It wasn’t all pretty, but it was hers. If it was a choice between the History and emptiness, maybe Yetu wanted the History. She’d always complained that the rememberings erased her, that Yetu didn’t exist because the ancestors took up too much space inside her. That was all still true, but what did it matter whether she existed if she was alone, if all that was around her was abyss?
“Please! There must be another way,” said Amaba. She spoke in the rudimentary language of electric charges. “You don’t have to live with this pain alone. Join us.”
Yetu ignored her amaba, absorbing more memories. She had thrown away her ancestors.
“You didn’t throw them away. You lived. You did what you needed to do to make sure you lived. Our survival honors ancestors more than any tradition,” said Amaba. Her fins were pressed against Yetu’s cheeks. Her face looked hollow, but her dark eyes were vibrant.
Yetu felt the minds of every living wajinru. Their struggles were so familiar to her. “Join us,” said Amaba, begging. “I would sooner die than let you suffer this alone. You begged me to understand, and I never did. I never could. Now I know, my child. I know, and I will not see you bear it without your amaba, without your kindred.”
But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe, instead of taking the History from them, she could join them as they experienced it. Just like with the Remembrance, she could guide them through the rememberings so it didn’t overtake them with such violence. They could bear it all together.
Usually, after the Remembrance, the historian waited nearby, empty of memories, but what would happen if they stayed? What could happen if someone with experience stayed with the wajinru past the moment of completion? Could she wrangle them back toward consciousness, without taking the memories back? Could they live out their days all sharing the memories together?
Zoti Aleyu wanted the wajinru to be one, together. But they never were. They were two. Historian and her subjects. It was time for the two to be merged.
Yetu let herself feel how the other wajinru felt, flooded by sensation. She welcomed the barrage of thoughts. They subsumed her, the same way they subsumed everyone else.
“I am here,” she said. “Enough.”
“It hurts,” they cried. “We hurt.”
“Yes,” said Yetu, acknowledging their pain in a way it never had been for her.
Yetu ebbed and flowed with them, caught up in the wave of rememberings, but she’d learned over the years how to make an inch for herself.
“How?” someone asked, and it came out as all of them asking it in unison. “How do we make an inch?”
Yetu showed them a picture of the day with the sharks, how lost she’d been, bleeding, seconds away from death before her amaba scooped her up and dragged her to safety. “We must save one another,” said Yetu.
Yetu showed them what she did when she found the History most overwhelming and brutal, projecting images from her own mind into theirs. When the History threatened to end Yetu, she went to one memory in particular: their first caretaker. In this remembering, there is a lone wajinru pup floating, alive and content. It was the ocean who was their first amaba.
* * *
It took three days for the storm inside all of them to settle. They each held pieces of the History now, divvied up between them. They shared it and discussed it. They grieved. Sometimes, they wanted to die. But then they would remember, it was done.
Whenever an event triggered a remembering, they spoke those words. “It is done.” Because it was. Yetu thought of life on the surface for Oori. She had lost most things. Knowledge, rituals, prayers, family. Gaps could be survived and made full again, but only if you were still living.
“You look woeful,” said Amaba.
“I am trying to remember something,” Yetu said.
“What?” her amaba asked.
“What it was like to be in the womb.”
She’d always thought the first memory had been the stranded wajinru pups, tethered to their dead first mothers, but if wajinru existed before the birth, inside the bellies, there should be memories of that, too.
Yetu explained her thought to Amaba.
“It is possible you have had a remembering of such a thing, but have forgotten it.”
It was impossible to forget. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have memories of darkness?” asked Amaba.
“Of course.”
“Of loneliness?”
“Yes.”
“All I’m saying,” said Amaba, “is that there is very little difference between a bornt wajinru pup and one still encased in the womb. What if some of your rememberings of dark loneliness as a pup were you inside a belly, and it was hardly distinguishable from floating in the deep? It is all waters.”
Yetu circled her mother slowly. “It is all waters.”
“When I think about the rememberings I’ve had, I believe this to be the case. I remember the womb from the first wajinru. I remember the ocean teaching us to breathe water. Once we were born, it would’ve been too late, but in the womb, it came to us naturally. That is why it changed us then.”
It was strange to be having such a conversation with her amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the History. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead.
Goodness, how had she missed it?
“I need to look for someone,” admitted Yetu. “She is probably dead, but regardless, I would like to at least locate her body. She means a great deal to me.”
“Oh? A wajinru?”
“A two-legs.”
Amaba tried to act neutral but Yetu caught her attempt to smooth down a smile into cold neutrality. “She had markings on her face, these beautiful, intricate tattoos. Some of the symbols were identical to etchings on the comb I received shortly before the last Remembrance. One of the offerings made to me. I’d assumed they were bite marks, but of course, they are not. They were intentional carvings. I misinterpreted.”
“It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the History,” said Amaba.
Yetu showed Amaba the comb. “My Oori comes from the place where this object is from. Does it spark anything for you? A location?”
Amaba held the comb in her front fin and rubbed it with closed eyes. “It’s from a song.”
“What?” asked Yetu.
