I disagree with that for all sorts of reasons, one of which is that, in the case of those drowned women in The Deep, there can be no testimony the only way to memorialize them is through imagination. I’ve met Holocaust survivors who insisted that the only genre capable of representing their experience is personal testimony – that fiction should just not even try. The horrors of the Middle Passage, like the Holocaust or indigenous genocides, seem to both demand and resist fantasy: on the one hand, the imagination needed to even approximate it in fiction requires resources beyond those of realistic or historical fiction, while on the other, invoking the tools of SF or fantasy risks turning historical outrage into comforting myth. Part furious indictment and part ecological fable, The Deep raises provocative questions about the weight of history, the nature of utopia, and the complex role of memory as both a blessing and a curse. This, in turn, was further elaborated by Solomon into this hauntingly lyrical fantasia.
(whose members are listed as collaborators on the novel as of this writing, the song is available online). The idea of a utopian underwater society built by the water-breathing descendants of pregnant slaves thrown overboard from slave ships was first conceived by a Detroit electro-pop duo called Drexciya, then developed into a Hugo Award-nominated song for NPR’s This American Life by the rap group clipping. Rivers Solomon’s The Deep has a pretty colorful and convoluted history, but one that suggests how SF and Afrofuturist conceits are increasingly interacting with the broader culture.
The Deep, Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes ( Saga 978-6-3, $19.99, 176pp) November 2019.
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