I’ve already proclaimed my love for a book on mermaids (The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey), and already written how mystical magical things enthrall me. So, it should come as no surprise to you or myself that stumbling upon The Deep by Rivers Solomon really lit my curiosity. And my hopes for this unique fairytale were not just met but exceeded, and still I find myself being reeled back into the world of the Wajinru. My thoughts drifting how seaweed plays through the light in shallow waters, disintegrating new colours. I keep pondering Yetu and their gorgeous, harrowing life (or lives) in the oceans.
The protagonist of The Deep is Yetu, historian of the Wajinru people. The Wajinru are mer-people born of the women thrown overboard during passage on the oceans in the time of trans-Atlantic slavery. The ocean spirits (or the ocean itself?) gave new life to these cast away children. Their hybrid bodies slicked with black scales sensitive to the slightest of tremors in the currents, teeth hewn for hunting prey. However, the painful origins of their society are completely unknown to the Wajinru; it’s how they thrive in each moment of their own making. Only the historian Yetu remembers and contains the memories of her people: the first lone Wajinru child without kin or a language, the first Wajinru settlements, war with two-legged land dwellers who drilled sea beds for oil. The weight of subject this little novella takes on is sobering, but Solomon writes with such ingenuity and grace the story still dances gorgeously.
Something that immediately arrested me was Solomon’s conjuring of the senses underwater: describing beautifully how sound feels against the skin, how the Wajinru seek out each other through the impenetrable darkness of the deep by using voices. An individual being felt by the vibrations their speech makes. This use of sound is particularly moving when it comes to the experiences of the early Wajinru as they were working out a new language of their own. But as the Wajinru seek belonging by imitating the words of another so alike, yet so different to themselves, it initiates an ongoing crisis of community. How can we remain present for each other despite our differences, despite the harm we do each other? How to craft a solid and shared existence with others so ephemeral and incomprehensible?
Another really compelling element of Solomon’s writing for me was how they voice the historian. The role of the historian is the one Yetu holds, however she is not the first. She retains in her memory the lives and feelings of all those who came before, and when narrating Wajinru history it’s almost as if Yetu’s voice becomes absorbed into a wider collective through time, in the wavering currents through space. I is replaced with we: at first it’s a little confusing. But once you get a grip of the switch of pronouns, the result for me was goosebump inducing. It was really emotional to read the loneliness of the first lone Wajinru child growing up through the lens of a we; suffering is never as unique as we think. The use of we conjured loads of questions and contemplating in my mind about the burdens and freedoms that come with belonging to a group. The constant tension between wanting to be a free individual with the whole world waiting -ripe for you- against the loaded chains of kin and history. The invisible threads that bind us to each other in various, straining contradictions. It makes me think of a James Baldwin quote: “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
We cannot choose the conditions of where we come from, but we can choose with what to do with that memory and where to go from there. This seems to be the denouement of The Deep. If you’re interested in thinking about how the way we build and sustain communities relates to how we remember the past, this book will definitely provide. Equally, if you just love the power of descriptive lushness in mystical narratives and magical beings, The Deep’s new imagining of mermaids is STUNNING! I could not recommend this book enough: a modern fable for our times that connects us to the past and each other.
PS- I didn’t know how to say this without sounding silly or shallow, BUT I LOVE THE COVER SO MUCH!!! Idk if all editions have the same cover but I find mine ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS!! A collage of pinks and purples, stars and bubbles that look like stars as they’re bursting, all bending in the shapes of graphic waves… it’s a ten from me.