The Juncture talks to Caleb Azumah Nelson
Jess interviews author Caleb Azumah Nelson about his sophomore novel, Small Worlds.
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds (Grove Press) offers us this reminder: so much of remaining human, so much of the labour of being alive, is about seeking beauty in the everyday.
Nelson’s sophomore novel explores beauty through the practice of making an intentional space for oneself. I think of what this looks like for me: the buoyancy I feel as good music washes over me, my face scrunching up and my head bopping as incense smoke fills my room; walking without a destination on a windy day in High Park, listening to Ballaké Sissoko; the joy of exchanging stories in the kitchen with family as plantain crisps and stew simmers in preparation for a shared meal. This novel pierced my life at a moment in which I needed the reminder to calibrate my lens, to sharpen my focus on the small intimacies of my life.
Small Worlds follows Stephen, a first-generation British-Ghanaian son of immigrants, attempting to build a life for himself while balancing the expectations of his father with his undying love of music. It is a capacious novel – stretched across three summers, between London and Ghana – that tells the story of a young man trying to find space for himself and the different forms of love that keep him in touch with his truth.
I was lucky enough to speak with Nelson, over Zoom, this past August. We spoke about the importance of community-building, the multidisciplinary nature of his writing practice, our shared appreciation for the filmmaker Kathleen Collins, and the importance of Black youth recognizing themselves on the page.
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Jessica Kasiama: The novel shows us different examples of world-building. Your characters build small worlds for themselves by thoughtfully preparing a home-cooked meal, putting on a favourite record, or surrendering to the company of a loved one. What did your world look like, or feel like, while writing the novel?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: For Small Worlds, there was this sequence of moments where I began to realize that the things I valued in my life were specifically around community and a sense of gathering. World-building away from the fictional world of the novel by making space.
I find myself being drawn more and more to trying to create and make new spaces for myself and my community. Putting on dinners, having communal gatherings, encouraging us to go out and dance for an evening, going to concerts, or sitting in the park. When I wrote the novel, so much of it was in the wake of the first few lockdowns that we had, during the pandemic. People were slowly making their way outside. I think we'd had so much time to think about the things that we love, and that we value in this world. At the centre of Small Worlds is this real notion of love and expression. So much of it was me trying to figure out how to express love, both towards my community and towards the things that I love. Again, and again.
Jessica Kasiama: Writing can be such a solitary act, so it's always interesting to hear how people find that balance, especially having written a novel during the pandemic. So for you, world-building happened through the channel of community building?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Yeah, for sure. I could feel that although so many of the spaces that I write about aren't necessarily real places, the emotional bed of those spaces that I'm writing about is very much the same as they are in real life. I kept thinking: where do Black people house their freedom? And what does the world look like when you're building it with care, grace, and love in mind?
The writer Tina Campt has this beautiful book, Listening to Images, and at the beginning of the book she describes this idea of futurity where you're building a world that you'd like to inhabit in the future [in the now]. I think that was a big pillar for the novel: what do I want the world to look and feel like both for myself and for the people around me?
Jessica Kasiama: Can you talk about Beacon, the gallery exhibition and limited edition photobook, that functioned as a visual accompaniment to Small Worlds?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Beacon was special because it didn't necessarily feel like a separate thing. It felt like a physical home for the space that I wanted the novel to inhabit. And even though it was only on for a week, having a physical space, especially in a community that I grew up in and around was special. I had people who would come and visit every day, who would just come to be in a space because they felt safe.
There was a young boy who played in the park next door and every so often, he'd run inside. His mom would come, chase him around, and then walk around the space. It was a special thing to be able to see. And then, there were the uncles next door who would sit in the betting shop for the whole day but were also the artificial protectors of the space, making sure everything was running smoothly. It felt special to have this moment of gathering for the people in the community. It felt very much like an echo of what I was trying to do with the novel.
Jessica Kasiama: How did you decide what music to include in the novel?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: The two big musical influences on [Small Worlds] were J Dilla and John Coltrane. With Dilla, there was a much bigger chunk about him in the novel that had to be cut down sadly but one day, we’ll find somewhere for it. There’s this notion of having your internal rhythm and leaving room for something special and beautiful to emerge out of that. That was such a big thing for me as I was in the practice of writing the novel and in the ways I could see the narrative coming together.
And with Coltrane, there was this idea of sheets of sounds. So much of his music feels like lots and lots of notes playing at once, washing over you. I wanted that same feeling and texture with Small Worlds. I wanted to give this sense of tangibility to the world that I was making on the page. Giving the text a sonic quality helped with that. This was a continuation of [ideas] that I started with Open Water, where I was listening to myself and my internal rhythm, trying to figure out a way of making sure that the voice on the page was as close as it was to mine. But also asking myself to try and break my rhythms and tendencies, to find a way of pushing and shifting because so much of what I'm trying to do is [close the] gap between emotion and expression. And trying to figure out ways of using rhythm to get closer and closer and closer, whether that means speeding up or slowing down, playing with the pace, or encouraging breaks within the text as well.
