Open Water

“Perhaps it was because you had both lost that year, and though you kept telling yourself you couldn’t lose any more, it continued to happen.”

This sentence uses a polyptoton (repeating the root of the same word in different cases) of “lost” and “lose”, emphasizing the precarity of these two Black people’s wellbeing. It invokes the idea of enduring more than one can bear.

“You create a small world for yourselves, and for you both only, sitting on this sofa, looking out at the world which has a tendency to engulf even the most alive.”

This establishes that the relationship between the narrator and his lover creates a safe zone in a senseless and hostile world. The clarification of “you both only” sets up their connection as unique, presenting them as a unit.

“You’ve often had such an image, or something similar, where you are made aware that you carry the house of your father, which means you also carry a part of the house he carried, your father’s father’s, and that this man would’ve done the same.”

The repetition of “carry,” “house,” and “father,” and the elongated structure of this sentence mirrors a long line of ancestry passing along their traumas. The narrator’s comparison of himself to the man in the artwork suggests The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community as an important element of self-awareness and self-knowledge.

“Feeling rather than knowing; not knowing and feeling it was right.”

Here Caleb Azumah Nelson uses chiasmus—a two-part sentence in which the second half is a reversal of the first—to capture the muddled instinct of this moment for the narrator. The second clause deepens the meaning by actively rejecting knowing as opposed to simply choosing feeling first.

“When someone sees you—I’m just talking about day to day, you know—you’re either this or that. But when I’m doing my thing? […] I get to choose.”

This is one of the few moments in the text in which the woman articulates her own experience of going unseen for who she is. The dashes capture the colloquial quality of the dialogue. The italicized emphasis on “this or that” imbues them with disdain.

“Headphones sending sound into the silence, a tender croon stretched across drums designed to march you towards yourself.”

An example of the motif of music, this quote gives music agency and personality. It is “tender,” unlike the narrator’s father, and the martial insistent drums force him to look directly at his own feelings. It is also a sentence fragment, aligning it with the style of song lyrics.

“Ask yourself here, as you begin to move with quick, light steps, bare feet sliding across the floor, a delicate sweat forming: ask yourself here, how are you feeling?”

This quote imitates the rhythm of music through anaphora, using the phrase “ask yourself here.” The descriptive lines focus on the embodied details of the narrator’s physical experience, suggesting that the answer to this question may be attained through listening to the body rather than speaking.

“You’re both wondering what it could mean that desire could manifest in this way, so loud for such a tender touch.”

The idea of a touch being loud uses synesthesia to connect to the music motif and suggests that bodies can speak to replace The Failures of Language. This is also an example of the couple thinking as a unit.

“You want your bodies to say what otherwise cannot be said.”

As a brief sentence using polyptoton by repeating the verb “say” in two forms, this encapsulates The Failures of Language. It implies that body language is more trustworthy. It also grants the physical form control of itself by saying that the characters “want” their bodies to do something instead of just making their limbs do it.

“The moment stretched and held, and you knew both of you wanted to say you were scared and heavy, but reticence was a song you both knew by heart.”

Referring to the narrator and his Black male friend having a deep conversation while driving, this passage makes clear that self-repression and fear of vulnerability are not unique to the narrator. It also allows music to be an expansive motif, in that here the “song” is not a positive force.

“You think about holding onto this feeling for so long, holding it down, holding it in, because sometimes it’s easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.”

This run-on sentence mimics the constant challenge of pushing a feeling away, surprisingly culminating in “your own light” as though that emergence is inevitable at some point. It uses the term “hide,” which the narrator turns to quite often to describe his behavior, reflecting his fear of visibility in a white supremacist society that looks at him as a threat.

“It’s a strange turn of phrase, you think, being allowed to breathe, having to seek permission for something so natural, the basis of life; in turn, having to seek permission to live.”

This is an unusually structured sentence for the novel. This passage’s use of the semicolon and the phrase “in turn” suggests that it represents a formal request for that permission. The narrator also shows his writerly bent by examining a commonplace phrase, “allowed to breathe.”

