The Deep

Like the chapters that precede these, Chapters 8 and 9 work together to gesture toward the symbolic relationship between past and present conflicts. The storm and violence enacted by the wajinru under the guidance of the historian Basha is drawn into symbolic connection with the storm that is brewing in Yetu’s absence, as the wajinru suffer and struggle to make sense of the History. Solomon allows Yetu to rewrite the past to reclaim a more just future that brings balance to wajinru society and their relationship with the two-legs. In Yetu’s version, Solomon emphasizes the significance of feminine forms of growth, transformation, and regeneration that stand in sharp contrast to Basha’s masculinized and destructive drive.

From within Basha’s memory and perspective, the History takes on a different quality. Whereas for Zoti and Aj, the History was a painful reminder of their suffering—a history of the wajinru’s tragic origin as the orphaned children of enslaved women left for dead—it inspires only anger in Basha. Solomon writes: “Where the History saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose” (130). Basha’s passion is most naturally channeled toward anger, which, while not necessarily a destructive nor inappropriate response to the History, becomes a blinding rage. In response to the unjust deaths of children, the obliteration of so many wajinru, and the burning of his lover, Basha cannot bear The Burden of History. Instead, he uses the power of the History to channel the wajinru toward vengeance.

The novella renders this a righteous rage, though it is in defiance of Omju’s more conservative guidance. This vengeance is understandable, similar to Yetu’s potentially destructive decision to flee. Solomon builds empathy by sharing Basha’s tender side: his feelings of love for Ephras. Within his consciousness, Solomon writes: “When we arrive at Ephras’s den, we embrace him, our bodies curling together. No one else can pull tenderness from us like this, make us weak with longing. It is a weakness we cherish” (132). Basha’s anger, a driving force of passion in his life, is undergirded by a tenderness and love that he recognizes as weakness. Within a normative gender paradigm that only distantly applies to the mythical world of the wajinru, Basha has a masculine fear of vulnerability that causes him to interpret his emotions as a sign of weakness. Rather than a weakness, though, his love gives his pursuit of justice a tender quality. His love for Ephras is in no small part the inspiration for his leading the charge against the two-legs. The desire to seek retribution from the two-legs that “cut [their] population in half” (139) similarly builds on Basha’s desire to care for and nurture his people.

There’s a small note of doubt introduced about the purity of this mission— whether it is the “right” choice for the wajinru—when they recognize themselves in the two-legs:

This is the first time the other wajinru are seeing the two-legs outside of the Remembrance. They are shocked by their faces, similar in many ways to our own. They know what we have known since taking on the History. The two-legs are our kin. […] This does not make us more gentle. It has the opposite effect. (140)

This moment foreshadows or anticipates the novella’s eventual resolution between Yetu and Oori. Basha’s harnessing of energy and interpretation of History rendered it as a battle cry. In stark contrast, Yetu discovers, through her own experiences of love, intimacy, and empathetic understanding, that the History may mean many things and teach many lessons, all of which can be true at once.

The realization that the assembly and rendering of History is itself an interpretive act empowers Yetu and the wajinru to act as more conscious shapers of their reality. In contrast with Basha, Yetu is initially depressed and overwhelmed by the tragedies she witnesses in the rememberings. The same event that sends Basha into a rage—the slaughter of three young wajinru—leads Yetu to consider suicide. Basha turns his anger outward toward what he perceives to be the source of the wajinru’s suffering, and Yetu turns her anger inward to consider self-annihilation as the only option. Through her love and loss of Oori and reconnection with her mother as a carrier and interpreter of History, Yetu realizes that the meaning of the rememberings is in their control. They neither have to inspire blind rage nor despair. The wajinru develop a new relationship with the History, one in which they can experience the pain of the memory yet stay alive in the present: “They each held pieces of the History now, divvied up between them. They shared it and discussed it. They grieved. Sometimes, they wanted to die. But then they would remember, it was done” (149). This new arrangement of Collective Memory and Cultural Identity allows the wajinru to both hold the pain and knowledge of the past and distinguish it from themselves. The two-legs are neither a force that they want to annihilate nor fear.

Finally, the reunification of the two-legs with the wajinru in Yetu and Oori’s embrace articulates a new ethos for the wajinru. By going back over the History—not just in her imagination but in her embodied experience of herself—Yetu is able to see a path forward. She brings Oori to the ocean “where life began. It was where the life of the wajinru began, and reaching backward, the life of two-legs, too” (154). Their joint descent into the deep is figured as a return to “the womb,” as Oori remembers how she once breathed inside her mother’s womb. It’s a movement backward and forward in time, simultaneously, that figuratively reunites the orphaned wajinru with their two-leg mother. Solomon uses the imagery of ocean tides and feminine forms of reproduction to finally settle the contradiction between the past and present, empowering femininized forms of creation and knowledge to carry the characters into a more hopeful future. The revolutionary energy of Basha is transformed into something more generative than destructive.