“A song our amaba used to sing when she was pregnant.” Yetu understood that when Amaba said our amaba, she was speaking in the voice of the Remembrance, when everybody became one.
“You remember such things?” asked Yetu.
Amaba began to sing. “Zoti aleyu, zoti aleyu, watsa tibi m’besha tusa keyu?”
Strange fish, strange fish, why do you jump around in my belly like a fish out of water?
Yetu had heard the song before. She’d just dismissed it as an old conversation with her amaba, something from her own childhood.
She’d taken on the History so young that memories from the past blended with memories of her life. Amaba was old enough that her memories were more distinct.
“I know where she is,” Yetu said, and left her amaba at once to try to find Oori.
Waj, the first surface dweller a wajinru had befriended, had lived on an island called Tosha. It was the wajinru word for belonging. It was also the Tosha word for belonging.
Waj had told Zoti, the first historian, where she was from, where she was heading. Zoti had misinterpreted. Perhaps Waj had deliberately played with her.
It was a small island in the backward C-shaped cradle of the African continent, and it took Yetu a day to swim there. She didn’t know if Oori would even still be there. It had been a while now since the storm had passed.
Yetu swam close to the shore, careful not to beach herself. “Oori!” she screamed, her voice ugly, strange, and coarse. “Oori!”
She called her nonstop for hours, her voice as loud as she could manage. Finally, she gave up, accepting reality. If Oo
ri was here, she was not coming.
Yetu waited days, eyes on the tree line, waiting for Oori to emerge. She did not. Yetu neither ate nor slept. She certainly didn’t leave. A world where a storm she had made killed the two-legs she held so dear was not bearable. Yetu remembered Zoti and Waj, but it was not the same. Oori had asked Yetu to come with her, and Yetu had willingly denied her. She’d never forgive herself.
On the seventh day, Yetu turned back to the open sea, where she saw a sail on the horizon. She squinted, the sun a blight against her eyes. Dazed from lack of food and rest, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t sleeping. “Oori,” she said quietly, her voice ravaged from the days she’d spent shouting for her. “Please, please, please,” she begged, her heartbeat quickening.
The boat was coming in fast, the winds strong.
When Oori saw Yetu, she did not wave happily, but she did lower her sail so as not to run Yetu over. It was perhaps the closest she’d ever get to a gesture of love.
Then Oori jumped into the water next to Yetu. Her small boat was not anchored and drifted away quickly on the waves.
“Your boat,” said Yetu.
“Hopefully the tide will carry it in. Or it won’t.”
“I have longed for you since you left,” said Yetu. “Were you able to get here in time?”
“No,” said Oori. Neither of them said anything for several moments until Oori added quietly but steadily, “I longed for you, too.” Then she began to cry like she’d been holding it in her whole life. Yetu thought she probably had. Oori had been waiting for someone to bear witness. “I thought I’d never see you again. I thought— I thought what happened to my family, to my nation. I thought that had happened to you.”
“I’m here,” said Yetu. “I will stay with you no matter what.”
“It’s all gone. All of it,” she said.
Yetu nodded. “All but for you,” she said, shivering at the feel of Oori’s legs treading water. “And this.” Yetu showed Oori the comb.
Oori studied it with sharp, serious eyes, her brow pinched tightly together as she bit her lower lip. “Where did you get this?”
“It is from one of the first mothers. The wajinru’s earliest ancestors.”
Oori blinked several times as she processed and wept silently. “When I die, there will be none of us left.”
“Then don’t die,” Yetu said.
A bare shadow of a smile pressed through Oori’s usual glum countenance.
“Stay with me, and we will make a new thing. What’s behind us, it is done.”
“How could I possibly stay with you?”
“Didn’t you know the ocean grants wishes?” asked Yetu.
It wasn’t really that simple. Of course, Yetu didn’t believe that the sea was sentient. But it was where life began. It was where the life of the wajinru began, and reaching backward, the life of the two-legs, too.
“Let me show you something?” asked Yetu.
Oori tried to wipe the tears from her face, but her hands were wet from the water, and finally that was when she laughed, at her own silliness. “Show me anything, everything,” she said, swimming closer so that her thighs brushed against Yetu as her legs moved furiously to keep herself afloat.
“It might be easier if we touch.”
“Touch me, then,” said Oori.
They held each other close until Yetu was able to transfer to Oori the remembering of the womb. Lost in it, Oori stopped treading, and she sank a little. Yetu let her sink, holding her tightly so she could quickly return her to the surface if need be.
But when Oori jolted from the remembering, she was breathing underwater, just as she’d breathed in the womb.
She did not transform in the way wajinru pups transformed in the two-legs’ bellies. She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing.
Yetu beckoned her downward into the dark, into this world of beauty. For most of her life, Yetu had had to shut it out, split between the past and the present, her mind unable to manage even the dullest input. But the world was infinite and magnificent, and she had finally found her place in it.
“Come,” said Yetu. Oori followed. This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.
AFTERWORDby clipping.