“Silent tears fell like soft rainfall.”

This sentence describes the narrator’s reaction to the film Moonlight and describes a markedly different version of crying from his more typical gulping for air and sobbing. These gentle tears are compared to something soft and nourishing, “rainfall,” demonstrating that they are the result of a positive experience.

“That anger which is the result of things unspoken from now and then, of unresolved grief, large and small, of others assuming that he, beautiful Black person in gorgeous Black body, was born violent and dangerous; this assumption, impossible to hide, manifesting in every word and glance and action, and every word and glance and action ingested and internalized, and it’s unfair and unjust, this sort of death—being asked to live so constrained is a death of sorts—so you don’t blame him for the anger, but why did his anger have to find a home in another who looked just like him?”

This line is an entire paragraph, its complicated, twisting structure and its length capturing the narrator’s wounded bewilderment at this Black boy’s murder of another Black person. His thoughts are so powerful that they overwhelm him. Repetition makes another appearance here to contribute to the feel of panicked cyclical thinking.

“But perhaps in the not knowing comes the knowing, born of an instinctive trust that you both struggle to elucidate or rationalize.”

The narrator is constantly reflecting and thinking, but this line suggests that intuition is the most powerful way to connect. It seems an oxymoron that “not knowing” could create “knowing,” but this too demands an understanding outside of rational thought.

“Perched separately, but together, you often find yourself close to the balcony as it rains, heat breaking in thunder and lightning, like snare hits and hi-hats.”

While long-distance, the narrator and his partner seek out the rain, which connects to the motif of water as feeling. The summer heat, which has created the season for their love, is powerful, with its manifestation being compared to music, an inspiring and healing force in the novel.

“Still, as you parted ways, you wondered if you’re wrong, if freedom isn’t as full as you imagine—no, if freedom is not an absolute—no, try again—if freedom is something one could always feel.”

The jerkiness of this sentence is a hyperrealistic depiction of thinking through something, correcting oneself mentally. The repetition of “freedom” is affecting, given that the narrator feels he doesn’t experience it often.

“You tell her she deserves to be loved in the way you love her, and she starts to cry, quiet as rain.”

This line is important in showing that the woman is willing to be vulnerable and that she too experiences insecurity and seeks love as a form of support. Her crying, like the narrator’s after Moonlight, is compared to the natural phenomenon of rain, which makes things grow. This connects the moment to the blossoming seed symbol.

“She tells you she loves you and now you know that you don’t have to be the sum of your traumas, that multiple truths exist, that you love her too.”

Summarizing the power of love to encourage, the narrator here recognizes his right to be loved before his emotional collapse in the following chapters. This sentence picks up the same ternary form as some of the chapters, with “love” bracketing the central, contrasting idea of trauma.

“You flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.”

This line reads like a rap lyric and references the use of the word “King” between Black folks to refer to praiseworthy Black men. It suggests that the reason for the persecution of Black masculinity is in fact its power, threatening the status quo.

“The artist always gives something to the portrait, and here you’re seeing what manifests when you cannot say what you feel: it escapes anyway.”

A beat that enhances the theme of The Difference Between Looking and Seeing, this again suggests that the body communicates when words cannot. Once again, the gaze is more honest than anything else.

“To love someone like that, to know how beautiful and wholesome and healing such a love is, and to turn your back on it required no strength at all.”

“Love” weights the front half of this multi-clause line, making it rhythmically startling when the line ends abruptly and monosyllabically with “no strength at all.” It is another version of the narrator explaining that not choosing connection is easier.

“You had no intentions of making a home in each other, but only to stay for a moment, only to feel safe for a moment.”

Looking at another Black man outside the train station wearing headphones, the narrator feels a profound connection through their wordless eye contact, again pointing at the power of the gaze. The line also highlights The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community in creating safety in a hostile world, and such immediate connection illuminates the narrator’s extreme pain at every Black death to which he bears witness.