The Deep

Starred review from April 22, 2019
This extraordinary short novel is at least the third creative iteration of a premise built on the documented drowning of pregnant African women by white male slave traders. Imagining that the infants survived as a community of mer-people was the contribution of the techno group Drexciya. In turn, the experimental rap group Clipping (Diggs, Hutson, and Snipes) was inspired to collaboratively develop “The Deep,” a song about conflict between people of the sea and people of the land. Now Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts) steps forward with a prose version that is by turns meditative, didactic, and rawly angry. The focus is Yetu, a historian for an undersea community that calls itself wajinru and cultivates collective forgetfulness of its agonizing past, backstopped by the one member who bears the burden of holding the entire community’s memories. It is too much for Yetu, and amid the excruciating annual ritual of sharing out and then taking back the rememberings, she flees her people. Her burden of memory is lifted, but her burden of responsibility has only shifted, as her choice to free herself from her role has devastating consequences. Solomon interrogates the devastations of slavery without ever showing a white perspective, in a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze. This superb, multilayered work will speak to any empathetic reader, and be best appreciated by those steeped in its cultural and artistic context.

June 1, 2019

Inspired by the Hugo Award-nominated song "The Deep" from Daveed Diggs's rap group, Clipping, this novella is set in an underwater universe inhabited by the water-breathing descendants of pregnant African women tossed overboard by slavers. All but the historian Yetu suppress their horrible memories, and the burdened Yetu finally rises to the surface to find new possibilities for her people. Diggs and other Clipping members are joined by Solomon, a John W. Campbell Award finalist for An Unkindness of Ghosts, to craft this work. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2019
Solomon's second book (after An Unkindness of Ghosts, 2017) is inspired by a song, also called "The Deep," by the hip-hop group Clipping (featuring Hamilton's Daveed Diggs). The book expands on the world of the aquatic beings descended from women thrown off slaver ships and left to drown during the Atlantic slave trade. Building off of the song's refrain "y'all remember" in particular, Solomon imagines a society of beings without individual memories known as wajinru, whose communal memory is held in one selected historian in the form of electrical signals. Yetu, the current historian, finds the continual remembering of her people's history, with all of its pain and tragedy, to be a crippling and devouring burden, so during the annual gathering in which she releases the accumulated history into the wajinru as a whole, she flees to the surface. Interspersing the collective memories of the wajinru with Yetu's encounters above water, Solomon's beautiful novella weaves together a moving and evocative narrative that imagines a future created from the scars of the past. Highly recommended for those interested in sf or fantasy that draws upon the legacies of colonialism and racism to imagine different, exciting types of futures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 1, 2019

Yetu is the historian for the wajinru, an undersea population of merpeople. Their collective memory of their origins as pregnant African women thrown overboard by white slavers is held by Yetu alone. The wajinru exist in forgetfulness, as it has been decided that the agony of their past is too much to bear. The historian carries the burden until the Remembering, a yearly ritual that lets the historian share the memories to the population, then take them all back. Yetu struggles under the weight of her duty, and flees her home in hopes of escaping. But as she leaves behind her agony and meets the people of the land that her ancestors left long ago, her burden shifts to those who aren't ready to accept it. Yetu is tasked with finding a way to reconnect the past to all before her people's future is lost. This vivid, devastating work is in its third incarnation: it started with the inspired mythology created by techno-electro group Drexciya, morphed into a song by rap group Clipping (Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes), and then was turned to prose by Solomon (An Unkindness of Ghosts). VERDICT This slim story packs a huge punch. Beautiful and stark in its pain, this emotional journey is one that all readers should take, in order to remember the atrocities of slavery. [See "Fall Fireworks," LJ 8/19.]--Kristi Chadwick, Massachusetts Lib. Syst., Northampton

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.