From the Abyss of the Middle Passage to the Currents of Hydrofeminism “Getting Wet” with the Ocean in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep

Abstract

This article proposes a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, a recent eco-story about water, memory, and survival. Solomon’s work is inspired by a song called “The Deep” from experimental hip-hop group clipping, a dark science fiction tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. This imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya, which, in a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, where merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. My analysis uses Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of the gaps in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that silence the voices of enslaved women, listening to the voices of water to imagine not only what was but also what could be. Moreover, this article examines The Deep through a trajectory that moves from the ocean as a space that reproduces death only to the ocean as a generative force for posthuman and multispecies kinship. Using Black hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, and econarratology, I will argue that this transition is made possible by the “despatialization” of the ocean—a concept introduced by Erin James—where the ocean is conceived not as a fixed or stable environment, but as a space in constant flux, defying stability, and the subsequent immersion in its waters.

1. Introduction

What if some of your rememberings of dark loneliness as a pup were you inside a belly, and it was hardly distinguishable from floating in the deep? It is all waters.

(Solomon et al. 2019, p. 150)

Is it possible for humans to breathe underwater? Inside a mother’s womb, a fetus exists in an aquatic environment, surviving without the need for air; could this be replicated in the depths of the ocean? This idea becomes even more poignant when we consider the horrors of the Middle Passage, where pregnant enslaved African women were tossed overboard during the transatlantic slave trade, often for being deemed “disruptive cargo”. Amid this cruelty, one might wonder: “is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?” (clipping 2019, p. 156). This speculative possibility forms the basis of The Deep (Solomon et al. 2019) by Rivers Solomon, a novella inspired by a song called “The Deep” (clipping 2017) by the experimental hip-hop group clipping. The story unfolds as a dark science fiction tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women who were thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. This imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya, which, in a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, where merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. Solomon imagines a community of water-breathing descendants of African slave women who must reclaim the memories of their past to shape their future. Named the Wajinru, their past is too traumatic to be remembered and is therefore forgotten by everyone but Yetu, a character who remembers for everyone and is therefore known as the Historian. Once a year, Yetu gives them the “rememberings” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 8): the ceremony, known as the “Remembrance”, lasts for a few days, and during the ritual, a structure called the “womb” protects the wajinry from outside harm. The Remembrance takes “more than it gave. It required her to remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once. Not just that, she had to put order and meaning to the events so that others could understand. It was a painful process” (p. 9). The memories are too painful and traumatic, so she escapes them by fleeing to the surface, where she develops a relationship with two female humans called Suka and Oori, who provide her with food and comfort. On the surface, she learns more about her own past and about the future of her people, and she understands that in order to survive, they will need to reclaim the memories of the Black Atlantic.

Solomon’s novella is part of a tradition in which the Black Atlantic, long tied to the trauma of the Middle Passage, also emerges as a space for reimagining histories beyond suffering (Dawson 2018; Davis 2021; Wemakor 2024). Through speculative storytelling, the ocean is transformed from a site of loss into one of resistance, mythology, and alternative futures where Black identity and memory are reclaimed in new and empowering ways. Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation—a method that blends historical research with speculation and storytelling to reclaim silenced voices—provides a compelling framework for reading these works. In her article “Venus in Two Acts” (Hartman 2008), Hartman explores the challenges of recovering lost histories, particularly the lives of enslaved Black women erased from the historical record. She focuses on the case of Venus, an enslaved girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship, whose existence is documented only through legal records that fail to capture her identity. Hartman critiques the violence of the archive and examines the ethical dilemmas of attempting to narrate their stories without replicating the same violence. Rather than accepting archival absence as an endpoint, she argues for imagining the lives of those lost, using fiction as a means of resisting the dehumanization imposed by official records.

Similarly, The Deep builds upon the speculative mythology of Drexciya and clipping. and uses speculative fiction to recover histories that have been submerged, both literally and figuratively. Unlike other representations of enslaved Africans transforming into merfolk after being cast from slave ships (Davis 2021), Solomon’s novella envisions the unborn children of enslaved African women surviving and evolving into the Wajinru, a water-breathing people. This brings us back to Hartman: by reclaiming the silenced voice of the Wajinru, Solomon complicates what Hartman writes in The Belly of the World, where she states that “slavery conscripted the womb, deciding the fate of the unborn and reproducing slave property by making the mark of the mother a death sentence for her child” (Hartman 2016, p. 169). The womb, using Christina Sharpe’s words, is not a “factory reproducing blackness as abjection” (Sharpe 2014, p. 63), but can be reclaimed in new generative ways. This article examines The Deep through a trajectory that moves from the ocean as a space that reproduces death only to the ocean as a generative force for posthuman and multispecies kinship. Using Black hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, and econarratology, I will argue that this transition is made possible by the “despatialization” (James 2022) of the ocean—conceived not as a fixed or stable environment, but as a space in constant flux, defying stability, and the subsequent immersion in its waters.

