The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

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.

“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.

For a people with little memory, wajinru knew one another despite the year-long absence. 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.

“You mean annoys you,” Yetu said. “Not everything is about the rememberings, Amaba. I’m not a child. Sometimes it takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. Or sometimes I just have no desire to honor your questions with a response.”

She’d had more interaction in the last few days than she’d had in the past year. Her patience was waning. She could only be the good daughter, the compliant wajinru, and the dutiful historian in short bursts. After a time, the constant conversation and stimulation wore her patience down. She was becoming a sharp edge.

“Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers,” she said.

Yetu felt Amaba’s body cease to struggle and go limp, then someone else’s, then yet someone else’s, until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom of the womb, mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers, just as Yetu intended.

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.

We do not think about the secret of our origin and how easy it became to find zoti aleyu once we’d learned it. We discovered which ships to follow. We memorized their routes. We learned their accents, their languages, and heard them through the water like an alarm. We followed ships where none went overboard, but this brought its own grief, for we knew the lives of those on the ship would not be good ones.

There are so many of us now, we could hardly be called strange fish anymore. We have made a place in this sea. All the fluttering, building, loving, hunting, embracing, mating, we hear it all, our presence unmistakable. 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.