The Deep

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close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Deep Author Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes Spurred by the promise of pain relief as much as by her amaba’s prodding, Yetu gagged the medicine down. Venom leaves slithered like slime down her throat and into her belly, and with every swallow she coughed. 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. In short, I would need to read this again before I can provide more thoughts. Something I would most definitely be willing to do. Haldeman, Peter (October 24, 2018). "The Coming of Age of Transgender Literature". The New York Times.

The both/neither characters are always referred to with plural pronouns "we", "they", and "their". This became confusing in scenes with many characters interacting at once. I got lost in one scene when I thought the whole pod of wajinru were engaging in a group response to Yetu's visions, but it was actually just one character. (Sci-fi authors should invent a singular gender-neutral pronoun to refer to nonbinary characters. The only one available in English today is "it", which carries a connotation of non-human and/or non-sentience.) Discussion of The Penguin Book of Mermaids at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa by its authors, Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown. How Mermaid Stories Illustrate Complex Truths About Being Human Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode “We Are In The Future,” The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where the history should be and that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.” – Amamba about The Rememberings, p.8I didn’t know that we were already so close to the Remembrance,” said Yetu, unsure she even had the strength to conduct the ceremony. Finally, in 2019, Rivers Solomon published their take on the Drexciyan mythos, but based their iteration mostly on clipping.’s song. They took the song, split it in half and used it as the base for both the Rememberings and for the voices of two important wajinru ancestors: the first historian and the avenging historian who passed the role and the history onto Yetu. Solomon combined the song with her own unique prose, while also creating both the wajinru and Yetu as inlets into her imaginings of memory and history. I’ll be taking you to the sacred waters soon. The people will want to offer their thanks and prayers to you. You should be happy, no? You like the Remembrance. It is good for you,” Amaba said.

Tor.com (2019-10-03). "Announcing Sorrowland, a New Work of Gothic Fiction from Rivers Solomon". Tor.com . Retrieved 2020-11-05. 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. 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.

One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities.” Stories (and what is history if not a bunch of stories we tell about ourselves?) act much like a game of telephone. They are passed down, and thus they survive, but their shape changes as they get interpreted differently by every individual. In The Deep we are told that the role of Historian is one handed down from generation to generation, and we are presented with three different bearers of the title: Zoti, Basha, and Yetu. And through them we get three interpretations of history. To Zoti, the first Historian, it is vital to the continued survival of their people. To Basha, it is a call to action, past hurts fueling a righteous rage at present injustice. And to Yetu, it is simply a burden, too deep and heavy to carry on her own.⠀ also was not expecting a really beautiful f/f romance and I loved that! (the wajinru are also all intersex and choose their own gender, if any) Because of the Disney animated film, The Little Mermaid, we may feel inclined to think of mermaids as an appropriate subject for children. But it was, in fact, never thus, and folktales involving mermaids rarely have happy endings. 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.

Yetu closed her eyes and honed in on the vibrations of the deep, purposefully resensitizing her scaled skin to the onslaught of the circus that is the sea. It was a matter of reconnecting her brain to her body and lowering the shields she’d put in place in her mind to protect herself. As she focused, the world came in. The water grew colder, the pressure more intense, the salt denser. She could parse each granule. Individual crystals of the flaky white mineral scraped against her. Yetu did know what it was like. After all, wasn’t cavity just another word for vessel? Her own self had been scooped out when she was a child of fourteen years to make room for ancestors, leaving her empty and wandering and ravenous. We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba. Como decía al principio, un libro para releer, y de esos que dejan poso. Tan solo el final me dejó algo fría, pero eso no empaña lo interesante y reflexivo que me ha parecido esta novela.A historian’s role was to carry the memories so other wajinru wouldn’t have to. Then, when the time came, she’d share them freely until they got their fill of knowing.

What do we do with the trauma that we've inherited? It's the central question Yetu struggles with during her journey of self-discovery. It also happens to be the question millions of people whose history has been steeped in anguish and adversity. Do we let it define us? Do we ignore it? Do we drown in it? Or do we use it to build a better, more just civilization? ⠀ Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past-and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity-and own who they really are.a b c d Solomon, Rivers. "Rivers Solomon - Xeno-biography". Rivers Solomon - Mothership. Archived from the original on 28 September 2020 . Retrieved January 29, 2021.