Best Novella - The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Publisher – Hodder & Stoughton

Published – Out Now

Price - £4.99 Kindle eBook 

Yetu holds the memories for her people; water-dwelling descendants if pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners; who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one – the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible, and miraculous, are destroying her. 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 will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past – and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim their identity and own who they really are

Blogger’s note - this novella was inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for This American Life Episode “We Are in the Future” – credits go to Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes.

I have a strange gap in my family history – for a variety of sad reasons we don’t know much about my father’s earlier family, so we are not sure when or how the family moved from 19th century Ireland.  We can guess why they joined in as part of that Irish diaspora, but I don’t know who they were; where they came from or under what circumstances they came from and therefore I really can’t see Ireland in any way as part of me. For me this is just a puzzle but there are though many groups in the world where migration was never a choice that they themselves got to make and the ramifications of war, slavery and oppression are now being seen in so many places around the world. Between 1525 and 1866 it is estimated that 12.5 million Africans were shipped to work in the Americas of which only 10.7 million survived that ordeal (and that is just an estimate based on available records). In that huge number of 2M fatalities where those found dead; those who had became very sick and even those who were/became pregnant – the dead and living thrown into the ocean as they would not be profitable. Over two million people. This was a centuries long huge vile crime against humanity that the descendants of those who survived it all must continue to process in their own way (often unsupported by various governments who ultimately built their empires off the back of slavery). How can you deal with that sort of immense pain? Should you? These are the questions that Rivers Solomon brilliantly asks in the haunting and yet beautiful novella The Deep.

In the deep of the oceans far below where sunlight can reach are the wajinru a whole underwater civilisation that now live in the sea. Humanoid but with adaptable fins and tails rather than hands and legs. They’re able to build, feed and create stories with strengths and powers that mean even sharks choose to leave them in peace. Long lived, able to influence the weather and can communicate across the seas they are a unique species. But they were born in the shadow of tragedy – the sea itself changed those unborn babies; whose mothers were thrown overboard by slave masters, into the wajinru form. The whales then found the first babies and the wajinru slowly came into being and grew in numbers forming their own civilisation. In their society memories can be passed to each other through electrical currents so you can see and sense the past of anyone as if you were there. But such a traumatic start to their creation is not easily endured so one person is chosen to be holder of the entire memory of the wajinru. Deemed their Historian this role ensures that once a year at the Remembrance all wajinru gather and for a few days experience all the Historian’s stored memories so that everyone briefly gets to see where they come from.  Then they all forget, and the Historian gathers everything up. This has been the way for years.

Yetu was just fourteen when she was chosen for this role. For her these super vivid and often jumbled memories of torture, pain and brutality are immense and debilitating. Yetu increasingly hides from her people; doesn’t want to talk about it and finds Remembrance itself draining and terrifying knowing she must eventually scoop it all back into her head and be alone once more for a year.  But this time when the Remembrance starts, she flees her people and leaves all her past behind at last.

This was a stunning read. Solomon has created a fascinating society that while has human ancestry has its own mythology; way of life and biology – the power to use self-generated electricity; an optional gender and procreation process plus the ability to fight sharks!  There is a beautiful sight of the entire powerful groups forming as part of the Remembrance a huge mud-based womb that they will circle around in unconsciously reliving their whole combined past. Reading that passage was One of those experiences where a book gives you all the emotional texture of the moment that even a movie can’t capture with just visual splendour. And yet despite all this power and status its not a perfect world. Yetu is the sacrifice for everyone else to live in bliss.  Imagine having as a teen to process your family’s entire story so vividly and see every bad and good thing at once? And in reality many teenagers do have to come to terms with finding out how people used to treat them for reasons just of skin colour or ethnicity here we feel that emotional dislocation starkly. The thirty something Yetu that the book follows is a woman who has considered suicide and rarely looks after herself. She is the person dealing with the ramifications of her people’s pain alone and no one is helping her – we can’t blame her for running from her destiny. 

What then follows is a powerful split narrative. For those in the mud-womb we get several glimpses of key moments in wajinru history from the first time their ancestors realised where the babies were coming from and several good and bad encounters with humans afterwards showing us how when angry the wajinru could easily destroy much of our world. While we also follow Yetu; now free of memory and duty getting to try to work out who she is. As part of that trip away from the deep sea she meets and builds relationships with a family of humans on the shore but by forgetting everything is she actually helping herself move forward either or honour the sacrifice of those who came before? In particular the key relationship is with Oori the last human survivor of a people whose homeland is now destroyed. Oori and Yetu are two damaged women from different species yet find an opportunity to open to one another more than they have with anyone else but that duty at the bottom of the ocean still calls...

I was hugely impressed with Solomon’s An Unkindness’ of Ghosts which explored slavery within a generational star ship. This time it’s a story looking at what happens after such an atrocity.  How can your process this alone?  Should you even try? As a privileged white British male, it gave me just a glimpse of the pain people whose ancestors came out of this tragedy are still having to deal with. I’m sure I would be missing some elements, but this was a story I needed to understand and see how it could or even would it be resolved. Fantastical, mystical and powerful and a story about how love and sharing with others can ease a burden.  This is definitely one of the best novellas I’ve read in 2020 and one I really think all lovers of fantasy should be picking up.

Bonus feature – the song that inspired all of this is available to listen here