The Deep (2019)

The Deep is a 2019 fantasy book by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. It depicts an underwater society built by the water-breathing descendants of pregnant slaves thrown overboard from slave ships. The book was developed from a song of the same name by Clipping, an experimental hip-hop trio. It won the Lambda Literary Award, and was nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards.

Background

In 2017, Chicago Public Radio program This American Life aired an episode called “We Are in the Future” dealing with Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science and philosophy of history that explores the developing intersection of African diaspora culture with technology. Show producer Neil Drumming also commissioned a song for the episode called “The Deep” from hip-hop group Clipping. According to the group, "The Deep" is an homage to Acid/Techno duo Drexciya, residing in the same mythological universe created for their music: "All of their records refer to a utopian underwater civilization founded by African mothers thrown overboard from slave ships. It’s like if Wakanda were Atlantis. We mashed that up with a few details from Parliament’s Motor Booty Affair album, as if they and Drexiya were writing about two different aspects of the same place."

Saga Press senior editor Navah Wolfe became "transfixed" by the "stories that need to be told" in the album Clipping put out a short time later, which led to a Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation (short form). With the trio's blessings, she set out to find a writer to bring the story to life. She found the voice she was looking for in Rivers Solomon, who was already interested in much of what was in the material, including "diaspora and slavery, ecological devastation, memory and remembrance", the lyrics evoking African women drowned on the journey across the sea, of climate change and environmental destruction, of the passion of the ancestors and drive of the survivors:

Our mothers were pregnant African women thrown overboard while / crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships. We were born / breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the / seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers until / their world came to destroy ours. With cannons, they searched / for oil beneath our cities. Their greed and recklessness forced / our uprising. Tonight, we remember.

Solomon found the existing outline of the story well-suited for novel form, but still had to develop a main character to carry the story, with a unique voice and back story. This became Yetu, the protagonist, memory-keeper of her people. Clipping members Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes were involved with the book's development throughout, and are listed as co-authors. Daveed Diggs narrates the audiobook.

Plot synopsis

The wajinru, are water-breathing merfolk, the descendants of thousands of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard from slave ships crossing the Atlantic. The women drowned, but their babies survived, and eventually developed into their current form. They have built their own idyllic underwater society. Only one person—Yetu, the Historian—holds all their often-traumatic memories, so the rest are spared the pain. The historian must suppress all their own personality and desire, and only once a year, the entire community relives the memories together.

The burden she carries threatens to destroy Yetu, so she flees to the surface while the community is observing its annual remembrance ritual, finding herself trapped in a tidal pool. Here, she meets some of the dreaded "two-legs", and in particular, Oori, who is also, in her own way, a memory-keeper of her people. Oori brings Yetu fish to eat, and the two develop a bond. Yetu comes to realize that not all the two-legs are white slave traders.

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.

Having been abandoned by their Historian, the wajinru beneath the surface are slowly being driven mad by the burden of their people's traumatic memories. Their madness is creating a storm like the one that previously engulfed the surface world. Yetu must decide whether or not to return, saving both her people and the surface-dwellers like Oori, at the cost of retaking the burden of her people's memories.

Reception

Reviewing for NPR, Jason Heller calls The Deep "immersive, gut-wrenching, and poetic". He notes that the unique composition of music, poetry and prose from various creators that is The Deep is more typical of television and film, but that it works remarkably well in this case. Heller concludes: "For all its complexity in origin and concept, The Deep is an elegantly concise and simple novel. Yetu's plight is an essential, emotionally fraught conflict between duty and sacrifice, between tradition and progress, between the individual and the common good, and between vengeance and forgiveness. Furthermore, enjoying the story doesn't require any foreknowledge of clipping., Drexciya, or the mythology of the wajinru that precedes it; while those elements certainly enrich the novel, Solomon's text stands alone as a wise, daring, touching, and important addition to the Afrofuturist canon, and one that carries its own rhythmic and melodic grace — not to mention a wholly relevant and righteous gravity."