Quietly Powerful

filled star filled star filled star filled star filled star
mppierce Avatar

By

It's powerful, in a quiet way that demands your full attention, from understanding Yetu to understanding her people and the struggles that face them both individually and collectively due to the generational trauma linked back to their origins, and the tenuous balance between preserving the past while protecting the future. The Deep, while being under 200 pages, packs a novel's worth and more of emotion, heart, character, and depth that I'm still thinking about weeks after having originally read it.

I think at the moment, the most striking thing about The Deep is while the Wanjiru origins are directly tied to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Yetu's purpose in this is the cultivation of the memories of this, of where her people come from, there is less a focus on studying the grotesqueness and the darkness of that history in graphic detail, and a deeper focus on the effect of that on the people who came after, particularly with Yetu, who bears the brunt of that history for her people. We do not often get to examine the generational baggage that comes from how our ancestors came to be, how carrying it constantly at the forefront and the expectation of always being keenly aware of it hurts--and how tempting it can be to ignore it and forget it entirely.

And yet, even with how bleak this can all sound, I don't believe that The Deep itself is a bleak and hopeless book. The premise alone--the idea that life could have come from the deaths of the countless pregnant women tossed to sea over the hauls of slave ships--is so unexpectedly hopeful in and of itself. That their deaths weren't the end of their legacies and that there are people remained who cared about them and refused to let their memories die is a powerful concept that defies the intentions of the slavers and colonizers who led them there to begin with.

The Deep is definitely a book that'll be getting a good few re-reads while I attempt to sparse my thoughts on this a little more. I don't think a single read is going to thoroughly capture the magnificence that was this novella, and Rivers Solomon is a force to be reckoned with, with their writing.