It felt like a playful space that I was occupying. Even though some of the parts were heavy, it was a lot of fun to write.
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Donuts by J Dilla was released on the day of the musician’s 32nd birthday, February 7, 2006, which also happened to be three days before his death. He recorded the album in the summer of 2005 during an extended hospital stay due to complications from thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. I often think about how art allows us to confront the self and through the vulnerability of making, we are given the opportunity to face the preciousness of human life.
Nelson’s writing and his rhythmic use of repetition create music on the page, conjuring the sampling techniques of J Dilla. In form and content, Nelson provides a blueprint for what often feels unimaginable in this life: alongside the grief, violence, and pain of contemporary Black life are moments of intimacy, peace, and beauty.
I think of beauty as Saidiya Hartman writes about it, as quoted by Christina Sharpe in her essay on beauty as a method. I read Nelson the passage before asking my next question:
Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.
Jessica Kasiama: What does beauty mean to you?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: It wasn't until the novel was finished that I began to see where some of my other artistic practices were making their way into the text in a big way, such as my interest in music and my photographic and filmmaking practices. I was looking at the images and the films that I've made in the past couple of years, and noticing how there’s been a real shift for me in terms of going from personal responsibility to communal responsibility. A couple of years ago, I wrote this essay, called "Solace," which The White Review published. In a way, that was the prologue to Small Worlds. It helped me crystallize some of the ideas that I was thinking about and I originally thought a lot about this notion of refusal, especially in the face of anti-blackness, and what refusal can look like. I think so much of this novel was trying to find a way of encouraging beauty to emerge in the every day and trying to find a way of making seemingly mundane moments feel like a spectacle, because, in that, there's a sense of refusal for us.
For example, with Marlon, who is one of my favourite characters, he emerges and the world pauses for a moment. The people in the space around him can consider how they're feeling, who they are, and where they're going. When Uncle T appears in the novel, he kind of takes centre stage. It’s a performance of a kind but there's no dishonesty in what he's doing. This is him and he revels in taking that moment for himself.
There’s so much that emerges every day of this rendering of Black people as ugly, dangerous, or threatening. I’ve said it before but, this was an opportunity for me to show how beautiful we are.
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Marlon and Uncle T are two of the most interesting characters in the novels. Both figures glimmer when they enter the text and are so sensitively rendered. Take this description of Uncle T from the novel: “I catch a glimpse of his soft dreads, pulled up in a bun, revealing a kind face and a mouth full of gold. He sings like he’s singing to a lover at dusk, but I know it’s just him in the room. Bob Marley’s ‘Waiting in Vain.’ I raise a hand in greeting, and he calls back, and in that moment, memory, image and possibility slide across one another.” When you read this novel, read and reread scenes in which these characters emerge. I liken this magic, the magic of a photographer translating visual language into written language, to the fiction of writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins, specifically Exteriors, a short story that reads like a screenplay. I share this with Nelson.
Caleb Azumah Nelson: Have you watched her film Losing Ground?
Jessica Kasiama: Yes, it’s one of the movies of my life. I see such a connection between the film and your novel in the ways that the protagonist of Losing Ground is seeking an ecstatic experience or more simply, seeking embodiment. What’s your relationship to that movie?
Caleb Azumah Nelson: I remember thinking about that theme of ecstasy. I've written in my notebooks a bunch of times recently: when was the last time you felt ecstasy? I keep thinking of that. And so much of the desire that was pulsing through that film was [a desire] to be closer to yourself. It's also just so beautiful.
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As the conversation comes to its end, I think of what it would have meant to me to have stumbled upon this novel in my younger years. I think of the exclusionary nature of the canon and the lineage of Black writers and artists who have created work that, in the spirit of Carrie Mae Weems, imagines the unimaginable. We go back and forth for a moment, about the urgency of seeing ourselves in the world around us. Caleb offers this reflection: “My partner runs a publishing house and we were talking a lot about how necessary and urgent it is for more Black children to see themselves and feel themselves [in what they are reading]. I think it’s so important.”
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The question reverberates: “Where do Black people house their freedom? And what does the world look like when you're building it with care, grace, and love in mind?”
I think of my Congolese upbringing and being in African markets and beauty supply stores with my siblings as we watched our mother bond with our aunties and uncles.
These spaces existed in their own imagination, far outside of the pressures to assimilate into Western culture. They gossiped, shared plates of pondu and fufu, listened to soukous, and lived beautifully, all while trying to survive. These spaces housed intimacy. These spaces allowed for them to return to themselves, giving them room to create and preserve their own internal rhythms. In face of rampant gentrification and erasure of marginalized communities, how do we keep the spaces that hold us alive?
Through the portrait of a young man attempting to live as fully as possible, Small Worlds explores this question and so much more. Nelson brings his lens to the beauty found along his character’s journey of self and in turn, asks readers to come closer to their own lives and themselves as a way to survive.
Small Worlds is available in-stores and online.