A troubled girl chosen for the role before she reached adulthood, Yetu has come to feel that the memories of her ancestors have consumed all that could have been her, that in truth there is no Yetu, only the Historian, the vessel of her people’s pain: “The wajinru inside her from the past had pulled her backward, and the wajinru around her had pulled her outward toward their various ends. The novel opens with the attempted suicide of the fourth Historian.
But they are only allowed this freedom due to the sacrifices of each generation’s Historian, the one member of their race who acts as the repository of their ancestral memory à la Lois Lowry’s dystopian work, “The Giver.” For centuries the wajinru, who call themselves the Chorus of the Deep (though a two-legged surface dweller might be tempted to describe them as mermaids), have lived a carefree life, hunting and mating as the needs take them. The novel grants its readers a look not only at a unique interpretation of one of fantasy’s classic races, but into the deeply troubled mind of a member of that species.
In 2019 that novel was released, along with a trio of songs by clipping. Upon hearing it, Saga Press Senior Editor Navah Wolfe immediately sought out author Rivers Solomon, fresh from her debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and commissioned the award-winning novelist for the complex task of transmuting a song into a novel. This single, “The Deep” would go on to be nominated for the 2018 Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). Inspired by the tidbits of lore revealed about the album’s lyric-less techno-soundscapes, rapper Daveed Diggs, as part of his experimental hip-hop group, clipping., released a single that further expanded on the world. The idea of an undersea world populated by the mutated children of drowned, pregnant slave women first surfaced as the backstory for the album, “Harnessed the Storm,” the first in a series of seven linked concept albums by Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya (William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes). Like its aquatic main characters, “The Deep” has a rather complicated history.
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