Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

You speak and realize that, in slowing down to speak, you can breathe. 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.

To have a home is a luxury. To know someone before you knew them introduces a freedom previously unknown, when in their presence. Perhaps this is what home is: freedom. It’s easy to stay furled up where you can’t live, like folding a book in half on its spine to fit into pockets.

No one has bars harder than your mum as she prays for you every day that this will not be the day. You know that this day could be the day but still you laugh it off when your partner says she’s concerned for you to travel at night. You flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.

Saidiya Hartman describes the journey of Black people from chattel to men and women, and how this new status was a type of freedom if only by name; that the re-subordination of those emancipated was only natural considering the power structures in which this freedom was and continues to operate within. Rendering the Black body as a species body, encouraging a Blackness which is defined as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious, finding yourself being constrained in a way you did not ask for, in a way which could not possibly contain all that you are, all that you could be, could want to be. That is what you are being framed as, a container, a vessel, a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime, before anyone else who is currently in your lifetime, and now you are here, a body, you have been made a body, and sometimes this is hard, because you know you are so much more.