Romance blooms between two broken characters in a deliberate way that isn’t a straight, fast line towards love. The novella made me feel like I was at sea-giving me a ride with its turbulent waves, and unable to see what lies ahead, like looking at the bottom of the ocean, knowing unseen, mesmerizing creatures lie beneath.Įven the mid-section of the book, where Yetu is confined to a single, placid location is simmering with emotion. The Deep has an uncanny ability to condense in-depth description of a species’ history, characters with unending facets, and dialogue that has one-hundred unsaid sentences burbling beneath the surface. But Yetu doesn’t have the mental constitution of past historians-she needs some sort of release from history’s anxieties. Things have, at least at first glance, operated quite swimmingly for the wajinrus in the past, with a good symbiosis between historian and the other wajinrus. Every year, Yetu shares the past with the other wajinrus, granting them lingering inklings of the memories that they can carry until the next year, rather than full-forced images of trauma, adrenaline, and complexity that Yetu must carry throughout her waking life.
Yetu’s job is to single-handedly carry the history of the wajinrus’ ancestors, a latticework of the past, both positive and negative.
Some generations since their inception lives Yetu-a wajinru historian. These babies became mermaid-like creatures, creating their own community in the sea. The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society-and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award–nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’s rap group Clipping.īased on a narrative song by Clipping, which was inspired by an idea from techno group Drexciya, The Deep explores a world of water-dwellers called wajinru–creatures originating as babies of black, pregnant women who were thrown into the ocean during the transport of African slaves to America.
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