The Deep

“Yetu loved Basha’s memories, loved living inside of his bravery, his tumult. But if ever he’d made a mistake, it was choosing Yetu as historian. She couldn’t fulfill her most basic of duties. How disappointed he would be in the girl he’d chosen. She’d grown up to be so fragile.”

These sentences give insight into how Yetu perceives herself in relation to past historians. She is overly self-critical and compares herself to Basha, whom she regards as much stronger and more resilient, criticizing herself as overly sensitive and “fragile.” In the early pages of the novella, Yetu consistently feels disempowered, weak, and defeated.

“She’d been appointed to this role according to her people’s traditions, and she balked at the level of self-centeredness it would require to abandon six hundred years of wajinru culture and custom to accommodate her own desires.”

Here, Yetu articulates her perspective on The Conflict Between Self-interest and the Interests of Society, a central theme in the novella. At the beginning of the text, Yetu feels that the present-minded focus on one’s desires and needs is “self-centered” and superficial in comparison to the depths of the 600 years of history that she carries.

“For a people with little memory, wajinru knew one another despite the year-long absence. They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts.”

This passage connects to the symbol of the Remembrance. Within the world of the wajinru, memory is an embodied rather than intellectual experience; it is deeply felt and may be inarticulable. Through this embodied memory, the wajinru find connection and see themselves in each other. However, their state of disconnection from each other highlights a fundamental flaw in the History and historian system; the community is not truly interconnected.

“It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures. It was perhaps dramatic to compare that to her own situation, but it was true. Her people’s survival was reliant upon her suffering. It wasn’t the intention. It was no one’s wish. But it was her lot.”

Upon being presented with a dead vampire squid, Yetu thinks about the cruelty of an ecosystem that requires the death of some to sustain the lives of others. It reminds her of her own situation, foreshadowing the extreme panic that she will experience during the Remembrance ceremony when she realizes that having to take the History back even one more time will kill her.

“During such rememberings, Yetu’s loneliness abated, overcome with the sanctity of being the vessel for another life—and in a moment like this, a child’s life, a child who’d grown into an adult and then an elder, so many lifetimes ago. Yet here they were together, one.”

Yetu yearns for connection and community but is only able to find it through the rememberings, where she shares an experience with an ancestor. Here, she articulates this longing and the peace that she finds in this sharing of memory and emotion.

“She’d had more interaction in the last few days than she’d had in the past year. Her patience was waning. She could only be the good daughter, the compliant wajinru, and the dutiful historian in short bursts. After a time, the constant conversation and stimulation wore her patience down. She was becoming a sharp edge.”

In her relationship with her mother, Yetu most vocally and directly expresses the resentment that she bears for all wajinru. When her mother prods her for information, Yetu feels the burden of her role as the historian. She feels that she is torn in too many directions, expected to act entirely in service of other people, nothing left just for her. The use of synecdoche—“a sharp edge”—has the edge of a blade stand in for the whole object, highlighting Yetu’s feelings of alienation.

“Her body was full of other bodies. Every wajinru who had ever lived possessed her in this moment. They gnashed, they clawed, desperate to speak. Yetu channeled their memories, sore and shaking as she brought them to the surface.”

Yetu experiences the History and the process of the Remembrance as a painful, physical violence. This passage highlights the actively aggressive and oppressive force of the memories by using vivid, animalistic verbs like “gnashed’ and “clawed” and personifying them as “every wajinru who had ever lived.”

“‘Submit,’ Yetu whispered, talking to herself as much as to them. She was begging herself to do what needed doing, what she told her mother she would do. 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?”

Yetu describes the conflict that she perceives between her self-interest and the interests of the collective wajinru. She frames her taking on the memories as the loss of herself, the sacrifice of the potential that she had to grow as an independent person.

“They gave themselves over to it, copying Yetu’s ecstatic movements. She shook her head back and forth so fast and so hard that she lost her sense of equilibrium as the remembering overwhelmed them. They all watched together in the remembering as hundreds of sharks gathered to share a feast of bodies that looked so much like them, just like wajinru.”

Through the Remembrance, the wajinru are united as a single, collective consciousness and experience the same embodied memory together in the way that Yetu designed. It is a joining together that is shaped by the historian’s personal anxieties; in this case, the wajinru fear death as painfully and sharply as Yetu fears her annihilation by sharks, the History, the wajinru, and the rememberings. This passage highlights the way history is malleable and gains meaning through interpretation.

“She felt them, though for a moment she forgot who they were. She forgot who she was altogether, let alone who she was to them. Small bits of it came back to her. Her name. Her life. Her amaba.”

When Yetu is finally freed of the rememberings, she comes back into close contact with herself. The repetitive phrasing of “her name,” “her life,” and “her amaba” emphasizes both the tiny bits of her self-identity that remain and her sense of possession over them. 

“After copying and copying her, we learn to make sounds with our throat and tongue. They do not sound like the surface dweller, but after a time, she understands. As she looks upon us, we can tell the land dweller still thinks us perplexing. She says she has always known there was a world beyond this world, a world where the unseen happens, but that we surprise her still.”

Narrated from the perspective of Zoti—and using the second-person pronoun “we” to emphasize that the wajinru are experiencing this remembering together—this passage highlights the longing of Zoti Aleyu to connect with the two-leg woman, Waj. Like the wajinru, who imitate Yetu to forge connection and safety, Zoti mimics Waj to unify with her, as they admire and recognize her as part of themselves.

“Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another. Down here, we eventually find more of us.”

Repeating the phrase “down here,” this description of the deep contains a rhythm that creates emphasis and even a sinking sensation. The zoti aleyu sink further down and give “down here” a special meaning. In these sentences, “down here” accumulates significance for the abandoned, orphaned creatures.

“Our population, roughly three hundred, is still too small to be considered robust. We remember the way our centuries-old pod was wiped out like a flash. When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton. It is our duty to ensure that the zoti aleyu survive, and that means we return to searching the ocean for any who are stranded.”

Zoti articulates the mission that forms the eventual wajinru society: a commitment to ensuring that all the discarded, abandoned children of enslaved mothers find a home and that none are ever abandoned again. This ethos leads Zoti and the rest of the wajinru to prioritize the History, self-preservation, and distance from the two-legs who pose an existential threat.

“That is what we think about now, the peace we imparted, the togetherness we brought. We have absorbed many lifetimes of pain, but it is no matter compared to the good.”

In the creation of the zoti aleyu society, Zoti and others experience the tragedy of witnessing their origin, seeing bodies thrown from ships, and hearing the enslaved talk about their suffering in the bottoms of ships. They express their pain and anguish but come together to find peace. It becomes an ethical mission to preserve peace and happiness by focusing on what they have now, not where they came from.

“We remember.”

Repeated at the end of each chapter of the Remembrance, this phrase resonates with the commitment of the people of the African diaspora to remember from whence they came despite the psychological trauma that this entails. The novella suggests that there is an imperative to remember—one must remember to find community and create better, new beginnings.

“Strangely, despite the physical pain her body was in, she felt better than she had in ages. The ache of her muscles, bones, and cartilage was nothing compared to the pain she was used to carrying, of the History and what they’d been through. There was no doubt that despite the disorientation of life without the rememberings, Yetu felt tranquility, too.”

Whereas the rememberings provide the wajinru nourishment that they need, the burden of carrying history is physically and psychically detrimental to Yetu. Here, Solomon connects her bodily suffering with her psychic relief. Feelings, like rememberings, are embodied as well as intellectual experiences. The absence of the History makes Yetu’s mind lighter and more open, even as her body is far from healed.

“Yetu found the quality fascinating. She wanted to be a person who didn’t take kindly to requests, who knew her own mind. Maybe if she’d had a stronger will, she’d have been able to resist the pull of the ancestors, able to carry the History without so much grief.”

Yetu is compelled by Suka’s description of Oori. In Oori, she sees a stronger version of herself and is fascinated to know more about a creature that prioritizes her own needs and deprioritizes the demands and requests of others. To Yetu, this appears to be a freedom from grief that Oori has accomplished through strength.

“Oori looked out at the sea, unblinking. ‘I would take any amount of pain in the world if it meant I could know all the memories of the Oshuben. I barely know any stories from my parents’ generation. I can’t remember our language. How could you leave behind something like that? Doesn’t it hurt not to know who you are?’”

Oori challenges Yetu’s understanding of the conflict between self and society. For her, as someone who lost her community and homeland, the idea that Yetu could find identity in isolation seems absurd. She pushes Yetu to reconsider the conflict that she perceives between herself and her people.

“Through the chorus, Yetu singled out the voice of her amaba, but instead of calling her by her name, she said historian.”

In her childhood memories, Yetu remembers when she attempted to sacrifice a frill shark for the ancestors and beg for her freedom from the History. When the ceremony did not work, her amaba came to look for her. In this passage, Yetu remembers with a heavy heart that the group of wajinru that came looking did not even call her by her name, confirming for her that they failed to see her as an individual. 

“Oori’s eyes were still affixed to the sea’s horizon, but Yetu caught the faintest flutter of movement as she went to turn toward Yetu then changed her mind, thinking better of it. ‘I do,’ answered Yetu finally.”

Yetu and Oori’s relationship develops intimacy as the two admit their feelings for each other. Here, Oori asks Yetu a series of questions about her own desires, which Yetu has never experienced, let alone expressed. The small but meaningful phrase, “I do,” so often associated with marriage vows, suggests the simplicity, power, and tradition of claiming this desire.

“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.”

Seeing from Basha’s eyes, the wajinru describe his emotional experience of the rememberings. Unlike Yetu who is overcome with despair, the History activates Basha’s disposition toward anger. The passage highlights how the historian’s personal identity impacts their interpretation of the History as well as how they share this information with others.

“We are every wajinru. As one, we make the ocean waters rise and create a tidal wave that lifts us high above land. 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 passage represents the perspective of the wajinru who join together to fight the two-legs during the Tidal Wars. Led by Basha, the overwhelming and shared emotion of vengeful anger inspires the wajinru to attempt to save their people from extinction through mass destruction. In the process, they confront the reality that their enemy is their kin. 

“What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead.”

Yetu discovers that History is an object that must be interpreted as well as preserved. The “living”—those who survive and carry the stories of the past—necessarily “put their mark on the past,” giving memories shape and meaning through the process of remembering. This realization provides some resolution to the novel’s thematic exploration of the conflict around the burden of history, as well as Yetu’s conflict between herself and society.