The Deep

How does the author use narrative perspective to help convey the relationship between personal memory and collective history? What effect does this have on the reading experience? On contemporary relationships to the history of the transatlantic slave trade?

How does the novella contrast the lives of surface dwellers with the aquatic society of the wajinru? What differences do you notice between the societies’ structure, purpose, and relationship to the rest of the Earth? 

What does the novella aim to teach about the history of the transatlantic slave trade? How does the process of remembering the horrors of slavery change your understanding of the present and the future?

What is the role of love and vulnerability in Yetu’s transformation from the beginning to the end of the novella? How does she experience love from her amaba and family? How does she experience love or vulnerability with Oori?

How does the novella explore the roles of gender and sexual identity in shaping relationships, intimacies, and emotions? How do the different meanings of gender and sex in the wajinru world contrast with normative understandings in our world?

What does the novella say about the purpose of History in shaping the future? What role can history play in imagining more harmonious social relations in our world?

What do we learn about mother/daughter relationships, or relationships among different generations of women, through the novella? Even in this vastly different society, these relationships seem troubled. What can be learned from the way that Yetu and Amaba heal their relationship in the novella’s conclusion?

What does the novella say about the way authority can be claimed, exercised, or abused? How do leaders protect and control their people? Are there better and worse ways of doing so, according to the text?