Small Worlds

Yomi Sode called Caleb Nelson “a cultural archivist of our time”, and I couldn’t agree more. His second novel Small Worlds is another intensely poetic portrait of growing up in south east London. The novel follows protagonist Stephen over three consecutive summers, as he leaves th safety and structure of college. It’s sun soaked and full of heart, returning again and again to motifs that - like a chorus - knit each chapter together; deeply embedding the character’s (and indeed the author’s) Ghanaian roots, iterating the rich culture of dance to self-express, music when language fails.

I’m trading my sorrows, I’m trading my shame. She sings these words, knowing that if we’re in this room, then we’ve probably known sorrow, probably known shame. We know death and in its multitudes, but we’re all very serious about being alive. And since the one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing, we turn our mourning into movement.

Whether it’s because I read it during summer’s last days, when a final heatwave had Londoners seeking shelter from the sun; or because Nelson’s novel’s home, the seat of his writing, is one that we share - or an intoxicating combination of the two, his books are up there with my favourites. Small Worlds is about contemporary, black, male self expression. It’s about parental relationships, brothers, families split and spread across the world; migration, colonialism, slavery and generational trauma. It’s about friendships, family, lovers. It’s about dance, music, the feeling of bass in a crowd when there’s too much in this world to comprehend and all you can do is lose yourself to the movement and the moment.

And here, as the song starts, there’s another space, or maybe the space takes on a different shape, and the hats begin to skip and swing, the click of a snare, such fantastic motion, the vocal sample cut and pitch just right, a sound thrumming at the deepest parts of us, and we all begin to skip and swing, our bodies moving, such fantastic motion, and we’re there, almost there, when the beat drops, and maybe we would have been surprised the first time we heard it, the thud of bass sat atop a kick, but today, we’re pressed up against the sound, broaching the space, bumping against familiar and foreign, expression, presence, present, all of us, hands raised as if to say we are here.

The novel is set in the wake of the lethal shooting of Mark Duggan and Nelson captures this political moment in contemporary Britain in a way I’ve rarely read, putting front and center the experience of being young and black in a city full of brutality rooted in racism. Where violence is ever-present, and space to be authentic and free is in limited supply; friendships are as essential as air. This story captures raw emotion, brotherhood and belonging in times of change and loss, with grace and intensity in equal measure.

I pray then, like I’ve never prayed before, asking not for money, or a job, but that this new world I’m walking out into, this new world I’m building for myself, I ask that it be constructed from peace.

We all laugh through our own tears, but don’t rush them away. We allow each other to feel through the motion of our hurt, allow each other the space to break.

CW: Police brutality, murder, beatings