The Deep

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Whilst reading, I was overwhelmed with feelings that I was being told some wise and ancient lore; something dug up from the deepest depths of a rich oral history. Se trata de una novela corta que habla de la importancia de recordar nuestro pasado, de nuestra identidad, de la importancia de la comunidad y del sentimiento de pertenencia. Me ha parecido un libro muy poético y especialmente relevante. As of 2018, Solomon lives in Cambridge, UK, with their family. Originally from the United States, they received their BA in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity from Stanford University in California and an MFA in Fiction Writing from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. They grew up in California, Indiana, Texas, and New York. Their literary influences include Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Bradbury, Jean Toomer, and Doris Lessing. The Deep won the 2020 Lambda Award and was shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo awards. Monique Roffey

Yetu strained to feel Amaba’s words over the chorus of ripples, her skin drawn away from the delicate waves of speech and toward the short, powerful pulses brought on by her amaba’s gesticulations. I found this story to have a lot of deep points that would make for great discussions. One major theme of the story is remembering. Our main character Yetu is resentfully given the “gift” of collecting and harbouring the memories of the Wajinru ancestors. These memories create huge physical, mental and emotional responses and therefore can create a lot of pain for the viewer. This is why Yetu holds the memories so the Wajinru do not have to experience them. Tejada, Andrew (2020-10-17). "Announcing the Winners of the Inaugural Ignyte Awards!". Tor.com . Retrieved 2020-11-05. And my personal jarring moment that completely took me out of the story - just one line, incongruent with the rest of the narration — the inner monologue line “Was such a thing passed down in DNA?”. Please, do not throw the reader out of the story by mentioning DNA, clearly not a wajinru concept, wajinru who refer to humans as “two-legs”. Minor, but irritating nevertheless. (Replace DNA with “blood” and it suddenly reads less jarring. Where were you, editors?) Since the history of the wajinru is too painful for them to bear, but the thought of forgetting is even more impossible, they appoint one member of their species to carry the memories for everyone. Every year, the historian must deliver the history to their people, allowing them to process the lessons and value of the memories before becoming blissfully unaware once more.The Deep is a novella written by Rivers Solomon that is based on the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by the experimental hip hop group clipping. Their song was itself based on the afrofuturist mythology that Drexciya, an electronic duo from Detroit, created for their compilations.⠀ Yetu finds her answer in The Deep. She shares it with her people. And she shares it with you, too.⠀ She wasn’t, but she’d make the journey unaided anyway. She didn’t want her amaba carrying her any more than she already had. The memory of Amaba’s fins squeezing around her tail fin, dragging her away from the sharks at nauseating speeds, lingered unpleasantly, the same way all memories did. This fact forms the base of Solomon’s novella. They take this horrific event and make an interesting speculation: what if those pregnant mothers gave birth to water-breathing babies at sea. What if these babies, free from slavery and ignorant of the horrors of their ancestry and of the ugliness of the surface world, went on to form communities and live peaceful lives in the abyssal depths of the ocean?

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. The wajinru - water-breathing merfolk - are the children of pregnant enslaved women who threw themselves overboard when kidnapped. Their memories, too painful to hold all at once, are held by Yetu, a deeply pained Historian finding herself repeatedly retraumatized not just by the memory, but by holding it on her own. With a blend of gorgeous writing and a kindness towards Yetu and every other lead that resonated with me deeply, The Deep hit me hard.This has been another round of Joey dashing into a book too fast and missing the ‘lgbt’ label. 🤦‍♂️ And despite knowing how important Yetu is to her people, she decides that she can no longer endure.

Also, and this may just be me, but I had some serious The Giver vibes with the whole collective-memory-in-exchange-for-a-functional-society thing. It kind of worked and kind of didn't. I am here, Amaba. I promise,” said Yetu quietly, exhaustedly, though she wasn’t sure that was true. Adrift in a memory that wasn’t hers, she hadn’t been present when she’d brought herself to the sharks to be feasted upon. How could she be sure she was here now?Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities-and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Queer and intersex themes are unmistakably layered in, too. For instance, there’s the odd, awkward, somewhat adorable scene in which Yetu and Oori discuss how sex works for their respective species and whether they’d like to try it with each other. The way this conversation plays out is a way that would only ever work for a pair of queer autistic characters, and that alone makes it fun to read. Unfortunately, just as I would get most into the book, it would jump to other characters or to some time in the future, leaving me wondering each time where I was. I almost felt like I was flailing about, lost in water. Perhaps this was Solomon's intent. If so, they did it very well. It was frustrating for me the reader though and prevents me from giving the book 5 stars. However, this is juxtaposed against the revelation that the wajinru warred against the surface world a generation prior. This is told through the memories of Basha, Yetu's predecessor, who lived when the wajinru were threatened by global warming and energy companies desiring the fossil fuels lying below the ocean bed: "Below us, deep beneath the sand, there is a substance they crave. It is their life force. They feast on it like blood." Basha led the wajinru, whose emotions can telekinetically control the ocean's water, in creating a massive storm and tidal wave that wreaked devastation on the surface world.

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These people are the wajinru, the “chorus of the deep”, and the protagonist, Yetu, is one of these mermaid-like beings. Yetu is special. Unlike her fellow wajinru, whose memories fade within weeks or months, Yetu has a more intact long-term memory and her brain chemistry is more flexible than the others. As a result, when she was 14 years old, she was chosen to become the wajinru’s Historian. It’s her duty to hold the entire History of her people – every memory, sensation and emotion from all the wajinru from the past 400 years or more – so that once a year, during a three-day ritual called The Remembrance, she can return the history to the people so that they can remember who they are and where they come from. This story hit me hard from the very beginning. I was so angry at the Wajinru for putting the burden of their entire history all on Yetu's shoulders. All alone, in so much pain, pain they should have been sharing together rather than dumping it all on Yetu and it was killing her, literally. As the story progressed though I understood why they did it. I felt so much for Yetu. At times I related to certain things from being disabled, neuro-divergent and a rather sensitive INFP. I just wanted to hug Yetu and scream at the rest of the Wajinru that they were killing Yetu and didn't even seem to notice.