, and it still allows her to choose her own identity.
When the woman gets ready to leave, the narrator offers her his favorite hoodie so that she won’t be cold. At her request he gives her a piggyback ride upstairs to his bedroom. She examines his books, remarking on his collection of Zadie Smith and mentioning that she is reading the novel The Same Earth by Kei Miller. He walks her to the train station, and they pass a group of young men playing basketball and later the Caribbean takeout place. The woman promises to get in touch with the narrator before she returns to Dublin to continue at university. She boards her train, and he runs after it as far as the platform allows, waving to her and laughing.
Chapter 7 Summary
A while later, after a week in an empty house, the narrator has an emotional crisis in his kitchen. While sweeping the floor and listening to music on his headphones, the emotions of the rapper prompt the narrator to examine his own. He calls his mother for support but remembers how much pain she is feeling about her own mother’s death. He hangs up before she answers. He calls his father and his brother but changes his mind about those calls, too, knowing that both men in his family “will not have the words” (35).
He cries on the floor, admitting that he is “fearful of this spillage” of all the grief and sadness and uncertainty he’s been experiencing (36). He’s afraid that he won’t be able to recover from giving into the feelings. His mother calls but he declines, thinking that she would need him to be strong when is currently is not. He gets up and looks in the mirror and talks to himself.
He listens to a song by contemporary singer-songwriter Solange Knowles about influential funk musician Walter “Junie” Morrison. The narrator feels gratitude and quiet joy after his sobbing and begins to dance freely. He recalls another time that he faced his own complex emotions and took a bus to a bar known for jamming musicians. He was turned away from a next-door bar before the show began. He danced once inside with the music. A friend’s words made him think of how Black ancestry and identity are manifesting on the crowded, joyous dance floor. He felt his pain flow away and allowed himself to simply dance and celebrate the music.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
In these chapters, Azumah Nelson explores masculinity as it relates to The Emotional Consequences of Oppression. This becomes prominent as the text features more explicit references to violence. Even before he was born, the narrator was in violent circumstances, remembering that when his mother was pregnant with him “she was on the top deck of a bus, cowering as a man waved a gun” (20). She emerged unharmed, but as the text later makes clear, even witnessing or fearing violence causes psychological harm. Emotional violence is present in the narrator’s school experience: His white compatriots’ equation of him with another Black boy gives him a “strange feeling […] something hard and heavy at the top of [his] chest” (28). The white students telling the narrator that he looks like one of the few other Black boys plays into the racist myth that all Black people look the same. This is a microaggression from the white boys, which means a deceptively commonplace interaction that reveals negative, derogatory, or stereotypical biases against a marginalized group. The protagonist’s response to this microaggression is to “perform a complicated, natural handshake, to the glee of lookers-on” (29). Though this connects him with the other boy, it also accepts the white students’ exoticizing attitude toward Blackness, letting them observe it as entertainment.
This performance, which disguises how the narrator truly feels, is an example of the emotional damage caused by systemic racism. He has inherited this tendency to some degree, aware that he “carr[ies] the house of [his] father, which means [he] also carr[ies] a part of the house [his father] carried” (22). The contents of this house represents a masculine suppression of emotion, made clear by the narrator’s description of his father as “a man for whom love was not always synonymous with care” (22) and someone who “will not have the words” (35). Emphasizing The Failures of Language to communicate pain, the woman discusses a similar relationship with her father, noting that “[l]anguage fails us, and sometimes our parents do too” (22). Freddie also suffers from psychological injuries, as when he calls his brother with the “panic in his body trying to rise” (26). This mirrors the anxiety that the narrator experiences later in the text, stitching together the many manifestations of masculine wounds at the hands of oppression.
In Chapter 5, when the narrator and the woman discuss these familial challenges, the text introduces another piece of linguistic repetition: “What is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?” (21-22). These questions probe the ambiguity around when a relationship is beyond saving and trying to identify weak or damaged areas in a relationship before it ruptures completely. This line and the narrator’s question of “[u]nder what conditions does unconditional love become no more?” return during the scene during which his lover breaks up with him (22). This shrouds the text in a subtly ominous tone as it builds towards this breakup.
However, these chapters are not bleak as they represent the positivity of interpersonal connection and The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community. In contrast to the narrator’s wordless acknowledgement with his fellow Black student in school, sharing his experience with the woman makes him feel less alone. In a positive example of The Difference Between Looking and Seeing, “she’s looking at [the narrator] and there is nowhere to hide here, nowhere to go” (29). He returns to the refrain of “an honest meeting” and describes them as “two books […] spread open along the spine” (29), using the symbol of books for the first time. Though it is only the two of them, this is an example of communal sharing becoming healing.
Bodily movement is a potent force for liberation in these chapters. The woman describes the way dancing brought her a sense of freedom within her majority-white private school, telling the narrator, “[w]hen I’m doing my thing, I get to choose” (32). The narrator’s experience feeling free while playing basketball at school parallels this, as the physical immersion allows him not to think about “the discrepancy between what they thought they knew and what was true” (31), referencing the ways his classmates racially profile and stereotype him. The final beat of Chapter 6 calls back to the emotional expansiveness of bodily movement, as the narrator chases the woman’s train and is left “a little breathless, a little ecstatic, a little sad” (34). This reflection captures the emotional essence of bodily movement in the novel, as something that allows Black people to embody freedom in an “ecstatic” manner but remains something that can be restricted by racist power structures, as suggested by the narrator feeling “breathless” and “sad.”
Chapter 7 in particular focuses on the power of Black music to release suppressed feeling. While listening to music and cleaning the kitchen, the narrator gives into his sorrow, experiences a cleansing weeping fit, and emerges into a calmer and more contented mood. This begins when “[i]n an easy rhythm, the rapper confesses his pain,” leading the narrator to ask himself to “[b]e honest, man” in a passage with Christian resonances that connect confession and cleansing (35). He describes his emotional collapse as “spillage,” noting that once he is in the throes of sobbing that “[t]he music has stopped” (36), suggesting that it has done its job. This journey is ultimately a hopeful one, as “the hazy, rhythmic bounce of the drums” of a new song “afford […] [the narrator] the freedom, to be” (37). Thinking of a time that he danced at a jazz club, the narrator compares the cleansing force of communal dance to water, highlighting water as a significant motif in the novel. He states that it allows him to “let go of that pain, let go of that fear, let go” (39). This line punctuates that, in a world that rarely honors his humanity, the narrator heals himself through music and movement.