THE BOOK YOU CURRENTLY HOLD in your hands—and are likely upset that you read too quickly and that is now over—is only one step in what its editor, Navah Wolfe, described as a game of artistic Telephone. You know how the game works: A phrase is whispered from ear to ear, and as it’s misheard by each participant, the cumulative errors transform the phrase into something new and unexpected. It’s an obvious metaphor, and something of a cliché, but it’s usually deployed to illustrate how signal accumulates noise, how transduction degrades information, how truth becomes fiction when it’s passed along as gossip. What that use of the metaphor ignores is that the phrase’s transformation is a feature of Telephone, not its failure—it’s what makes the game fun. Each new telling of The Deep has been productive, rather than destructive, and each new iteration has been carried out with admiration for the previous. The Deep has gone through three major rounds of Telephone to find itself now in book form, and might continue indefinitely, happily taking on the adaptations of each new interpreter, into the future.
Drexciya started the game. The Detroit techno-electro duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald—along with collaborators like “Mad” Mike Banks and Cornelius Harris of Underground Resistance, illustrators like Frankie Fultz and Abdul Qadim Haqq, DJ Stingray, members of the Aquanauts, and others—created the original mythology:
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us?
Their story took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization. Drexciya’s music was, for the most part, instrumental, and what lyrics there were provided only small glimpses into the mythology they had created. As writer Kodwo Eshun explains: “It was a world that was only being filled in partially, track by track, and you were doing a lot of that navigating, with the help of the music and the track titles. In a sense, to be a Drexciya fan was to build the mythos by yourself.” With our song “The Deep,” we took up that project, navigating the undersea world that Stinson and Donald had created, filling in and building upon that mythos for ourselves.
Drexciya’s music has fascinated us, ever since we encountered it many years ago, for several reasons. For one thing, we admired how much story they were able to tell with so little written content. With a combination of only several hundred words, they created a fictional universe that nonetheless felt real to us. In our music we have always been focused on storytelling. We often talk about lyrics and themes as if we were writing short stories or novels. Although Splendor & Misery—the 2016 science-fiction concept album we made before we made “The Deep”—contains considerably more words than appeared in Drexciya’s entire oeuvre, we often referred to their technique of spare, elliptical world-building when we were making it. We wanted listeners to fill in the narrative and cocreate the world of the album as they heard it.
In the second place, we admired the fact that Drexciya’s elaborate, ambitious concepts were grounded in the most functional of music. Their tracks serve at least one concrete purpose above all: they make you dance. And this is not to say that they bridge some sort of highbrow/lowbrow divide
—because we don’t believe in such a thing—but it’s essential to remember that Drexciya were much more than their narrative themes. To this day, the experience of listening to their music is communal, and it is deeply physical. This is as much a part of their politics as was the science-fiction story of Drexciya—the rave, the block party, the live concert… they are all approaches to utopian world-building. Drexciya continue to teach us the radical potential of bodies moving together in space.
The three of us wrote “The Deep” together. (Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.) We did so at the request of This American Life producers Stephanie Foo, Neil Drumming, and Ira Glass, who commissioned the song for their episode “We Are in the Future” and each gave generous notes contributing to the final result. We emphasize collaborative authorship at every stage of this ongoing work because collaboration and collectivity tie into our initial idea for the song. The first rule we established shortly after clipping. formed was that Daveed’s lyrics should never be written from a first-person perspective—this extended to the banishment of all first-person pronouns and possessives: I, me, my, etc. For “The Deep,” we continued to follow this rule, but narrowed it even further: the only pronoun allowed in the song was y’all. Our prohibition of the first person was, in part, a reaction to the fiercely individualistic authorship presumed in rap lyrics, so in imagining what a Drexciyan utopia might look like, through the lens of clipping.’s linguistic rules, we imagined their culture might affirm collectivity over the individual, and therefore, the plural over the singular. The word y’all, for us, became both an emblem of the Drexciyans’ advanced communal society, and a reference to the multiple-authorship of the song, shared between those of us in clipping. and our partners at This American Life, as well as with Drexciya and their collaborators.
Now, Rivers has contributed their misheard whisper to the chain, filling out our song’s narrative with their particular concerns, politics, infatuations, and passions. Rivers has fixed on the refrain Y’all remember, which is repeated many times throughout our song. They have expanded that phrase into a major aspect of their world-building. In our song, the lyrics serve as a kind of ceremonial performance of remembering. We conceived it as something like a Passover Seder, where the history of whatever new society is formed after the Drexciyans rise up against the surface world is retold. Now we’ve learned who is burdened with this ritual of remembering and retelling. Rivers has given us Yetu, and in so doing, shown us something that our song elided: the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma. Drexciya’s militant uprising, which we suggested was incited by climate change and the destruction of Earth’s oceans, becomes an ambivalent act of both justice and extreme violence, perpetuating further trauma. In their translation from Drexciya to clipping. to this book, Rivers has added a dimension of pain to all three texts. Yetu’s painful remembering might be seen as an allegory for the painful process of adaptation that Rivers has accomplished by retelling a fictional, but nonetheless consequential, story of white supremacist violence. It’s a retelling that reaches back to the materials it adapts, and complicates them; makes them better. In this sense, Rivers has coauthored our song in as profound a way as we have inspired this book.
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