It’s a quick read that’s going to stay with me for quite a while. The Deep is an impressive novella, with a fascinating and heartbreaking storyline and musical, emotional language. A hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing.

Yetu strained to feel Amaba’s words over the chorus of ripples, her skin drawn away from the delicate waves of speech and toward the short, powerful pulses brought on by her amaba’s gesticulations.“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?’. “Then what? What else would make you do something so foolish?” Amaba asked, her fins a bevy of movement. “I do not wish for death,” said Yetu, resolute despite the quiet of her worn voice. You must put those childish whims behind you.” Amaba waved her front fins forcefully as she lectured her daughter, the movements troubling the otherwise placid water. “Do you wish for death? Is that why you do this? You are grown now. What kind of dream makes someone lurk in shark-dense waters, leaking blood like a fool? If I had not come for you, if I had not found you in time…” Amaba shook her head, black water sloshing over her face. “Then wake up,” Amaba said, “and wake up now.

She’d been weeping for days, lost in a remembering of one of the first wajinru. “IT WAS LIKE DREAMING,” SAID Yetu, throat raw. 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. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity-and own who they really are. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past-and about the future of her people. 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 remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. 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. 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’ rap group Clipping. She says, “Where loneliness ends.” What is The Deep ABout?

The deep by river solomon