The Deep is based on a song by Clipping, the rap group consisting of William Hutson, Jonathan Snipes, and Daveed Diggs, who you’ve probably seen in either Hamilton, Black-ish or Blindspotting. As the “remembering” is drawing near, she must decide if the history and the needs of the wajinru are worth risking her own life to keep carrying.
When we meet Yetu in The Deep, she has shouldered the heavy cross of her ancestors’s memories for most of her life. Every year, the historian must deliver the history to their people, allowing them to process the lessons and value of the memories before becoming blissfully unaware once more. The Deep is “a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze…a superb, multilayered work,” ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) and a vividly original and uniquely affecting story inspired by a song produced by the rap group Clipping.Since the history of the wajinru is too painful for them to bear, but the thought of forgetting is even more impossible, they appoint one member of their species to carry the memories for everyone. If they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories, reclaim their identity-and own who they really are. Yetu will learn more than she ever expected about her own past-and about the future of her people.
And so, she flees to the surface escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities-and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly is forgotten by everyone, save one-the historian. Yetu holds the memories for her people-water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners-who live idyllic lives in the deep. Butler meets Marvel’s Black Panther in The Deep, a story rich with Afrofuturism, folklore, and the power of memory, inspired by the Hugo Award–nominated song “The Deep” from Daveed Diggs’s rap group Clipping.
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