The Deep

According to The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980-2020, the term Afrofuturism includes a range of artistic techniques that center Black people and their relation to the past, present, and future. Afrofuturist artistic expression in music, fiction, and visual art represents African diasporic culture through a speculative, science fiction, or fantasy lens. These imaginative engagements with the history of the Atlantic slave trade project possible futures in which the formerly enslaved reclaim their power and imagine future liberation outside the scope and imagination of Western colonialism. By revising the history of their suffering, Afrofuturists imagine future technologies and civilizations that not only survived the brutality of slavery but thrived and created new forms and ways of life. One of the most popular examples of Afrofuturist media is the Black Panther Marvel series and its civilization of Wakanda.

Solomon’s The Deep is situated in a long tradition of Afrofuturist thought that recovers the history of the Atlantic slave trade to imagine an alternative future for those who lost their lives in the ocean. The novella adapts a song by the hip-hop group Clipping, which was commissioned for a 2017 episode of the podcast This American Life. The song, also titled “The Deep,” is itself an homage to the acid/techno duo Drexciya, who created a mythological universe in their music, much like Solomons’ wajinru. Drexciya’s music, according to Clipping, “refer[s] to a utopian underwater civilization founded by African mothers thrown overboard from slave ships. It’s like if Wakanda were Atlantis” (Liptak, Andrew, “How Rivers Solomon turned award-winning Afrofuturist song ‘The Deep’ into a book” The Verge, 31 Jan. 2019). Solomon uses both the general concept and vocabulary developed by Drexciya and Clipping, including terms like “two-legs,” “surface dwellers,” and the wajinru’s close relationship with whales.

According to literary critic Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Solomon’s novella meaningfully contributes to and reshapes the Afrofuturist genre, which largely focuses on the experiences of enslaved men and masculinized forms of technology, power, and visions of freedom (DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Kinship in the Abyss: Submerging With The Deep.” Atlantic Studies, 2023, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 348-60). The Deep foregrounds both non-male characters and feminized forms of transformation, regeneration, and kinship. In addition to the wajinru’s origins—the pregnant women who were thrown overboard from slave ships—and the reverence with which they treat the “womb” in which the Remembrance is disseminated, Solomon’s novel features a queer love story between Yetu, a non-human hermaphroditic creature, and Oori, a human woman. This departure from the conventional masculine hero of Afrofuturist narratives places Solomon’s The Deep in a Black feminist tradition. Other examples of this tradition within Afrofuturist literature include works by Dionne Brand, Nnedi Okorafor, and Nisi Shawl, as well as the anthology Octavia’s Brood, edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha.