The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

Our pod never preferred to feast on carcasses, didn’t like the rot, but sometimes it was necessary. Right now, for us, newly orphaned as we are, it is necessary. We swim toward the floating creature, but it is not dead. It is not even sleeping. It turns toward us, first with a look of shock, and then with a look of fear. It is smaller than it should be. Emaciated. And it cannot swim well. Lashes on its back. It is a surface dweller of some kind. A land animal.

Though it looks like a stranger, we, a small and scaled squirming thing, had come from the belly of a being like this.

We begin to understand the things this strange creature says, and the more we do, the more we begin to think of it as her Water means where we live. Land is where she lives. Sky is what’s above. Sand, stone, trees, fire, hungry, hot, cold, sweat, sad.

She gives us words.

The land dweller will no longer engage in conversation about where she came from or how she came to be floating half dead on driftwood in the middle of the sea. We wonder if her god abandoned her.

We don’t understand the question. We just remember. Every moment is a spark, and the spark is there forever.

“I will call you Zoti Aleyu,” she says. We know those words together mean strange fish.

“What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude.

The whale, a few measures away, opens its mouth. Inside, there are pups, pups that look like miniature version of us. Little zoti aleyu. Strange fish. We gasp. We are outside of our body. We wonder if the blue whale devoured us and we are dead, and this is the afterlife, a world of dreams.

In time, the pups fatten before our very eyes. Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo. Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.

First we find two. Twins. Not quite fresh out of the womb, but nearly. We look through the water trying to find where they have come from, but they have drifted too far.

We are nine in total now. Then we are sixteen. Then seventeen. Then thirty. It is only a few years later that we find some closer to my age. A pod of four. We cannot speak to one another, but their joy is plain. We are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one.

We become queen of this place. One of the eldest among us, we know what most others do not. For that, they call us historian.

The surface dweller is in our arms, heart still beating, but we are too far from any land for us to think of dragging it to an island. It is unconscious, and its belly is round with child. We bring it to the surface so it might breathe, but it never comes to.

The two-legs dies in our arms, but not moments later, its body starts moving, taken over by a spirit or some other thing of the next world.

“Come out,” we sing. “The world is ready for you, and you are ready for the world.”

There are fins at the center of its back, on its sides, and at its front. Hairless. And darker than any land creature. It is zoti aleyu. It is zoti aleyu!

What magic had intervened to transform the pup in the womb? Was it the ocean itself, the progenitor of all life? Did the zoti aleyu have a god after all?

We must bury the surface dweller. Our kin.

A whole chorus of the deep. Wajinru. We are not zoti aleyu. We are more vast and more beauteous than that name implies. We are a song, and we are together. We remember.

A lonely child, more easily hurt than other wajinru, she’d always tended to keep to herself. But before becoming historian, she could be with people at least, talk to them and confide in them. Once she had taken on the rememberings, she’d lost that ability, too gripped by the past to do more than the bare minimum to interact in the present.

“All dead. I am the last of the Oshuben,” said Oori.

“Such madness does exist,” Yetu said, dizzy, her words gobbled up by the eddy she was whirring. “You all made me this way. I carry the burden of remembering so you don’t have to. So acknowledge it, then! That it’s a burden!”

freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point? Nothingness was a fate worse than pain.

Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.

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.”

Psychically linked, we are stronger. Our connection makes us a beast mightier than the blue whale.

We are arranged in rings, a circle of forty over a circle of forty over a circle of forty and so on. We move in a spiral as we ascend, creating a twister in the water.

As we near the surface, we lose sight of what we are doing. We are not Basha anymore. It is like we are in every remembering at once. We are every wajinru. As one, we make the ocean waters rise and create a tidal wave that lifts us high above land. This is the first time the other wajinru are seeing the two-legs outside of the Remembrance. They are shocked by their faces, similar in many ways to our own. They know what we have known since taking on the History. The two-legs are our kin. This does not make us more gentle. It has the opposite effect. We send endless waves of salt water onto the land, flooding the whole earth. This is only our first assault.

“Please! There must be another way,” said Amaba. She spoke in the rudimentary language of electric charges. “You don’t have to live with this pain alone. Join us.”

“You didn’t throw them away. You lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition,”

“Join us,” said Amaba, begging. “I would sooner die than let you suffer this alone. You begged me to understand, and I never did. I never could. Now I know, my child. I know, and I will not see you bear it without your amaba, without your kindred.”

When the History threatened to end Yetu, she went to one memory in particular: their first caretaker. In this remembering, there is a lone wajinru pup floating, alive and content. It was the ocean who was their first amaba.

Amaba held the comb in her front fin and rubbed it with closed eyes. “It’s from a song.” “What?” asked Yetu. “A song our amaba used to sing when she was pregnant.” Yetu understood that when Amaba said our amaba, she was speaking in the voice of the Remembrance, when everybody became one.

Amaba began to sing. “Zoti aleyu, zoti aleyu, watsa tibi m’besha tusa keyu?” Strange fish, strange fish, why do you jump around in my belly like a fish out of water?

Waj, the first surface dweller a wajinru had befriended, had lived on an island called Tosha. It was the wajinru word for belonging. It was also the Tosha word for belonging.

But when Oori jolted from the remembering, she was breathing underwater, just as she’d breathed in the womb. She did not transform in the way wajinru pups transformed in the two-legs’ bellies. She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing.

This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.

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?

Their story took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization. Drexciya’s music was, for the most part, instrumental, and what lyrics there were provided only small glimpses into the mythology they had created.

Our prohibition of the first person was, in part, a reaction to the fiercely individualistic authorship presumed in rap lyrics, so in imagining what a Drexciyan utopia might look like, through the lens of clipping.’s linguistic rules, we imagined their culture might affirm collectivity over the individual, and therefore, the plural over the singular. The word y’all, for us, became both an emblem of the Drexciyans’ advanced communal society, and a reference to the multiple-authorship of the song, shared between those of us in clipping. and our partners at This American Life, as well as with Drexciya and their collaborators.

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. Drexciya’s militant uprising, which we suggested was incited by climate change and the destruction of Earth’s oceans, becomes an ambivalent act of both justice and extreme violence, perpetuating further trauma. In their translation from Drexciya to clipping. to this book, Rivers has added a dimension of pain to all three texts. Yetu’s painful remembering might be seen as an allegory for the painful process of adaptation that Rivers has accomplished by retelling a fictional, but nonetheless consequential, story of white supremacist violence. 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.

Without the permission and support of clipping. to use their profoundly powerful sound “The Deep,” this text would not exist.