By Nikita Blair
When I saw the cover of The Deep by Rivers Solomon, my mind immediately bounced back to the Animal Planet 2013 documentation Mermaids: Body Found. A friend of mine had told me that The Deep was more about memory and history, but still with the image of that fake in my head, I somehow thought it would have been something else, a deep sea adventure story includes mermaids and whales.
I was wrong, of course, and my friend managed to sell the book sufficiently to surprise me. The Deep more than just memory. It’s poetic rumors about the nature of memories, our individual and community experiences with our healing stories and cross-generational trauma. Within its 150 pages, this novel became so complex, that I postponed this review so that I could have an animated book club discussion to process everything in it.
Even the circumstances of this book’s creation were an interesting story. Solomon, who certainly did a good job and deserves all the prize and earnings nominations they have created, did not offer the basic premise of The Deep on their own. The concept’s origins began with the 1992 techno-electro album and, over the past 27 years, the concept went through a game of phone, as actor and musician Daveed Diggs puts it, leading to the upcoming novel let us read it today.
So, in this review, I’ll try to unpack a core theme The Deep and to explain just a little of the fascinating history that led to its creation.
“Our mothers were pregnant with two legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the ocean floor, unaware of the two-legged surface occupants. ”P. 28
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade historical record written in blood, details the many atrocities against various people who were stolen from different African Nations. One of the most insidious of these atrocities was the fact that pregnant women – considered to be a troublesome and sick cargo – were thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks during the Middle Ticket.
This fact forms the foundation of Solomon’s novel. They take this horrific event and make an interesting guess: what if those pregnant mothers gave birth to babies who breathe water at sea. What if these babies, free from slavery and ignorant of the horrors of their dynasty and of the ugliness of the surface world, went on to form communities and live peaceful lives in the abysmal depths of the ocean?
These people are the wajinru, the “chorus of the deep”, and the main character, Yetu, is one of the mermaid-like beings. Yetu is special. Unlike her fellow warriors, whose memories fade within weeks or months, Yetu has more complete long-term memory and her brain chemistry is more flexible than the others. As a result, at the age of 14, she was chosen to become the wajinru Historian. It is her duty to capture the entire History of her people – every memory, feeling and emotion from all the wajinru of the last 400 years or more – so that she can return the ritual once a year, during a three-day ritual called The Remembrance is a history for the people so that they can remember who they are and where they come from.
But, there is a problem. While Yetu’s brain chemistry makes her a good Historian, she is easily overwhelmed by the weight of her people’s history. She loses herself in spontaneous Memories for weeks, and the process erodes her individuality and sense of self-preservation. What makes it worse is that she is lonely. No one around her, or even her own mother, remembers enough to understand how painful History is to preserve, and the wajinru themselves have developed a culture of being more dismissive from the past.
When the time for Remembrance rolls around again, Yetu finds herself at odds: should she continue to protect the History to her detriment, or should she protect her health and individuality and leave her history after?
“Just don’t ask who I am? Where do I come from? What does it all mean? What is that? What came before me and what could come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where history should be and that is in the form of endless longing. We are cavities. ”- Amamba for The Memories, p.8
For such a slim volume, Solomon managed to pack in a significant number of themes. Most of these themes relate to individual and community connections to history and memory. Yetu’s character and his role as historian seem to pay homage to the thankless hard work and oftentimes that historians of the world do to keep our stories from fading away. Wajinru’s method of preserving history – forcing a single person to keep the value of generations of pure memories in his head – seems reminiscent of the fragility of oral histories and oral storytelling traditions. In a way, Solomon advocates for sharing these stories more widely, keeping them in duplicate so that if something happens, they will never fade.
More importantly, however, Yetu’s journey is about cross-generational trauma. Yetu suffers throughout much of the book under the weight of its people’s history. Although she understands why she is suffering, the people around her have only vague impressions of her who have long forgotten their stories, and therefore cannot fully relate to the battle of Yetu. This lack of understanding – exacerbated by the wajinru’s tendency to dismiss the past unless it is time for Remembrance – means that Yetu is part of a community, but is not supported by that community. This often leads her to have mental health crises that her people do not understand and punish, which aggravates her suffering.
