Caleb Azumah Nelson: “The confrontation with myself enabled me to find a brief freedom.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses writers’ digital artifacts to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel, Open Water, unfolds like a sequence of pulsating sensations. When the narrator, a photographer, is introduced to a dancer in a London pub, they are both so impressed with each other that their initial exchange elicits a nervous flapping of arms instead of a customary handshake or embrace. They fall carefully, hopefully in love, their increased intimacy communicated through the swipe of a hand or the smell of a borrowed hoodie. Their romance grows against a backdrop of Black art, music, cinema, and literature, a cultural tapestry that offers these young artists protection against a world where being seen and heard is a fight. The recognition that this fight is not often settled in their favor fuels the novel’s secondary narrative, in which we see the photographer—a young Black man coming of age in a European capital filled with police violence, class antagonism, and cultural erasure—question how he can live, let alone love. “You wondered if you were wrong,” Azumah Nelson writes, taking us inside his character’s head. “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. Or if you are destined to feel it in small moments here and there.”
Reading Azumah Nelson is an experience that has been described as a ’s narrative moves like jazz, punctured with loops, diversions, and improvisation. The characters’ relationship is sketched through a series of images that emerge as quickly as they fade, as if tied to a rolling film reel. The London-based Ghanaian writer has always been omnivorous in his modes of expression—from playing violin and basketball growing up to writing and photographing today. But there is one question he seems to return to, in his work as well as our conversation: In a world filled with violence and
