The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

“Remember how deep we go.” As she said it, it became true. She honed in on the bottom of the ocean, deeper than any wajinru of this generation had ever lived, the old homes of their ancestors destroyed.

“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?

The moment the wajinru understood how related they were to the two-legs, the remembering changed, just how it had for Yetu two days ago. They were all now one of the floating dead bodies. Their lives recently extinguished, some spark still remained, brains starved for oxygen but pressing on. The wajinru felt the deadness like it was their own.

Babies of all kinds are always wanting more: more touch, more food, more answers, more kindness, more world, more sea, more newness, more knowledge. But none want more than us, a little fish-child whose whale pod dies of grief when its matriarch perishes from a harpoon.

But in the water, we make beautiful sounds with our throat, and from the creature, we learn how to name the whole world, the whole sea, using this thing we only had a half idea of. Language. Now we have a name for being alone. A name for being anxious. For searching. For fear. For denial. For ugliness. For beauty. For wanting something and someone.

We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

The moment we first ever saw Waj all that time ago, a year or two years or maybe more, floating, looking like something good to eat, we could not have known what she’d come to mean to us. Perhaps it would’ve been better never to have understood, to have stayed in that moment full of possibility.

The cries carry on, and the pang of loss strikes us, too. There had been more at one point, perhaps. But now?

They are our pups Ours. They will not know loneliness like we have known. They will have no true knowledge of the concept of abandonment.

It is a pleasant loneliness because in the end it will mean more togetherness. We are getting older and older, thinking more about what it is that makes a stable future when the world is so full of unpredictability.

We are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.

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.

“Basha. Please. I don’t want to die, and I could not bear it if you died. Or my amaba, or any of my pod. My siblings. I have never seen or felt anything like that—what did you call it?—bomb, in my entire life. We are not ready. We must prepare. We must do something. I’ve never been this scared of anything.” He weeps as we hold each other with our front fins. We will ourselves not to be bent by his words, but truthfully, we would die for him. And we will always do anything he asks of us.

During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us?

Now we’ve learned who is burdened with this ritual of remembering and retelling. Rivers has given us Yetu, and in so doing, shown us something that our song elided: the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma.

It’s a retelling that reaches back to the materials it adapts, and complicates them; makes them better. In this sense, Rivers has coauthored our song in as profound a way as we have inspired this book.