So many of us are struggling under the pressure of personal history or even a generation that we do not fully understand and cannot process properly because of the lack of context. On a grander scale, there are so many social evils that confuse us because of spontaneous or classified histories. As such, we, as humans, cannot really improve unless we face these problems together. I really appreciate this message in Solomon’s work.
“They all held pieces of the history… They shared it and discussed it. They were grieving. Sometimes they just wanted to die. But then they would remember it was done. ”P. 148
Healing, at individual and community levels, is possible. But the journey to face history and to heal is often painful and can be overwhelming, especially when the truth is set bare and raw.
There are parts of the book where the perspective changes from single first person to multiple first person as Solomon immerses her readers in two Memorials. It is through the combined voice of the ancestors and the living wajinru that we understand some of the painful history that concerns Yetu.
We also get to see how she is healing personally and how her community is improving as well. Once everyone is on the same page after the Remembrance and once, they can all talk about it among themselves and embrace one another through the worst of the pain, the whole community can heal.
I think the best part about this is that once the Memorial is over, Yetu and her mother are able to discuss the History together, and her mother even gives her an insight into the history never thought of it before. In doing so, she unlocks more potential from Yetu in the end, which leads to a great finale.
The Deep has gone through three major rounds of Phone to get itself into book form, and could continue indefinitely, happily taking on the adaptations of all new interpreters, into the future ”. – clipping. p. 156
The Deep is a great novel. The story locked within its covers left me reeling as I thought about my own relationship with my personal and community stories.
But the story of how The Deep came to be is just as interesting to lovers of music, fancy and trans-medium collaborative productions. Back in 1992, James Stinton and Gerald Donald Drexciya and the triple instrumental album series “Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller” created. They, along with a few fellow musicians and illustrators created the original Drexciyan mythology. According to Daveed Diggs, they reasoned it as such: Fuses are alive in their mothers’ aquatic environment. During the middle section, pregnant women from Africa were thrown overboard during labor. So, could it be possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies who never needed air?
The project revolving around this mythos continued for 10 years until Stinton’s death in 2002, but the concept remained. Fifteen years later, the hip-hop band Clipping (stylized as clipped.), Led by Diggs, of Hamilton and Snowpiercer fame, sampled the Drexciya mythos to create Hugo’s nominated song, The Deep. This song imagined Drexciyan’s rebellion against the world surface in protest over climate change and the destruction of a devastating deep-sea seismic for oil. It was interesting to hear how they sampled Trexciya, turning a more utopian and tripling sound into a song about environmental protection and nature’s rabies.
“Remember when the first blast came
And the beat fell away and the dreams awoke
And the light blinks dimly and the fish bolts up
And the coral castles tripled them because they weren’t enough
And the conversation used to erupt like the floor earthquake
Like the bleached bones that the winged friends fled from their home
But the explosions wouldn’t stop ’cause they wanted black gold
And they had to have no gills to feel it ’cause they couldn’t be told “- a quote from The Deep by clipping.
Finally, in 2019, Rivers Solomon published their opinion on the Drexciyan mythos, but their iteration was largely based on a clipping song. They took the song, split it in half and used it as the basis for the Memories and for the voices of two important wajinru ancestors: the first historian and the vengeful historian who passed the role and history to Yetu. Solomon combined the song with his own unique prose, while also creating the wajinru and Yetu as niches in her imaginations of memory and history.
It was wonderful to see the sequence and how all artistes and writers built on each other’s work to expand the original Drexciya universe created back in 1992.
Collection
The Deep is a great book that takes a painful part of history, makes utopian speculation, and then takes the result of processing the relationship many people have with their personal and community histories.
The Deep a great read for Black History Month because while it deals with trauma, it also ends with suggestions for healing. It is also a great Republic / Mashramani Day read as it focuses on history and community, which have always been integral parts of our Republic Day celebrations.
I would like to thank Aurelius’ Raines, Elena L. Perez and Emiko of the FiyahCon Support Group Book Club for engaging me in an animated discussion about The Deep. We could not have written this review without your additional insights into the themes explored in this book.
You can scan the QR code below to listen to The Deep by clipping. or Drexciya album Deep Sea Resident I Tour.
Nikita Blair is a writer of speculative fiction and creative fiction. Her work has featured in Ku’wai Moray House magazine, The Guyana Annual, and the Commonwealth Author blog. A collection of her work can be found on her blog, blairviews, where she writes book reviews, essays, and articles on topics of interest.