What if these babies, free from slavery and ignorant of the horrors of their ancestry and of the ugliness of the surface world, went on to form communities and live peaceful lives in the abyssal depths of the ocean?

They take this horrific event and make an interesting speculation: what if those pregnant mothers gave birth to water-breathing babies at sea. This fact forms the base of Solomon’s novella. One of the more insidious of these atrocities was the fact that during the Middle Passage, pregnant women – deemed troublesome and sickly cargo – were thrown overboard to drown or be eaten by sharks. The historical record of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is written in blood, detailing the multitudes of atrocities against various peoples stolen from various African Nations. We built our home on the ocean floor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers.” p. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. “Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. So, in this review, I will try to unpack the core theme of The Deep and to explain a little bit of the fascinating history that led to its creation. The origins of the concept started with a 1992 techno-electro album and, over the last 27 years, the concept went through a game of telephone, as actor and musician Daveed Diggs puts it, culminating in the novella that’s available for us to read today.

Solomon, who certainly did a good job and deserves all the award nominations and wins they have garnered, did not come up with the base premise of The Deep on their own. Within its 150 pages, this novella managed to be so complex, that I delayed this review just so that I could have an animated book club discussion to process everything it contained.Įven the circumstances of this book’s creation turned out to be an intriguing story. It is a poetic rumination about the nature of memories, our individual and communal experiences with our histories and healing transgenerational trauma. I was wrong, of course, and my friend did manage to undersell the book just enough for it to surprise me. A friend of mine had told me that The Deep was more about memory and history, but still with the image of that mockumentary in my head, I somehow thought it would have been something else, a deep-sea adventure story involving mermaids and whales.

When I saw the cover of The Deep by Rivers Solomon, my mind immediately bounced back to the 2013 Animal Planet docufiction Mermaids: The Body Found.