In Conversation

This week we spoke to Caleb Azumah Nelson about the sanctity of his writing practice and the inspiration behind his latest novel, Small Worlds.

Interviewed by Nancy Adimora and Amanda Kingsley

NA: Take us back to where it all started. Where did your writing journey begin?

CAN: I feel like I've been writing all my life. Once a year, my mum will bring out this short story that I had published when I was 10 years old. She absolutely loves it and she’ll always say that that’s where it all started. But when I was around 16, I had this moment where I was being asked what I wanted to do for A Levels and I was being told that the decisions I was making would inform the rest of my life. I spent so much of that time thinking about what I really wanted to do, and I've just always had this real obsession with language and storytelling, and the ways in which we, as communities, tell stories in order to achieve a sense of closeness. So I decided that I wanted to write. I had no idea how it was going to happen, but this desire to write became my guiding north star for almost a decade before I signed my first publishing deal.

AK: When did your interest in writing transition into wanting to become a published author? Or do you feel like those two ambitions were the same?

CAN: I think they’re different. There's definitely crossover, especially now that a lot of my work makes its way into the public sphere. But for me, my writing practice is the thing that's mine, and the process of writing is the thing that I find the most joy in. There are multiple versions of the things that I write - there's the thing that's mine, and then there’s the thing that everyone else gets to hold. My writing takes on a new life each time someone else holds it. But for me, I really enjoy going back and forth and working my way through a process of self-confrontation. When I write, I’m facing myself and facing these parts of myself that I wouldn't always get to explore in the everyday. Despite the fact that it can be quite difficult, it's a real joy to be able to do that.

In the past year and a half I’ve made real efforts to keep my writing practice contained. I have a private writing space, a little studio that I write from, and when I go in there, no one's hearing from me between the hours of 7am and 12pm. I don't exist. A bat signal literally has to appear at the window for you to be distracting me during that time. Whenever I go there, there’s not always this push for production; I can just be in my own headspace and I can roam around in my mind. I’m not sure if I answered your original question?

AK: Yes, I feel like you're saying that when you initially decided to be a writer, you understood that to be an author, but you separate the practice of writing from what you put out?

CAN: Yes, 100% - the craft of writing is so important to me. When I was writing Small Worlds, I was keen on asking myself what I could do differently to really push myself from a craft standpoint, because I felt more confident as a writer and I knew that I wanted to take more risks. I didn't want to feel comfortable. I loved the process of writing Open Water, and I could see how Small Worlds could have been another love story about two people, but I felt like I wanted to expand the scope. I wanted to explore how a multitude of people could love each other, and yet not always be able to express that love. I really wanted this book to give a sense of space and language towards the things that you can't always articulate, but you can definitely feel within you.

NA: Most people would have read or at least heard about your debut Open Water, which went on to win numerous awards. Can you tell us more about Small Worlds, what was the inspiration behind this story and what were you trying to achieve with it? 

CAN: So from a top line point of view, when I started, I understood that the novels that I'm writing exist in this kind of loose trilogy about Black art and Black expression, and the freedom that you might find when you're able to express the love that you feel for someone else, or towards something else. I was trying to figure out how this novel could sit within the same universe as Open Water, and once I understood that music was the main thread that was going to be running through both novels, I began to think about the different ways I could push and pull with this idea of music and rhythm. I also began thinking about the ways in which the novel could feel like one continuous song, how it could have verses and choruses and refrains and things that return.

Small Worlds was initially a short story I wrote about a month after I'd finished writing Open Water, and these two characters, Stephen and Del, appeared to me in a fully formed way - their sense of playfulness, their closeness, their shared language of intimacy came to me immediately. It was during the middle of the lockdown, and I was also feeling a lot of the anxiety that was just permeating the world. I also had this real sense of personal and collective grief that I think a lot of us were feeling for the people that we were and the people we were becoming during that time. Anti-blackness was also knocking at our doors so I began thinking about the notion of creating these small, private and intimate spaces where Black people can house our freedom for brief moments. That was really where things started. A lot of my work is not necessarily plot driven, it's mostly vibes and atmosphere and texture. It’s about building worlds that feel real enough for people to wander through and interact with.

