The Deep

Abstract

The Deep (2019) is a fantasy novella written by Rivers Solomon, but also credited to Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes. The story revolves around the Wajinru, a water-breathing merfolk, which descend from pregnant slaves thrown overboard from ships during the Atlantic slave trade. The women drowned, but their babies survived, being born into the ocean, and eventually the species evolved to what it is today. The Wajinru have built their own near-perfect society where everyone thrives free from the pain of remembering. However, this happens at the expense of one person, the Historian, who holds all their traumatic memories, and must suppress their own personality. Once a year, though, the whole community gathers for the Remembrance ceremony, in which they relive all their memories together. The book originated from a song of the same title by clipping. In the novella’s afterword, the hip-hop trio state “their [Drexciya’s] story took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization.” - hence the possibility of it being considered a heterotopia.