And through them we get three interpretations of history. In The Deep we are told that the role of Historian is one handed down from generation to generation, and we are presented with three different bearers of the title: Zoti, Basha, and Yetu. They are passed down, and thus they survive, but their shape changes as they get interpreted differently by every individual. Stories (and what is history if not a bunch of stories we tell about ourselves?) act much like a game of telephone.

Rivers Solomon heard the song, and decided to bring it back down to a more personal level, writing a story about a people, and their relationship to history. took inspiration from it, added considerable amounts of verbiage, and sang a story about a world being destroyed by global warming, and about a people who rise up and exact revenge on the ones who caused it. Drixceya’s songs were largely wordless, and so they started to tell a story through their song titles a provocative and engaging concept. describes the nested style of development this particular story has gone through as a game of Telephone, the original message relayed over and over, each time a bit more different. What do we do with the trauma that we’ve inherited? So it is no surprise to us when, during an annual ceremony where the wajinru gather in order to receive the memories of their past for a brief time, time enough to satisfy a deep thirst for their own history, that Yetu, free from remembering, runs away. Yetu however, has a fragile constitution, and so this task, this weight she carries that has stripped her of any individual identity, is killing her. To be a Historian means experiencing every single memory as if it was your own.

A responsibility that falls on Yetu, our delicate and long-suffering main character. In order to thrive despite the suffering, it was decided long ago that one of their people a Historian should carry the burden of their history and collected memory. For good reason they are a people descended from the pregnant African women who were thrown overboard during the slave trade, their unborn babies granted new aquatic life by the ocean. On its surface, though, it is about the wajinru, a mermaid-like people who have great power over the ocean but little memory. Which is the sort of fascinating thing you learn when you read the acknowledgements.

The deep solomon rivers