Charlotte Kersten

“To join the realities. To make sense of it all.”

Year published: 2019

Category: Fantasy novella

Representation: F/F, main couple

Summary: 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. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one—the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. 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 will learn more than she ever expected to about her own past—and about the future of her people. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity—and own who they really are.

Inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping for the This American Life episode “We Are In The Future,” The Deep is vividly original and uniquely affecting.

My thoughts: I may or may not have been reading a number of SFF books about trauma lately, and this is the first I can think of that I’ve read on the theme of generational trauma in particular. The Deep has a lot to say about how we deal with and remember the atrocities that define our past. The mermaid society in question sees no middle ground between living in complete ignorance of their painful past or being totally consumed by it. The book emphasizes that neither option is sustainable, ultimately, even if the intent is to protect people as much as possible; it is only through sharing pain that we can make sense of it and it can be held and processed.

The Deep also speaks a great deal about solitude and companionship and how that is affected by trauma, especially trauma that is linked to the loss of other people. The first of the wajinru knew incredible loneliness and were desperate to build a community; Yetu is divided from her people at the start and abandons them, but makes her way back to them after deciding that nothingness is worse than pain. A big part of her process of doing so is finding companionship with the human Oori.

These topics are ones that are worthy of exploration and I think The Deep’s way of doing so is powerful and effective overall. As a final point, I also really loved the descriptions of the ocean, the gentle whales and the wajinru culture and communication.