The wajinru are the descendants of pregnant Africa slave women who were cast overboard during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Their children were born breathing water and created a civilization beneath the waves of the Atlantic. The Deep is the story of Yetu, a historian of her people, who alone carries the burden of The Remembering. She contains within her all the memories of every wajinru who ever lived, forced to contain and recall every tactile sense memory of the violence and trauma of ancestral pain. But carrying out this duty is slowly but surely killing her. Can she survive being the historian? And what will happen if she abandons her duty and her people?

In The Deep, Rivers Solomon (fae/faer) invites you to explore what it means to inherit ancestral and generational trauma in a fantastic underwater world populated by the wajinru, a mer-person like race of black people who created a civilization in the wake of destruction left by the casualties of the trans-atlantic passage enslaved Africans were forced to take to supply the demand for enslaved workers in the Americas.

Reading Rainbow, the queer book club that I co-lead at DPL picked this book as our March selection. A little background on this book, it was originally inspired by a song by the group Drexciya, then adapted into a rap song by the group .clipping of whom Daveed Diggs is a part. .clipping rejects the use of personal pronouns in their lyrics as a push back against the territoriality of some styles of rap songs, they do not use I, my, me in their lyrics. For The Deep they went even further, using only the phrase “y’all remember”. In Rivers Solomon’s adaptation into the novella The Deep, fae has focused on that phrase and given life to the wajinru and their tradition of The Remembrance. You can read more about the process in the end notes to the book, which I highly recommend!

The Remembrance is a recurring observance where the historian pushes out all the memories to the rest of their people so that they can all remember their collective past for a time before the Historian recalls all the memories and the wajinru can be free with only faint whispers to burden them.
This book was powerful, and a completely recommend listening to the song The Deep by .clipping as well. I heard the song after I read the book and it would be interesting to compare experiences with someone who heard the song first and then read the book. I recognized moments of the novella when I heard the song.

This is a very queer story, the wajinru live in a variety of family styles and shapes, some in polycules and some unpartnered. I appreciated the queernorm of their world, it wasn’t made into a sensational thing, it was just presented as part of their culture. There are a number of queer relationships in the story as well, but the story focuses on Yetu’s life and how she carries the history of her people inside her. Several members of my bookclub read her character as autistic, although that word is never used. I don’t want to give too much else away, because I recommend that you read this novella. The story was both about the burdens caring for community places on a few ‘strong’ individuals and the cost of being a caretaker, especially when you aren’t prepared for that role and didn’t choose it. But it was also a story about community healing and how that can happen in the wake of a massive traumatic event.

The writing of this story is very lyrical in places and sometimes I became confused about who was narrating because of the lack of personal pronouns, but I don’t find this to be a fault of the writer, just an adjustment of my thinking as we work towards being more identity inclusive. A good stretch of the brain for any reader. It’s a beautiful piece of well-crafted story telling and I liked how it ended. Recommended 100%!