18 Nov Reclaiming Black Identities: Afrofuturism in Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep,” By Sara Cosman
In The Deep, Rivers Solomon loosely adheres to the science fiction genre to confront the relationship between post-colonial ideologies and the persistence of memory in a novella deeply coded with genderqueer possibilities and reclamation of racial fantasy. Adapted from a song of the same name produced by the band Clipping., The Deep follows the Wajinru people, a society of merfolk who are descendants of enslaved pregnant African women, as they live blissfully unaware of the trauma of their past (Solomon). Yetu alone guards and holds her people’s memory, whose voice and desire to be remembered allows Solomon to examine how social amnesia fuels racial logic in settler colonial structures and eradicates the validity of Black identities. Using Maya Mikdahsi’s perspectives of settler colonialism as the colonization of memory through Solomon’s use of remembering, we can see how Yetu’s identity has been stolen from just as her history has. The novella ultimately suggests the necessity of Afrofuturism in science fiction literature as it challenges the precedent framing of Black otherness and focuses instead on the reclamation of identity as it intersects with the sexual relations, race, and gender of the Wajinru. Examining Rivers Solomon’s The Deep through the lens of colonization, racialization, and the marginalization of genderqueer identities reveals the need for an Afrofuturist perspective to address the double bind of settler colonialist ideologies, particularly when considering the enduring power of memory and the framing of intersectional otherness as demonstrated by the Wajinru.
Examining Yetu’s loss of identity in tandem with the erasure of her people’s history suggests that social amnesia fuels racial logic and colonized structures that police Black bodies. Social amnesia, as defined by Robyn Maynard, is the erasure of history to justify and perpetuate the structures and racial logic that dominate the past, present, and future disenfranchisement and surveillance of Black bodies (Maynard 19). The concepts create a double bind that eradicates the possibility for change between the sanctioned racial logic that validates structural societal relationships to Black bodies and the social amnesia that erases such violence. In her book, within a chapter titled “Devaluing Black Life, Demonizing Black Bodies,” Maynard underlines the effects of social amnesia as essential to:
Understand[ing] anti-Black policing in the current epoch. It is only in recovering this original brutality by engaging in the making of the perceived relationship between Black bodies, inferiority, and pathology so that we may more thoroughly understand the contemporary disenfranchisement of Black life through policing and other state institutions. (19)
Maynard’s definition of social amnesia highlights the importance of understanding the history of Black subjugation to recognize the paradigms in place that inform racism. Engaging with the relationship between Black bodies is crucial as we must analyze how colonizers have not only perceived but created these relationships — or at least the social and structural perception of them. Solomon illustrates this through the protagonist Yetu, whose identity is lost in the context of the erasure of her history. When Yetu faces the Wajinru people who have now remembered the violence of their past, she “[swims] closer, it wouldn’t work to shout,” because “Shouting had never woken [her] from being lost in the history” (Solomon 144). Yetu’s silence signifies her awareness of her voice’s weakness, especially in reclaiming her history, as she knows her shouting cannot overcome the violence of erasure. Solomon distinctly emphasizes Yetu’s voice as a marker of her identity as she uses it to establish her differences with Ooti (86). Solomon’s distinct focus on Yetu’s voice as something that identifies her individuality but confines her freedom highlights the pressure placed on Black individuals to remain passive in the face of unjust racial stereotypes. A society’s collective forgetfulness of the violence that fuels present racialized structures, perpetuates these stereotypes, and has resulted in a significant loss of awareness and understanding.
By analyzing Maya Mikdashi’s perspectives of settler colonialism as the colonization of memory, we can understand how Solomon demonstrates the complicated relationship between history and identity in The Deep. Settler colonialism attempts to take over and replace a society through eradication or assimilation and manifests in numerous ways (Mikdashi 31). Additionally, in What is Settler Colonialism? (For Leo Delano Ames Jr.), Maya Mikdashi modifies the definition of settler colonialsim to include “The history of a family welded together by natives and settlers,” adding that “it is the logic of superiority, of primacy, of genocide. It is the colonization of memory and of events that come to be known as ‘history’” (Mikdashi 34). The scholar’s definition emphasizes that for communities of people who are displaced, eradicated, or assimilated due to settler colonialism, colonization extends beyond the physical colonization of their people to the colonization of their memories. Settlers adopt a logic of superiority that effectively erases history and constructs their ideologies and narratives as normative. The Deep illustrates the effects of colonized memory through The Remembering of the Wajinru people, as they are intrinsically inseparable from their history; without their memories, they lose contact with their people, identities, and homeland. Solomon’s most striking use of such theories is through the protagonist, Yetu, and her relationship to the Wajinru past as the historian who guards their memories. Toward the end of The Deep, after Yetu grapples with the truth and violence displaced upon the Wajinru, she illustrates how connected history is to the memory of the Wajinru:
Wanting the world to exist, to be more than just a place with a history no one would ever know. … She let the multiple truths exist inside of her as a way of mediating. […] and accept the multitudes inside herself. […] it made her remember that she existed,’ (Solomon 142).