2. The Black Atlantic as a Womb Abyss

The Black Atlantic has long been theorized as a space of rupture and transformation, where the histories of forced displacement, resistance, and cultural reinvention converge. At the heart of this history lies the Middle Passage, a violent crossing that saw millions of Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic, severed from their homelands and kinship. However, as thinkers like Paul Gilroy and Édouard Glissant have shown, the Atlantic is not merely a site of loss—it is also a space of relation, where new forms of identity, memory, and belonging have emerged. Black hydrocriticism offers an innovative approach to exploring the intersections between bodies of water and the histories of slavery, colonialism, and migration, reframing the memory of the Middle Passage as a generative site for new forms of kinship and belonging in the contemporary moment (Bennett 2018; Gumbs 2020). In her article “Kinship in the abyss: submerging with The Deep” (DeLoughrey 2022), Elizabeth DeLoughrey, drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, and other hydro-theorists, highlights how the Atlantic is not only an archive of colonial modernity but also an ontological and material space of regeneration; her reading of The Deep demonstrates how speculative fiction can transform the necropolitics of the transatlantic slave trade into the possibilities of the “womb abyss”.

This resonates with Édouard Glissant’s theory of the transoceanic abyss, where he describes the slave ship as a space of both terror and the emergence of new subjectivities. In “The Open Boat”, featured in his work Poetics of Relation (Glissant 1997), Glissant delves into the harrowing experiences of enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage and explores how this collective trauma gave rise to new cultural identities. He uses the metaphor of the “open boat” to symbolize both the physical vessels that transported enslaved individuals and the conceptual journey toward understanding and relation. He describes the slave ship as a “womb”, a paradoxical space that, while confining and dehumanizing, also serves as a site of gestation for new identities and cultures. This “womb” expels its occupants into an “abyss”, a physical and existential void representing the literal ocean depths and the profound disconnection from their origins experienced by the survivors. Joshua B. Bennett articulates a similar perspective in his 2018 essay “Beyond The Vomiting Dark: Toward a Black Hydropoetics”, where the American author examines how the transatlantic slave trade continues to influence contemporary Black literature and culture. Bennett introduces the concept of “Black hydropoetics” to define the archive of the ocean as a space of both “otherworldly despair and fugitive possibility” (p. 109), and he explores the “haunting presence of the Middle Passage” that can be “recalibrated toward imagining an elsewhere, however remote or deeply submerged, where black life can flourish” (p. 109).

In this context, the Afrofuturist myth first created by the Detroit techno band Drexciya (Drexciya 1997)—and inspired by Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)—serves as a form of speculative historiography that confronts the horrors of the Middle Passage while imagining an alternative narrative that envisions transformation and memorialization (Scales 2021). According to Helen Scales, Drexciya’s Afrofuturist vision has indeed inspired a growing movement for an oceanic memorial to honor the lives lost during the transatlantic slave trade. Scales also notes that the urgency of establishing an ocean slavery memorial has become even greater due to the threat posed by deep-sea mining, which risks destroying the wrecks of slave ships and other submerged evidence. In The Deep, Solomon retains and expands upon the climate change dimension of the clipping. introduced the Drexciyan myth. While Drexciya originally imagined an underwater civilization born from the bodies of enslaved Africans thrown overboard, clipping’s version reframes their uprising as a response to this ecological devastation. In the afterword to Solomon’s novella, they write: “Drexciya’s militant uprising, which we suggested was incited by climate change and the destruction of Earth’s oceans, becomes an ambivalent act of both justice and extreme violence, perpetuating further trauma” (clipping 2019, p. 156). Solomon preserves this theme, portraying the Wajinru’s vengeance against humanity as deeply tied to resource exploitation and environmental destruction. They are aware that humans seek to extract a vital substance from beneath the ocean floor—“We are rich with it, and they would mine it from us like scavenger creatures picking off bones” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 135)—and their retaliation escalates into a cataclysmic act: “as one, we make the ocean waters rise and create a tidal wave that lifts us high above land” (p. 140).

Going back to Draxciya and The Black Atlantic’s influence, if Gilroy has reshaped the understanding of the Black Atlantic as a cosmopolitan network, inspiring much of diaspora and cultural studies, scholars in critical ocean studies argue that his perspective overlooks the materiality of the ocean, treating it as a passive backdrop—where one “never gets wet” (Steinberg 2013, p. 158)—rather than an active force (DeLoughrey 2022). This critique has led feminist materialists such as Stacy Alaimo (2016) and Astrida Neimanis (2017) to call for deeper engagement with oceanic matter and the idea of the ocean as a space of fluidity, liquid subjectivity, and queer relations: the ensuing pages of this article intend to add this dimension.

