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a few of my favourite things (2023)

Early this month, I read Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson over two days, sending photographed excerpts to K:


Del and I take the night bus back towards Peckham

It’s here, when I’m with her, I know that a world can be two people, occupying a space where we don't have to explain. Where we can feel beautiful. Where we might feel free.

Morley’s on Rye Lane

riding the orange line to Shoreditch or further. Dalston or Hackney or London Fields

There’s a performance going on today, at Bussey Building, you know that spot?


Her life is informed by loss but because she’s lost, she loves and loves freely, openly, with all she can. [...] Life is too short to be holding back, she’ll say.

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I told K that Small Worlds was the best book I read this year. “I cried. I’m inspired. Sooo good!!! About love, grief, anger, family, music, language, home, friendship, joy, freedom, burden. But also specifically, Black love, Black grief, Black anger, Black joy, Black freedom.”

Small Worlds resonated with me in many ways. I love that it’s set in Peckham, where K lives and where I briefly lived. I know Morley’s, the orange line (my fav!) and Bussey Building.

I love the music references, even though I don’t know them. I love the way Azumah Nelson portrays family and romantic relationships. I love the way he expresses the limits of language. He writes movingly about migration, the burden of parental expectations, and dreams smashing up against state violence. Open Water, his debut, is equally exquisite.

Sad and angry but also joyful, beautiful and free. Written for his people and community.

I’ve spent the past few days reading interviews/conversations with Azumah Nelson.

I feel inspired by the way he draws on music, photography and poetry, often by other Black artists, the way he talks about writing as a process for discovery and self-confrontation (vs. a book as ‘the thing that everyone else gets to hold’), and the power in stripping back (‘I constantly asked myself: How do I get as close as possible to the feeling? How do I push further so the reader doesn’t just know what I’m saying, but feels it too?’).

Below are a few quotes from Azumah Nelson’s interview with Mary Wang for Guernica:

I wrote the core draft of Open Water in a space of two or three months. During my research, I amassed quite a large collection of images, videos, texts, and sound. Every week, I would revisit what I’d gone through and select what resonated the most. These were the first images I knew would make their way into the narrative.

I’m always collating and collaging, trying to see how images work off one another. I discovered that if I referenced images or films in Open Water, it would take the narrative into another dimension. It’s like sampling music—like J Dilla or Madlib—you’re not just sampling a specific sound, but you’re sampling what was in the room at a specific time.

When you sample in music, you’re taking a snippet, a phrase and repurpose it into something else, a new melody or drum pattern. With images, I was interested in feelings, emotions, the gaze—the gaze, especially, of how Black people were seeing and being seen. I was interested in the possibilities that could emerge from a single moment.

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They were originally short, lyric essays about photography, music, film, and about Blackness and freedom. They were a testing ground—quite a few were written in second-person, the form I eventually used in the novel. I wanted to first explore the feelings I was interested in, and write the fictional events outwards from there.

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The book contains many different love stories: There’s the love between the pair, but there’s also an ode to creative expression, specifically Black creative expression, and there’s the love for South East London, where the narrator is from. In a sense, this was a work of love about all the things that I love and have loved, an exploration of what freedom can be afforded to you when you love someone or something.

What freedom can be found in the safety of love? In places where you can be honest, can be true, can be yourself? That’s the freedom I was interested in: sitting alongside someone you love, or being in a place you love, and not feeling like you have to hide. Rather than the everyday violence you might encounter when you look like me, you’re greeted by love and care. That in itself is freeing.

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A few other favourite things:

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