Open Water

A central motif in the novel is breath, deployed to illustrate both The Emotional Consequences of Oppression and The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community. The narrator’s ability to feel like he can breathe mirrors his sense of safety and freedom. He reflects on this, noting, “it’s a strange turn of phrase […] being allowed to breathe, having to seek permission for something so natural” (78). This line points at society’s racist view of Black people as property, which forces them to abase themselves in order to be permitted existence. The text’s reference to the scholar Saidiya Hartman underscores that this social framework is the result of the history of slavery.

When both the narrator and his brother are in pain, they “gulp” or “gasp,” and the narrator describes “suffocating in [his] own room” (135). Yet he also “stop[s] breathing” (53) in response to his lover’s intense gaze and finds his “breath robbed” when relating to a play about two Black brothers (54). The narrator also “inhale[s] as deep as it will go” when smoking a joint with Leon (127), pointing at the safety and ease he feels in that interaction. Breath (or its absence) therefore emphasizes moments when the narrator is emotionally affected. He struggles for breath when he experiences oppression but breathes more freely among his Black community.

Music is a frequent element of the narrator’s life in Open Water, serving as a motif that illuminates The Liberating Power of Black Art and Community. The protagonist describes Black music as “some of the greatest expression of Blackness—that ability to capture and portray a rhythm” (99). The majority of his emotional breakthroughs are accompanied by music references, as in Chapter 7 when “the rapper confesses his pain” and forces the narrator to deal with his own (35). He connects with his lover through music, as well as other Black people, including Daniel, with whom he shares a love for Dizzee Rascal.

The narrator also describes the relationship with the woman through the lens of music, making clear that she manifests the liberating power of Black music in a very personal way. At their first real meeting, the lovers split a pair of headphones, and the narrator describes this as “[t]wo people closing a distance made shorter by the trailing wires holding them together” (15). The wires transmit music and music is a force that brings the two people closer. Once they are in a defined romantic relationship, the narrator describes them as “a pair of jazz musicians” and their love as music that they created together (96). This implies that their relationship shares the healing properties of Black art.

This motif suffuses the beginning of the text, representing the relationship between the narrator and his future lover. It appears first in Chapter 2, as Freddie suggests that the narrator not pursue his feelings for his friend Samuel’s girlfriend, but the narrator feels that it is too late as “to give [desire] a voice is to sow a seed, knowing that somehow, someway it will grow” (8). In his dream interaction with his grandmother, she repeats the exact same words. Wrestling with his falsely platonic relationship with the woman while she is still dating Samuel, the narrator thinks, “the seed [he] pushed deep into the ground has blossomed in the wrong season” (19). This motif is emphasized by the narrator associating the woman’s scent with flowers, describing it as “sweet like the torn petal of a flower” (45).

The motif returns in the last third of the book at the peak of the lovers’ relationship. The narrator recalls “the seed [they] planted so long ago grown, the roots clutching in the darkness, pulling each other closer” (110). This image represents how difficult the narrator finds it to separate from his partner.