The Deep (Solomon)
with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes (2019)
(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)
I browsed Good Reads looking for something short to read, something that I might not have picked up (or even heard of). I saw The Deep. The premise was interesting enough: it was about a society of sea beings who were descended from pregnant slaves who were tossed overboard from the slave ships traveling from Africa to America.
It turns out, and there are notes after the novella, that the book was inspired by a song. If you are familiar with the song, you might have a greater appreciation for the story since you have an idea what's coming. For me, I just got to enjoy the ride for the first time.
How the unborn human infants were transformed into these creatures is glossed over, but that's fine -- this is fantasy. It can be vague about this part. If I had any problem with the "wajinru", it was any time later in the text where they became even less human, more removed from the first women. This is, basically, a matter of identifying with the characters, along the lines of thinking "the wajinru are like human beings except..." and then listed one or maybe two traits. The more that changes, the more alien they become. A minor quibble.
The story is that there is a Historian, Yetu, who "remembers" all of their history. She remembers it so that the rest of them will not have to. Unfortunately, she experiences a loss of self because of this, and she is overcome with pain and memories because of it.
There is an annual Remembrance where for a few days, the Historian passes the memories back to all the people so that they can remember where they came from. However, Yetu takes this opportunity to flee and leave her people behind, free of these memories. She gets caught up in a storm and wakes up injured in a tidal pool of an island. Where this island is, I don't know. One would imagine that if must be in the Atlantic somewhere near the equator. I didn't realize until the end that this island is not the same one mentioned earlier in a flashback where some wajinru encountered a human lost at sea.
Yetu makes friends with a mysterious woman named Oori, who brings her food to help her get stronger. Oori leaves when a storm is coming. She invites Yetu to go with her, but Yetu decides to go home. The storm is from her people locked in the Remembrance.
A quick read. Again, not something I would've picked out normally, so I'm glad I did.
Final note: I like the cover shown above. The cover that my kindle showed (from the library loan) only had words and color patterns but no image. The image above comes from amazon UK.
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