Open Water

The narrator meets the woman through her then-boyfriend and his friend, Samuel, who introduces them at the narrator’s request. She immediately becomes the narrator’s love interest and eventually his lover. She is tall, at first with “braids under a beret” (6) and later “cropped blonde hair” (106). The woman is a dancer attending university in Dublin, but she often returns home to the apartment that she shares with her mother in south-east London. She is thoughtful but light-hearted and very spontaneous—at least when it comes to the narrator. At times, she serves as the physical embodiment of The Liberating Power of Black art and Community since her love has the same supportive and encouraging effect on the narrator as his experiences with music and performance.

Although the text mostly depicts the woman as able to live unfettered by the racism that traps the narrator, she, too, experiences fear of violence. Even with the narrator, whom she clearly cares for and trusts, she has “a weird moment” going to sleep with him, thinking that he “could kill [her] in [her] sleep” if he so chose (82). The narrator also mentions that his “partner says she’s concerned for [him] to travel at night” (130), demonstrating that she is aware of the dangers to Black safety, especially Black male safety.

The woman has a small arc, in that she goes from dating Samuel and burying her attraction to the narrator to accepting her love and desire. Their closeness eventually results in her daring the social censure of her friend group, resulting in “many people in [her] circle [shutting her] out because of what they think happened” (139). However, when the narrator refuses to speak to her from the depth of his depression, she ends the relationship, though she continues to think “about loving [him] and what that meant” for the entire year before he returns to ask her forgiveness (162). The novel is, therefore, an apology to the woman who represents the possibility of hope.

Although a central character in the narrator’s life, Caleb Azumah Nelson only portrays the narrator’s grandmother through the narrator’s daydream interactions with her. She died during the summer of 2017, before the book’s timeline begins that winter. Through his imagined scenes with her in Chapters 3 and 23, this grandmother is presented as kind and loving, encouraging the narrator to be open and accept affection. She has a sense of humor about her grandson’s foibles that of which he is aware, imagining that she “smile[s], and laugh[s] to herself, keeping her amusement contained, encouraging [him] to go on” about his first meeting with his future lover (10).

Her brief appearances adhere to the archetype of the wise woman, dispensing support and advice to a younger person in turmoil. She is a woman who prays for her family and offers her grandson the later-repeated advice, “there’s no solace in the shade” (11), meaning that to hide oneself away doesn’t make anything better.

The narrator’s younger brother, Freddie, is a student at university who comes home to south-east London during school breaks. He is five years younger than the narrator. Due to their father’s inability to fully care for them, the narrator also feels that he had a hand in raising Freddie, describing him as “[his] brother, [his] charge, [his] duty, [his] son” (26). Their interactions range from light-hearted to emotional when Freddie struggles, “gulping for air,” and the narrator can “hear the tears” (25-26). Freddie’s need for emotional support sometimes takes away from the narrator’s ability to care for himself.

Yet, in the midst of the narrator’s major depressive episode, the caretaker role is switched. In response to Freddie’s question of how he’s doing, the narrator breaks down into tears. Freddie understands that the narrator is hurting the way he once did and puts his arms around his older brother.

The narrator’s father is mostly an unseen influence on the narrator. Through his father, “a man for whom love was not always synonymous with care” (22), the narrator is encouraged to repress his feelings. In the narrator’s first memory of seeing police brutality towards a Black body, he looks to his father only to see the man turn away. Considering calling his father during an emotional crisis, the narrator rejects the idea, knowing that his father “will hide behind a guise, will tell [him] to be a man” (35). However, when his father learns of his own father’s death, the narrator takes on a paternal role as he “hold[s] [his father] close, letting him breath in the comfort of [the narrator’s] arms” (66). The narrator’s father contributes to the theme of The Failures of Language, as both he and the woman’s father do “not have the words” (35). They represent the repression of Black masculinity in white supremacist societies that is passed from fathers to sons.