The Deep

Starred review from April 22, 2019
This extraordinary short novel is at least the third creative iteration of a premise built on the documented drowning of pregnant African women by white male slave traders. Imagining that the infants survived as a community of mer-people was the contribution of the techno group Drexciya. In turn, the experimental rap group Clipping (Diggs, Hutson, and Snipes) was inspired to collaboratively develop “The Deep,” a song about conflict between people of the sea and people of the land. Now Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts) steps forward with a prose version that is by turns meditative, didactic, and rawly angry. The focus is Yetu, a historian for an undersea community that calls itself wajinru and cultivates collective forgetfulness of its agonizing past, backstopped by the one member who bears the burden of holding the entire community’s memories. It is too much for Yetu, and amid the excruciating annual ritual of sharing out and then taking back the rememberings, she flees her people. Her burden of memory is lifted, but her burden of responsibility has only shifted, as her choice to free herself from her role has devastating consequences. Solomon interrogates the devastations of slavery without ever showing a white perspective, in a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze. This superb, multilayered work will speak to any empathetic reader, and be best appreciated by those steeped in its cultural and artistic context.

Narrator Daveed Diggs brings his unique voice to Rivers Solomon's collaborative novella, THE DEEP, inspired by a song of the same name, written by Diggs's band, Clipping. Diggs explores his multilayered world through the voice of Yetu, the historian of an ocean-dwelling people called the Wajinru, descended from pregnant African women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade. Diggs brings different voices to the generations of characters but relies more on description than changes in tone to express emotion. While the story itself was inspired by music and is interwoven with music and sound, there is little reflection of this in the audio production. Although the lack of musicality seems like a missed opportunity, Solomon's words stand strongly on their own. H.C. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine