Examining the Sea as a Medium for History in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep
Zhang Xinyu

University of Southampton, UK Southampton,SO17 1BJ;

Abstract：The early works on the Black Atlantic often took the sea as a space of change and cultural emergence, manifesting the history of slavery and the long-term effects of this history through connecting the living with the dead, the past with the real, and the sea with the land. Rivers Solomon’s The Deep contributes to this perspective. Solomon draws on the worldview of Drexciyan’s music. She retells the history of the Atlantic trade by constructing a fantasy race, the wajinru. Wajinru is the descendant of pregnant women abandoned in the Atlantic trade. Their first generations are raised by whales, and established their own society in the depths of the sea. Because only have short memories, wajinru relies on historians in Remembrance for the long-term memory of the community. Yetu, the main character, is the wajinru’s new generation of historians, believing that the heavy burden of history is preventing her from acquiring an individual identity. She abandons the other wajinru in a Remembrance and goes to the coast, where she meets Oori, a human woman. Yetu knows the importance of history through their communication. Therefore, she ultimately chooses to return to her people to save them from the painful memories. Solomon focuses more on the fluidity and historicization of the sea. Using a blue humanities approach, she revisits the history of the Atlantic trade through intersecting narratives and character stories. Solomon portrays a fantastical aquatic race wajinru, showing the past, present and future of slavery from the horizontal plane and the deep sea. Taking wajinru, the inhabitant of the deep sea, as the recorder of Atlantic trade, this essay analyse how they represent slavery history by establishing new connections with the world through the sea. By focusing on the attitudes and approaches of the wajinru to the history of slavery, revealing the traumatic effects on black people brought about by slavery in real history.

Keywords: Deep Sea; slavery; maritime trade

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