The Deep

Yetu is the Historian of the wajinru, a people who breathe underwater. They descend from African women who were pregnant when they were thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. The wajinru have chosen to forget that past. Yetu alone keeps the memories, and she gives them back to the community once a year, at the Remembrance.

The weight of holding everything is destroying her. Before the next Remembrance, Yetu swims up to the surface and ends up stranded in a tidal pool. There she meets Oori, a surface dweller who keeps the memories of her own people.

Oori shows Yetu that not every two-legs is a slaver, and that the land holds a world the wajinru left behind long ago. Back below, the community struggles without its Historian. Yetu has to decide whether to return and take the burden up again.

This is an Afrofuturist novella, short and focused on one character's choice. It deals with slavery, inherited trauma, memory and what remembering costs a person. Rivers Solomon wrote it together with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, who make up the hip-hop group clipping. It grew out of the group's song of the same name.

The Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ science fiction, fantasy and horror went to this book. It was also a finalist for the Hugo, the Locus and the Nebula.