Yetu notes the “history that no one would ever know,” illustrating how connected the Wajinru’s history is to their memory (Solomon 142). Because colonizers have stolen their memories to assert their superiority, the Wajinru history will remain unknown. Salient in this passage is Solomon’s distinction between the multitude of truths existing inside Yetu and the acceptance of said truths. As Yetu comes to accept the truths of her history against those that comprise her identities – her race, her queerness, her gender, and the intersections of selves – her present existence proves itself by the distinct remembering of her stolen history.
Having analyzed the use of social amnesia and memory to reshape and reclaim Black identities, there is a clear need for an Afrofuturist lens such as Solomon’s in science fiction depictions of the other to reclaim representations of Black identities. Afrofuturism can be defined simply as science fiction as it represents the lives of Black people, yet for writers such as Ytasha Womack, it denotes the intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and the liberation of Black people (Womack). The identities of the others in science fiction are often marginalized as those who are less than the settlers who discovered the land. In The Deep, Solomon flips this narrative by clearly distinguishing the identity of the Wajinru people, and rather than focusing on the framing of otherness, focuses on the reclamation of history and identity. In a charming exchange between Yetu and the land dweller Oori, our protagonist reflects, “How pleasing to think Oori had questions for her just as Yetu had questions for Oori. Oori wanted to know more about Yetu. She believed there was a Yetu to get to know at all,” illustrating how Solomon focuses on the identity and culture of the other rather than their abnormality (Solomon 16). In Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future, Lisa Yaszek establishes how Afrofuturist artists can fight the paradigms of dystopian fiction to address the actual reclamation of identity:
First, they use the vocabulary of science fiction to demonstrate how [black alienation […] is exacerbated rather than alleviated by those visions of tomorrow […] Second, they disrupt, challenge, and otherwise, transform those futures […] These acts of “chrono political intervention, “as Eshunn calls them, double, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple our consciousness about what it might mean to live in a [black future (2003: 298)” (Yaszek 48).
Perspecitivising the envisioned tomorrow of science fiction literature without an Afrofuturist lens can only perpetuate the embedded colonial structures of the past that define the present and build our future. The Deep radicalizes a literary science fiction canon that typically focuses on heroized settlers who discover Terra nullius. Instead, the novella focuses on the reclamation of Wajinru memories and Yetu’s identity after the enslavement of history. The Deep uses the past framing of Black policing to reclaim the history and experiences of Black people, especially their representational otherness in science fiction.
In consideration of settler colonialism as the colonization of memory, the social amnesia that fuels racial logic and the ever-present need for Afrofuturism in science fiction, Solomon’s The Deep offers an intersectional analysis of the persistence of memory in the reclamation of identity, history and otherness in science fiction literature. By pivoting the framing of the other through an Afrofuturist lens, Solomon suggests that the other does not have to be feared or isolated because of their difference. Instead, by addressing the bindings of colonialist structures, we can use Afrofuturism to reclaim the stolen identities of Black bodies and rewrite what has come to be known as history.
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Works Cited
Maynard, Robyn. “Devaluing Black Life, Demonizing Black Bodies Anti-Blackness from Slavery to Segregation.” Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.Fernwood Publishing, 2017.
Mikdashi, Maya. “What Is Settler Colonialism? (For Leo Delano Ames Jr..).” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, 2013, pp. 23–34. doi:10.17953/aicr.37.2.c33g723731073714.
Solomon, Rivers, et al. The Deep. Gallery / Saga Press, 2019.
Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books, 2013. (“A review of “AFROFUTURISM” by Ytasha L. Womack — AGOTT”)
Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 41–60. doi:10.1080/08854300600950236.