The Deep, by Rivers Solomon

I published my review of THE DEEP, by Rivers Solomon, on Goodreads. But I thought it would be a good idea to post it here as well. I got access to an advance copy of this novella through Netgalley. The book is scheduled for publication on November 5, 2019.

Rivers Solomon recently wrote on their twitter feed: “me discussing writing today with a friend: i wanna be murdering ppl with every line… to clarify, i mean murdering readers. emotionally.” This applies, I think to Solomon’s new science fiction novella THE DEEP. The book just slays me. It is about about trauma and history, and about remembering and forgetting.

The book refers to the real history of the Atlantic slave trade, but also to an imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, that was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya. In a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, Drexciya tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, “populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships during the Middle Passage who had learned to breathe underwater in their mother’s wombs.” These merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. In this way Drexciya imagines a partial escape from the horrors of modern history, and reclaims what the philosopher Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic.”

Other artists have further developed Drexciya’s vision. Ellen Gallagher’s ongoing “Watery Ecstatic” series of mixed media artworks (2001- ) offers a Black feminist, and also “posthuman and interspecies,” reworking of the Drexciya myth. More directly relevant to Solomon’s novella, the avant-rap band Clipping released a song called “The Deep” in 2017. This song is set in the world imagined by Drexciya, and brings its narrative into the present. The song envisions the underwater realm threatened, today in the 21st century, by global warming and undersea oil drilling, and imagines the Drexciyans’ apocalyptic response to these dangers.

Rivers Solomon picks up Clipping’s scenario, and once more reimagines it. (In an Afterword to the book, the band compares the transmission from Drexciya to Clipping to Solomon as like a game of Telephone, in which each reiteration of a phrase creatively expands and transforms it). Solomon gives us the story of Yetu, the official Historian of the merpeople, who are here called wajinru rather than Drexciyans. Her job is to remember their past. She hoards the memories of these aquatic human beings, all the way back to their ancestral origins, when their first generation was born underwater from the wombs of kidnapped African women thrown from slave ships into the open ocean. By remembering, in excruciating detail, everything that has ever happened to the wajinru, Yetu grounds them in history. On the one hand, she uses her knowledge to remind them who they are. On the other hand, by remembering for all the others, she frees them from the burden of their history, allowing them to forget, and thereby to enjoy life in the present.

The history of the slave trade is deeply traumatic, and Yetu suffers mightily from being forced to remember it. She experiences directly, in mind and in body, the tensions that animate her whole society. On the one hand, to forget your history is to become unmoored, to feel a kind of hollowness, a cavity (a word the novella uses several times). Without some sense of growth and development across time, there can be no feeling of accomplishment or achievement. On the other hand, to remember your history is to be traumatized by it anew, and to feel unable to escape it. As Karl Marx famously wrote, “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Yetu is literally trapped by this dilemma. Her job of remembering and preserving the past makes it impossible for her to function in the present — let alone to enjoy it. But by taking the task of remembrance upon herself, she allows her people both to have fulfilling lives in the present, and to maintain the historical background that they need to thrive. She is torn between the need for self-care, and the need to hold things together for her people and for the ancestors. THE DEEP is really about how Yetu negotiates between these two needs, both of which are crucial to her survival, and yet which seem to contradict one another. It’s a powerful and affecting book; you can’t read it without being deeply shaken by the conflicts that it depicts in such vivid prose.