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She needed frequent reminders she was more than a vessel for the ancestors’ memories.
If Yetu died doing something reckless and the wajinru were not able to recover her body, the next historian would not be able to harvest the ancestors’ rememberings from Yetu’s mind. Bits of the History could be salvaged from the shark’s body, assuming they found it, but it was an incredible risk, and no doubt whole sections would be lost.
A historian’s role was to carry the memories so other wajinru wouldn’t have to. Then, when the time came, she’d share them freely until they got their fill of knowing.
“We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.
She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.
The meaning behind their name, wajinru, chorus of the deep, was clear.
They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts. Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.
He’d learned to harness the electrical energy present in all wajinru minds.
Where Amaba recalled a vague “difficult relationship,” Yetu still felt the violent emotions her amaba had provoked in her, knew the precise script of ill words exchanged between them.
She dealt with death every day during her rememberings,
It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.
Her people’s survival was reliant upon her suffering.
She wanted to cry for the dead thing draped in her front fins.
It was found here near the sacred waters, lodged inside the skull of a two-legged surface dweller, which itself was inside the belly of Anyeteket,” Kata said.
age and infamy had earned her a name,
One, she’d probably never forgotten the rain of bodies that descended here when two-legs had been cast into the sea so many centuries ago. Sharks didn’t usually feast on surface dwellers, but easy meat was easy meat.
