The Deep

The Deep is a novella written by Rivers Solomon that is based on the Hugo-nominated song of the same name by the experimental hip hop group clipping. Their song was itself based on the afrofuturist mythology that Drexciya, an electronic duo from Detroit, created for their compilations.

Which is the sort of fascinating thing you learn when you read the acknowledgements.

The Deep is about a lot of things. On its surface, though, it is about the wajinru, a mermaid-like people who have great power over the ocean but little memory. For good reason they are a people descended from the pregnant African women who were thrown overboard during the slave trade, their unborn babies granted new aquatic life by the ocean. Theirs is a history of pain and strife. In order to thrive despite the suffering, it was decided long ago that one of their people a Historian should carry the burden of their history and collected memory. A responsibility that falls on Yetu, our delicate and long-suffering main character.

To be a Historian means experiencing every single memory as if it was your own. Yetu however, has a fragile constitution, and so this task, this weight she carries that has stripped her of any individual identity, is killing her.

So it is no surprise to us when, during an annual ceremony where the wajinru gather in order to receive the memories of their past for a brief time, time enough to satisfy a deep thirst for their own history, that Yetu, free from remembering, runs away.

What do we do with the trauma that we’ve inherited?

In the acknowledgements, clipping. describes the nested style of development this particular story has gone through as a game of Telephone, the original message relayed over and over, each time a bit more different. Drixceya’s songs were largely wordless, and so they started to tell a story through their song titles a provocative and engaging concept. clipping. took inspiration from it, added considerable amounts of verbiage, and sang a story about a world being destroyed by global warming, and about a people who rise up and exact revenge on the ones who caused it. Rivers Solomon heard the song, and decided to bring it back down to a more personal level, writing a story about a people, and their relationship to history. Their relationship to stories.

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.

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 finds her answer in The Deep. She shares it with her people. And she shares it with you, too.

Rivers Solomon has written a compelling, poetic, and thought-provoking story, with lyrical prose that enriches clipping.’s exhilarating song, with an imagination that expands Drexciya’s foundational mythos. It’ll stay with you. You will remember it.

I guess I don’t really know what I was expecting out of a book based on a song (which, I just learned is based on another body of work altogether), but this surpassed whatever those expectations were. While it’s not a perfect book, it’s an excellent modern day myth that that I found hard to put down.

Lovely and dark, haunting and visceral, challenging and ultimately transformative, THE DEEP resonates with the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the endless loving embrace of the sea, interrogating how traumatic history is carried and how it changes us. With the same spare lyricism that made AN UNKINDNESS OF GHOSTS so magnificent, Rivers Solomon draws us into a world where identity, memory, and community collide in strange and gorgeous ways. They bring us into a richly imagined world and lift us up, tearing at at us with beauty and grief and hope. They heal us.

As a trained historian and AfAm woman this book concept hit all the feel good points for me. History, sci-fi, Daveed Diggs-all of it. The book is really interesting concept and premise. The idea makes sense and the concepts of memory, forgetting both on the individual level and community level was interesting. I feel like the book grappled with these ideas but the solution seemed…simple to me. There were also some parts of the story that were hard to follow but that could have been intensional. Overall I really liked it, but had hard time following certain parts of the story.

Water dwelling creatures (aka badass merpeople) that are descendants of African slave women who were thrown overboard on the ocean crossing to America.

Tell me that’s not one of the most powerful premises to a story ever.

The Deep is not only written very well, but it’s done in such a poetic way that felt effortless.

This novella was inspired by the song “The Deep” by Daveed Diggs’s rap group Clipping. I thought it was so wonderful how this novella and that song and all of the creators came together to make something so impactful.

Yetu is the historian of her people. This role is bestowed on one to harbor all of the memories whether painful or amazing. One time a year, the historian grants the rest of their people the memories during the remembering.

Problem is, this overwhelming responsibility is killing her. She flees to save herself, leaving the rest of them stuck in the remembering.

By fleeing and meeting two-legged people, Yetu learns more about her past and her future, how to reclaim both her identity and theirs.

Do not sleep on this! And, it’s a very short read (less than 200 pages) and easily read in one sitting. And, don’t forget to read the afterword as it explains so much about the underlying story.

Also, without giving away too much, the inclusion of LGBTQ+ and, of course, BIPOC is always a plus.

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