The Deep is a short book, but it is one that will linger with you for a long time.
Yetu's responsibility is to be the sole merperson in her tribe who keeps the memories of her ancestors, pregnant enslaved African women whose bodies were thrown off of slave ships when they grew to sick to be profitable. But these memories are a heavy burden to bear alone. She shares them one last time in a ceremony, and then flees to the surface, where she meets some of the people who live above the sea.
This book did a phenomenal job of showing the embodied nature of trauma. The mermaids had a very cool mechanism of sharing and storing thoughts, which I thought was an excellent metaphorical way to show the more physical aspects of memory. The prose was beautiful. It made me think about which burdens are often borne alone and which are shared. It also showed that grief can be productive when it is shared & what a community's responsibility is to maintaining memory.
Yetu's responsibility is to be the sole merperson in her tribe who keeps the memories of her ancestors, pregnant enslaved African women whose bodies were thrown off of slave ships when they grew to sick to be profitable. But these memories are a heavy burden to bear alone. She shares them one last time in a ceremony, and then flees to the surface, where she meets some of the people who live above the sea.
This book did a phenomenal job of showing the embodied nature of trauma. The mermaids had a very cool mechanism of sharing and storing thoughts, which I thought was an excellent metaphorical way to show the more physical aspects of memory. The prose was beautiful. It made me think about which burdens are often borne alone and which are shared. It also showed that grief can be productive when it is shared & what a community's responsibility is to maintaining memory.