The Deep by Rivers Solomon

The Deep by Rivers Solomon is a novella that I bought just before the Hugo finalists were announced, with this novella among them. The premise was what particularly grabbed my attention: the horrible and fascinating premise that pregnant slaves thrown overboard birthed a new species of merpeople.

Yetu holds the memories for her people—water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners—who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities—and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

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.

As is explained in the afterword, this novella is a piece of art in conversation with two previous pieces of art. Building on and reinterpreting the same mythology. You don’t really need to know any other background to understand the story, since each retelling (for lack of a better term) is entirely self-contained. That said, I think my understanding of events in The Deep was aided with having remembered the premise from the blurb, included above. (Regular readers may remember that I rarely pay much attention to blurbs, but this is one case where I was glad to at least remember the premise.) A key aspect of worldbuilding/history is revealed slowly in the book and I think it helped me to have an idea of the characters’ origins a bit earlier. Your mileage may vary, however.

A key idea explored in The Deep is that if societal memory and specifically memory of trauma. The situation when the story opens is like this: one member of the wajinru people is the historian and only that person holds all the memories of past wajinru and events. Everyone else has a strong tendency not to dwell on or remember anything for very long. Our protagonist, Yetu, is the designated historian and not terribly happy with the role. Apart from anything else, she finds it difficult to be the repository of historical trauma for her entire species. She also finds it hard to interact with others who have such short memories, even about their own lives. As well as exploring how intergenerational trauma should be remembered, and by whom, The Deep questions whether it should be remembered at all, as Yetu grapples with some of these issues.

The Deep was a good read, though I found it was a little slow to start and not the sort of book I could read quickly. I recommend it to people interested in the premise and, perhaps, to fans of merpeople.

4 / 5 stars

First published: 2019, Saga Press
Series: Not really, but in conversation with other works
Format read: ePub
Source: Purchased from Kobo