The Deep is a short and profound Afrofuturist read.
The wajinru are an underwater people who live peacefully together. Yetu is the tribe’s historian—she holds their collective memory so the rest of the tribe can escape the pain of it. Each year, Yetu extends the entirety of their history to the rest of her people in a ceremony called the Remembrance. It is the only day where she does not shoulder the burden of their gruesome history alone.
Her people, the wajinru, are the descendants of pregnant women thrown off slave ships crossing the Atlantic. The lore of their survival is detailed with reverence—the babies born in the water, the whale that mothered them, the infinite renewal of changing waters.
We meet Yetu at a breaking point. She did not ask to carry the weight of her people’s pain that is now driving her towards death. She flees in the midst of the Remembrance, leaving her people thrashing with their history. We follow both Yetu and the wajinru as they both find ways to deal with the trauma of the past.
Rivers Solomon was tapped to write The Deep with experimental hip hop group, clipping., made up of Jonathan Snipes, William Huston, and Daveed Diggs, after their group had put out a song with the same name in 2017.
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EnPFsk4lOo
“Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty,” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”
Clipping. drew from the myth created by Detroit techno group, Drexciya. Their 1992 album, Deep Sea Dweller, and their subsequent recordings allude to a Black underwater utopia also called Drexciya, built by the descendants of the pregnant women who were thrown off of slave ships during the middle passage.
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1zhZVisJxY
Hip hop and science fiction often find their way to each other to imagine a different Black experience. Key aspects of hip hop, like sampling and reference, intrinsically honor the past while creating something new. Solomon and clipping. fold their layers of reference into a percussive and evocative prose in a way that loses nothing.
Solomon, R., Diggs, D., Hutson, W., Snipes, J. The Deep. Saga Press. 2019.
