46 pages • 1 hour read
Rivers SolomonThe Deep
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Conflict Between Self-interest and the Interests of Society
One of the novella’s central animating themes is the perceived conflict between one’s own interests and those of society. This theme is explored primarily through Yetu’s eyes and experiences. Although she is already 34 years old, Yetu undergoes a transformation similar to one found in a bildungsroman, a genre that traces the development of an adolescent to an adult. These types of novels typically chart the spiritual and psychological development or “coming of age” of a protagonist through a hero’s journey. Yetu’s main animating conflict, as is often the case in bildungsroman, is her perceived sense of alienation from society, the constraints imposed by societal expectations, and her family’s demands on her.
The novella begins with a belated Remembrance ceremony, which exacerbates a tension that Yetu perceives between her interests and those of her society. This is a conflict that manifests most clearly in her relationship with her amaba, who pushes Yetu to remember her duty without empathizing with or understanding what this duty entails for her daughter. Leading up to the ceremony, fear and anger are building within Yetu. In conversations with her amaba and Nnenyo, Yetu expresses bitterness about their failure to understand her predicament and putting her in this position to begin with. She feels the ancestors supplanting her independent sense of self, which has led to near-death experiences several times throughout her life and made her into something she never wanted to be.
Once the Remembrance is underway, these feelings of alienation become increasingly acute and urgent. Solomon writes: “As she commanded them to remember, she wished she herself didn’t have to. The rememberings had stolen Yetu away. Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?” (52) She regards her loss of identity as something she was actively robbed of, a sacrifice that she has been required to make to maintain the status quo. It drives her to both despair and resentment, envious of the full lives that other wajinru enjoy at her expense.
After the ceremony, Yetu becomes convinced that there is no way that any part of her would physically or psychologically survive another reimplantation of the History and decides to flee out of a sense of self-preservation. Yetu states the risk explicitly, thinking “[the wajinru would] fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake” (67). Her role as the historian and the burden of the History has put her in an impossibly compromised position, in which she cannot help but see her survival as at odds with that of her people.
Since Yetu’s personal identity was suppressed by the process of becoming the historian when she was only 14 years old, she must reconnect with her adolescent past to grow into the hero who saves the day at the novella’s end. Once she is ashore with Suka and Oori, her main work as a character and hero is to recall who she is, discover her personal desires and needs, and learn to distinguish them from the needs of the collective. She notices this change in herself: “She wasn’t used to speaking so freely about her wants and needs. […] It had always been a battle between what the wajinru needed, what the ancestors needed, and what she needed. A single lonely girl, her own needs never won” (166-67). Through her growth and the rememberings conveyed in the second-person chapters, Solomon argues that it’s not an issue with Yetu’s disposition so much as the historian role is unfair. It is too large a burden for any one person, and systemic change is needed to alleviate it.
To resolve the conflict between self and society, Yetu learns a new way to understand and navigate the tension through her relationship with Oori, who has been dispossessed of her history and homeland and mourns this loss. When Oori leaves and Yetu feels the impending threat of a storm that could devastate both the wajinru and Oori’s world, she realizes the importance of connection, however painful. Solomon writes: “She imagined how it felt when the History left her, the freedom of it, but if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point?” (195) Though Yetu is isolated in bearing the History alone, she is equally alienated by abandoning it and her people. In the end, this tension is resolved through Yetu’s transformation: her willingness to take on the History, which she understands is a way of forming a connection with the collective. Her willingness to accept this role mirrors the willingness of the wajinru to share this burden, finally bringing balance to the self and society in a sustainable and more just way.
The Burden of History
Solomon’s novella wrestles with the role of history in shaping one’s experience of the present and possibilities for the future. This is a common theme in Afrofuturist and African diasporic literature, which contends with the ways that the institutions of the colonial slave trade transformed African ways of living through violent intervention, dispossession, and displacement. This sense of displacement and metaphysical “homelessness” can inspire despair and rage in artwork, as artists, songwriters, and writers grieve the loss of knowledge and identity. However, this disjointed history has also inspired writers to use mythical, magical, or technological advancements to imagine a connection among ancestors, homeland, and members of the African diaspora around the world. The Deep includes a range of narrative perspectives that differently cope with and interpret the burden of their history and the tragic secret of their origin, primarily those that have served as historians: Zoti, Basha, and Yetu.
Zoti perceives the origin of the wajinru—the fact that they emerge from the pregnant bellies of dead enslaved women—a reality too painful for the wajinru to bear. Because of this, she decides to create the role of the historian. The historian, as a concept, embodies and absorbs the emotional consequences of collective trauma. While it is intended to allow for the collective to embrace peace as an identity, harboring the collective pain isolates the historian from their people. From Zoti’s perspective, Solomon writes:
We never wanted our people, our kindred, to suffer the loneliness we have known. Over the years, when others came to us desperate to talk about it, we encouraged them to forget. […] We reached into their minds and searched, taking away the hurtful moments when we found them. (63)
Zoti believes that this selfless act ensures that the zoti aleyu, transformed into wajinru, will find unity in the experience of peace rather than suffering. However, in doing so, they rob them of the truth and a key piece of their shared history.
Basha’s internalization of the History has a different effect. Initially, the burden of the History moves him to understand the two-legs as his mortal enemy. When he experiences the rememberings, he doesn’t see peace or even sadness. He sees pain and anger, which inspires a righteous rage. When Omju refuses to support Basha’s plan to seek vengeance on the two-legs, Basha feels unjustly alienated by the self-appointed leader. Basha is able to persuade the rest of the wajinru to join his side, collapsing the tension between the historian and society by showing them the brutality of the rememberings that make him most angry. He unifies the wajinru around this anger, a reunification with the whole that is powerful enough to devastate the world. Basha “pass[es] on the rememberings to them. They must have the depravity of the two-legs fresh in their mind” (139). He creates a collective identity among the wajinru by constructing a version of the History that most effectively inspires anger.
Yetu, on the other hand, experiences extreme alienation and despair in her role as the historian. The same memories that drive Basha to reunify the wajinru lead her to near-suicidal levels of isolation. The burden of history drives Yetu to an existential crisis, believing that her interests are so at odds with her people that their survival will only be accomplished by her complete annihilation. Solomon writes: “Her brain could not hold the History and the present. She felt the wajinru as they moved in the shadows of the womb, a great hulking black mass surrounding her. These were her people, her extended kin, but they were also death itself” (39). She feels violently threatened by her people and, as a result, feels deep resentment for all that condemned her to this existence. The burden of the History overpowers her very thin sense of self, which she can only recover when she flees and reconnects with the two-legs that Zoti and Basha tried to erase from the zoti aleyu memory and the world.
Yetu’s decision to leave the wajinru with the rememberings gives her the space that she needs to remember herself and gives her people the time they need to realize the unjust nature of her role. Together, they devise a plan that reincorporates the memories and Yetu into society. Additionally, as a result of her relationship with Oori, Yetu reunifies her people with the two-legs, their distant kin, finally closing the distance created by the transatlantic slave trade.
Collective Memory and Cultural Identity
The Deep explores the significance of collective memory and cultural identity through the creation of the wajinru history and people. This appears in both the characters’ journeys and the form of the novel itself, as Solomon uses both the limited third-person to narrate Yetu’s individual perspective and a collective “we” to narrate the History. As such, the novella both explains and illustrates the significance of sharing a cultural identity.
Through her relationship with Waj, Zoti determines to develop a shared language and history for the zoti aleyu that they collect throughout the ocean. The experience of abandonment from a figure that they consider kin and even, perhaps, a god, inspires Zoti to ensure that no “strange fish” has to navigate the deep alone ever again. Solomon uses the second person to describe the zoti aleyu’s process for building a community:
To protect ourselves from those who’d destroy this precious thing we’ve fashioned out of scraps and leavings, we build cities. The materials of our structures are mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater. Our language flourishes until we’ve lost count of the words. We have words for every creature in the ocean. We have words for every region of the water. (88)
The imagery here sketches the parameters of zoti aleyu cultural identity; they are unified with the sea—its creatures and plants—but they are also inherently rooted in “carnage,” hinting that this identity formation is inextricable from violence. Knowing this, Zoti tries to separate this pain from the collective memory by creating the role of the historian as a method for preserving this history.
Basha, too, commits to preserving and protecting the collective memory and cultural identity of the wajinru. However, he does not do so by creating safe havens and secrets but by disseminating knowledge of their pain. When he perceives that their entire civilization is threatened by the intervention and violence of the two-legs, he decides to protect the collective of the wajinru people through violent means. He calls to them: “The two-legs will not stop until we are extinct,” we say. “Like salmon, like the mighty hammerhead, monk seals, various sea turtles, fin whales, and so many others. Are you ready to take back what belongs to us?” (215). This call to arms unifies the wajinru around the shared emotion of anger and the shared purpose of self-preservation. They are called to protect what Zoti created in a new form of collective identity.
Finally, Yetu and her wajinru community determine to save their cultural identity and collective memory by sharing it among themselves. This is a matter of survival of the collective. They see the value of this as it lifts the deadly burden off of the historian but also provides new insights into the History. Since each wajinru can reflect on the rememberings from within their personal experiences, dispositions, and histories, they may yield more varied understandings of the significance of the past.
