The Deep

These two chapters work together to situate the reader, first as a witness of the Remembrance, seeing things from Yetu’s point of view, and then as a participant, immersed in the ritual. The changes in narrative point of view share the emotional experience of the wajinru, closing the gap between the reader, who, like the wajinru, is blissfully ignorant of history, and Yetu, who is overwhelmed by memory’s power. The second-person narration draws the reader into wajinru society, deepening the novel’s exploration of the role of history in cultivating empathy and identity.

In Chapter 3, Yetu is in a heightened emotional, mental, and sensory state, which creates an escalating intensity in the narration of the Remembrance. As she takes the wajinru through their first memories—being born in the process of their foremothers drowning to death—Yetu notices that she is struggling with remembering as much as the rest of the wajinru: “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?” (30-31) The ceremony continues to raise deep existential questions and resentment in Yetu, who feels the loss of herself and her memories more acutely than ever due to The Burden of History.

While the wajinru enjoy ignorance and experience an identity and life that is entirely autonomous, Yetu’s loss of self is much more permanent. She has a mere few days alone in her body, company to her own memories and feelings. The narrator explains that she used to view the process of sharing the History with her people “as a sweet, beautiful flow of energy, the past running gently through her. It was more like slitting an opening in herself so they could get out. Oh, was this pain real? It didn’t even belong to her” (28). The juxtaposition here amplifies the harm this process does to Yetu. The alienation from her own suffering and pain—and the conflation of her emotional experience with that of her ancestors—brings Yetu to crisis. This retroactively contextualizes Yetu’s suicide attempt in the novella’s opening pages. As the text proceeds, the narration is also always looking back as memories gain new significance. This moment is finally clear and demonstrates that Yetu’s well-being is violently at odds with her duty, illustrating The Conflict Between Self-interest and the Interests of Society.

Chapter 4 follows this crisis moment by figuratively relieving Yetu of her narrative responsibilities, allowing the collective “we” to recall the memories that she has disseminated. The chapter reads as a creation myth, including tropes from these types of narratives: the discovery and naming of the self and the Other, the “original sin” that inspires perpetual suffering, and the establishment of an ethos that protects the interests of the people. Solomon’s adaptation of this narrative form produces ironic inversions of these tropes that offer commentary on the real-life history of enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade. Like Eve who encounters the snake, Zoti comes to language and knowledge through their relationship with Waj. Unlike the snake in the Garden of Eden, Waj means no harm. There is a true effort at mutual understanding and, eventually, a sense of kinship between the two; both abandoned by their gods, they share the devastating realization that they emerge from the same original sin of slavery. The sin, however, is not theirs; it is not in the acquisition of knowledge or the pursuit of pleasure. The sin is someone else’s—the enslaver’s—and yet, the suffering is endured by the enslaved and the life that is generated by surviving slavery.

With the knowledge that they are the descendants of those “not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom” (58), the zoti aleyu create a sacred, safe space for all those disenfranchised and abandoned to fend for themselves or perish in the ocean. The ethos developed by the zoti aleyu, under the direction of their queen, recognizes an obligation of charitable care that is extended toward all innocents. They cultivate a structure for assimilating others into their society, teaching them language and history and assigning them work. When they witness the birth of a zoti aleyu from the pregnant belly of a dead enslaved woman, Zoti, as narrator, thinks: “We cannot think about its origins. We cannot think of what sickness plagues surface-life affairs that they throw living creatures to the sea to die alone. We must not think of the surface dwellers and two-legs at all. Only zoti aleyu” (60). To protect themselves and each other, the zoti aleyu decide to forget the pain and anguish that characterize their origin, inventing the role of the historian to mitigate the consequences of this forgetfulness. This invention binds them together in Collective Memory and Cultural Identity; through Remembrance and their shared history, the zoti aleyu become, finally, the wajinru.

Through this myth, Solomon projects the shame of the sin of slavery back onto the enslavers, suggesting the ways that this imaginary diasporic society simultaneously holds and releases the suffering from which they emerged. The death of the enslaved, this novella suggests, provokes the generation of a powerful species that outlives the dehumanization and violence inflicted by colonial enslavers.