AK: The story is set across three summers from South London to Ghana. I'm half-Ghanaian and I was really moved by the vivid descriptions of Accra, specifically in the penultimate chapter when you were writing from the perspective of Stephen’s dad. I don't know how often you visit Ghana, but I was wondering how you managed to paint such a detailed picture. Did it involve a lot of research?

CAN: There were a couple of things that had to happen in order for the novel to be written. I took a trip to Ghana last year, which was the first time I'd been back in 16 years. When I arrived, it felt less like closure and more like something was opening up within me. I was only there for 10 days, but to have my feet on the ground, and to see myself and my rhythm reflected in the actions and the speech of others was very special. 

But there were also real moments of grief for me. My maternal grandmother passed away in 2017, which felt like a severing of my connection to that place in a really big way, because she lived with us for the first 10 years of my life. I couldn't go back for the funeral, I just didn’t have it in me, so going back last year was an opportunity to grieve in a sense - which was really important for me, both emotionally and spiritually. I also got to see my family’s photo collection, which included negatives from the 1940s. All the photos had been really looked after, they were all intact and carefully boxed up, and it was unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

I don’t know if either of you have read Wayward Lives by Saidiya Hartman? It's a collection of essays that really explore the spaces of Black women in the 1920s, or maybe the 1930s. I could be wrong about the time, but she uses this technique called ‘critical fabulation’ where she writes stories to fill the gaps in the archives. When I was going through my family’s photos, I was told that what I was seeing was just a small fraction of the collection and I couldn't get through everything while I was there. I thought it would be beautiful to think about writing into spaces using Hartman’s technique. So to be able to take an image of the road my parents grew up on, and imagining what it could have been like in those times and rewriting into that space. That’s a technique I tried to adopt with this novel.

NA: I was also really interested in the way you infused Ga into the story. When you switched languages, you often did so in a way that made it clear that English wasn’t always able to capture the true essence of what a character was feeling. Why was the inclusion of Ga important to you? 

CAN: I guess because Ga is my first language, it's the first language my mum spoke to me. I often think about the limitations of language and when I hear terms or phrases in Ga, it feels like it’s getting closer to how specific things can actually be. Rather than being tired, you can express that you’re tired to your bones, rather than being hungry, you can really speak to desire. For me, Ga feels more full. It feels more rich, and I wanted to have space within the text for that. I was also thinking about the ways in which diasporic language is a mix of multiple languages, and how we're always trying to find ways to combine languages to express how we truly feel.

AK: Before we end I wanted to quickly go back to the idea of you having a writing studio - why was a separate, physical space important to you, and do you feel like it’s had a tangible impact on your writing?

CAN: I had to make the intentional space for myself because although I knew where writing was in my priority chart, I also knew it wasn’t always being respected in that way. I’ve always been the type of person who writes at very specific times of the day, and whilst having a physical space is a luxury, it’s what I felt I needed to make it clear that this is my time for writing and it can't be touched. I wanted to build a space that's as intentional as possible, so that when I'm writing, it's as intentional as possible.

People don't always take what you're trying to do as seriously as you will, you know. They won't feel exactly what you're feeling in that moment where things need to emerge. And I’m not saying that in a ‘nobody gets me’ kind of way, I mean it in a literal sense because it's actually really difficult to convey how you're feeling when you're trying to pull a story from yourself. And so, in a way, having that space is an act of self care. I'm looking out for myself.

NA: That’s a beautiful way to look at it. And finally, if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be?

CAN: I feel like, first and foremost, you really have to trust your own voice. You have to be listening, and you have to trust the voice that emerges - even if it scares you or seems foreign to you. Moving towards myself is one of the biggest parts of my practice. I always describe it as trying to get out of my own way to make space for who I actually am. Making space for yourself to be honest is probably the most important part of any writing practice.

Caleb Azumah Nelson is a twenty-nine-year old British-Ghanaian writer and photographer living in South East London. His first novel, OPEN WATER, won the Costa First Novel Award and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, and was a number-one Times bestseller. It also won the Bad Form Book of the Year Award, a Betty Trask Award and a Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Sunday TimesYoung Writer of the Year Award, Waterstones Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. He was selected as a National Book Foundation '5 under 35' honoree by Brit Bennett.

You can read an excerpt of Small Worlds here.