After I read The Deep, I looked for the This American Life episode that commissioned the song from clppng. The questions were horrifying in their lack of understanding of generational chattel slavery and basic historical facts. Years ago I came across a YouTube series called “Ask a Slave.” It was funny, but not actually funny at all, as the main character, Lizzie Mae, answered the questions put to her by visitors at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. When she shares the memories, instead of taking them back, she flees. The memories of the ancestors and the loneliness of the burden is killing Yetu. For a short time each year the Waijinru gather and absorb those memories, keeping them connected to their history and then they return the memories to the historian, until the next gathering. The historian holds the memories of their people, allowing the Waijinru to live unburdened by the grief of their origins. In Solomon’s The Deep, Yetu is the historian of the Waijinru, the descendants of the unborn children whose African mothers were thrown into the ocean. The changes made as it it transmitted from one artist to another are a feature, not a bug. Diggs describes this as an artistic game of Telephone.
Clppng’s song was an homage to Detroit’s Drexciya who imagined an underwater utopia created by the pregnant African women thrown overboard in the Atlantic slave trade. Diggs and his fellow clppng’s William Hutson and Jonathon Snipes, hold author credits because the novella is based a song they wrote, commissioned by NPR’s This American Life for “We Are in the Future” an episode about Afrofuturism. At this current time, I don’t think I could have read it if I hadn’t listened to Daveed Diggs’ narration. Rivers Solomon’s The Deep is a beautiful and gut wrenching novella.
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