William Hutson

Jonathan Snipes

Daveed Diggs

Rivers Soloman

The water-breathing descendants of African slave women tossed overboard have built their own underwater society-and must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future in this brilliantly imaginative novella inspired by the Hugo Award-nominated song "The Deep" from Daveed Diggs's rap group clipping. Yetu holds the memories for her people-water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners-who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface, escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities-and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past-and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they'll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity-and own who they really are. Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode "We Are In The Future," The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting.

The Deep

Nicole Lucy O'Loughlin

about identity, cultural history, ignorance vs. awareness 

Sabrina D. 

Oori shook her head and stood up from the water. “But your whole history. Your ancestry. That's who you are." “No. I am who l am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you're for everyone in the present, you're no one. Nobody. You don't exist. I didn’t exist…

“You're always wanting answers to why I do the things I do, but when try to give them, you cannot fathom it. Is this my curse? To be unfathomable? Am I even alive anymore? Maybe Yetu is already dead," said Yetu. "Are you even holdıng me now, Amaba? Or are you holding a corpse?”

Amelia

Their memories faded after weeks or months- if not through wajinru biological predisposition for forgetfulness, then through sheer force of will. Those cursed with ness, more intact long-term recollection learned how to forget, how to throw themselves into the moment. Only the his- torian was allowed to remember.

IT WAS NO LONGER SUNG. For that morsel of mercy, Yetu gave thanks. She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams. She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she'd come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

"Remember," Yetu ordered, voice flling the womb. Yetu gave them a script, but they knew the words. It lived in their cartilage and their organs, as coded into them as the shape of the webbed appendages on their front fins or the bulbousness of their eyes. She only need remind them. 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 remembering

These didn't have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating. It was something that she'd learned to do when deal- ing with the rememberings, to try to find a modicum of quiet and accept the multitudes inside herself. She never reached calm, nor even a steadiness, but she did it anyway. It made her remember that she existed.

The Deep quotes

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