But now she had to open herself back up, to make her body a wound again so Amaba’s words would ring against her skin more clearly. As a child, she’d learned to shut out what she could of the world, lest it overwhelm her into fits. Most of the time, Yetu kept her senses dulled. “Answer me!” Amaba said, her tone desperate and screeching. Yetu strained to feel Amaba’s words over the chorus of ripples, her skin drawn away from the delicate waves of speech and toward the short, powerful pulses brought on by her amaba’s gesticulations. “Then what? What else would make you do something so foolish?” Amaba asked, her fins a bevy of movement. “I do not wish for death,” said Yetu, resolute despite the quiet of her worn voice. You must put those childish whims behind you.” Amaba waved her front fins forcefully as she lectured her daughter, the movements troubling the otherwise placid water. “Do you wish for death? Is that why you do this? You are grown now. What kind of dream makes someone lurk in shark-dense waters, leaking blood like a fool? If I had not come for you, if I had not found you in time…” Amaba shook her head, black water sloshing over her face. “Then wake up,” Amaba said, “and wake up now. She’d been weeping for days, lost in a remembering of one of the first wajinru.

“IT WAS LIKE DREAMING,” SAID Yetu, throat raw. The Deep is “a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze…a superb, multilayered work,” ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a vividly original and uniquely affecting story inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity-and own who they really are. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected about her own past-and about the future of her people. And so, she flees to the surface escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities-and discovers a world her people left behind long ago.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her.

This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. Yetu holds the memories for her people-water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners-who live idyllic lives in the deep. Butler meets Marvel’s Black Panther in The Deep, a story rich with Afrofuturism, folklore, and the power of memory, inspired by the Hugo Award–nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’s rap group Clipping.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon