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May. 16th, 2021 10:45 amI read Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts twice in the past couple years, once for myself and then again for a book group, and despite my best intentions didn't end up untangling my complicated thoughts about it enough to write it up either of those times.
Anyway, a month or two ago I read Solomon's novella The Deep and appreciated it in a much less complicated fashion. This is the one that's based on/in collaboration/conversation with clipping.'s song Afrofuturist The Deep, which posits a thriving society of mer-people descended from enslaved people thrown overboard during the Atlantic crossing.
Solomon's take posits an underwater society in which the burden of cultural memory is carried by one wajinru (mer-person) per generation, a la The Giver, who takes their community through an annual collective ritual of remembrance before taking all the memories back up into themselves again. Unfortunately, this generation's historian, Yetu, is slowly collapsing under the mental stress, so when the memory-ritual comes around this time she flees before the memories can come back to her, leaving the rest of her community to figure out how to cope with thousands of years' worth of traumatic memory on their own. Or not!
Over the course of the next few days, Yetu rediscovers (post-apocalyptic?) land society, meets some two-legged humans, and develops a crush, while attempting to resolve the central questions of how a community processes its trauma, and how much of themselves a person owes to that community and that past, and at what personal cost. These are all compelling questions, and both Yetu's journey of self-discovery and romance and the interstitial adventures of one of the first wajinru carry the plot along in a way that provides enough movement and light to balance the weight of the themes. The one section that didn't quite work for me is a bit in the middle from another wajinru POV that might have been a trauma-memory or an actual event occurring over the course of the book or an explanation of what caused the apocalypse; I would like to have been a little clearer on that point, but the confusion might well be a me and a reading on lunch break problem. Anyway, a strong entry into the sci-fi subgenre of postcolonial underwater fish person societies!
Conceptually, it's also just a really cool piece of transformative work; the book feels quite different than the song, I think, and it's neat to read the discussion at the end of the way the collaboration worked.
Anyway, a month or two ago I read Solomon's novella The Deep and appreciated it in a much less complicated fashion. This is the one that's based on/in collaboration/conversation with clipping.'s song Afrofuturist The Deep, which posits a thriving society of mer-people descended from enslaved people thrown overboard during the Atlantic crossing.
Solomon's take posits an underwater society in which the burden of cultural memory is carried by one wajinru (mer-person) per generation, a la The Giver, who takes their community through an annual collective ritual of remembrance before taking all the memories back up into themselves again. Unfortunately, this generation's historian, Yetu, is slowly collapsing under the mental stress, so when the memory-ritual comes around this time she flees before the memories can come back to her, leaving the rest of her community to figure out how to cope with thousands of years' worth of traumatic memory on their own. Or not!
Over the course of the next few days, Yetu rediscovers (post-apocalyptic?) land society, meets some two-legged humans, and develops a crush, while attempting to resolve the central questions of how a community processes its trauma, and how much of themselves a person owes to that community and that past, and at what personal cost. These are all compelling questions, and both Yetu's journey of self-discovery and romance and the interstitial adventures of one of the first wajinru carry the plot along in a way that provides enough movement and light to balance the weight of the themes. The one section that didn't quite work for me is a bit in the middle from another wajinru POV that might have been a trauma-memory or an actual event occurring over the course of the book or an explanation of what caused the apocalypse; I would like to have been a little clearer on that point, but the confusion might well be a me and a reading on lunch break problem. Anyway, a strong entry into the sci-fi subgenre of postcolonial underwater fish person societies!
Conceptually, it's also just a really cool piece of transformative work; the book feels quite different than the song, I think, and it's neat to read the discussion at the end of the way the collaboration worked.
