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.

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.

It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.

That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

Oh, was this pain real? It didn’t even belong to her. Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?

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

“Tell me a story,” Aj says, fifty years old now. Hard to believe we witnessed his birth from the two-legged surface dweller, cast into the sea. “A happy one. Something that will comfort me in these next coming days, when I am to lose you, Amaba.”

The impossible weight of her responsibility to the world would obliterate her before she had the chance to fix what she’d done.

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.