3. Submerging into the Depths of the Ocean Through Hydrofeminism and Econarratology

As suggested by Astrida Neimanis in Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (Neimanis 2017), an embodied and relational understanding of water and bodies (Neimanis proposes to reimagine bodies as “aqueous”) can transcend patriarchal objectification and challenge dualistic thinking. The centrality of the ocean as a space where new ecological imaginaries can proliferate coincides with an extensive and interdisciplinary turn to the ocean under the banner of the so-called blue humanities (Dobbin 2021; Oppermann 2023), with the undersea world deemed a site for rethinking the epistemological and methodological stances of sustainability. From archaeology’s offshore move to environmental history’s recent attention to species of fish and marine mammals, an increasing number of theoretical, literary, and artistic projects are now “thinking with water” (MacLeod et al. 2013), expanding environmental imaginaries beyond forests and terrestrial spaces. Humanities’ attention to the aquatic Anthropocene, which requires the mediation of science and technology studies since “most aquatic zones, species, and topics exist beyond human domains” (Alaimo 2019, p. 429) has also been called “hydrocriticism” or the “oceanic turn” (Winkiel 2019, p. 1). Environmental humanities and material feminism scholar Stacy Alaimo points out that oceanic depths resist the flat mapping of the Earth through satellite images that favor a comfortable and disembodied perspective, proposing instead an immersed and never omniscient position on worldly entanglements. In other words, “the substance of the water itself insists on submersion, not separation” (Alaimo 2016, p. 161). As declared by the author, her conception of trans-corporeality—tracing “the material interchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world” (Alaimo 2016, p. 112)—was influenced by Donna Haraway’s feminist epistemology, in that it originates with a solid location of the self that is never separated from the world that theyseek to know. The Western human subject is no longer impermeable but exposed to worldly entanglements: “to dramatize oneself in place in this way is to critique the rational, disembodied Western subject’s presumption of mastery or at least objectivity that is, supposedly, granted by detachment from the world” (Alaimo 2016, p. 5). Alaimo’s theorization of a complete breakdown of boundaries may help to counter and reconceptualize dominant portrayals of the Anthropocene that tend to abstract the human species from the material realm:

[t]o think of the human species as having had a colossal impact, an impact that will have been unthinkably vast in duration, on something we externalize as “the planet”, removes us from the scene and ignores the extent to which human agencies are entangled with those of non-human creatures and inhuman substances and systems. […] The epistemological position of the “God’s-eye view” that Donna Haraway critiqued in “Situated Knowledges” dominates many of the theoretical, scientific, and artistic portrayals of the anthropocene. Ironically, at the very moment that the catastrophes of the anthropocene should make it clear that what used to be known as nature is never somewhere else (even the bottom of the sea has been altered by human practices), the “conquering gaze from nowhere”, the “view of infinite vision”, the “God trick” of an unmarked, disembodied perspective reasserts itself.

(Alaimo 2016, p. 144)

Prevalent visual depictions of the Anthropocene invite the viewer to zoom out of the planet—for example, through recurring satellite images that map human influence on Earth. The viewer enjoys a comfortable and disembodied perspective, outside the nature they have altered; moreover, through such scaling up, the agency and liveliness of all the more-than-human creatures vanish, and differentials of responsibility and harm are obscured. Alaimo, instead, proposes that we think of the Anthropocene subject as “immersed and enmeshed in the world” (Alaimo 2016, p. 157). To do so, she looks at oceanic depths, as they usually resist this flat mapping of the globe, where the surface of the seas is merely revealed. Submerging into the depths of the ocean may provoke the recognition of human life as always entangled with the more-than-human world. In Solomon’s The Deep, the ocean is not a space of absolute alterity but rather a site that provokes a recognition of human life as always enmeshed with the more-than-human world, where seawater is represented as a fluid that trans-corporeally traces the material interchanges between human and non-human beings.

Such an immersed and non-omniscient position on worldly entanglements lends itself to an econarratological reading. Econarratology, as outlined by Erin James in Narrative in the Anthropocene (James 2022), emerges at the critical intersection of narratology and the environmental humanities, addressing the mutual lack of engagement between the two fields. James defines econarratology as an approach that combines the environmental humanities’ interest in the relationship between literature and the physical environment with narratology’s focus on the structures and devices that shape narratives. This approach seeks to address two major gaps: the environmental humanities’ limited engagement with narrative theory despite its recognition of storytelling’s role in environmentalism, and narrative theory’s “relatively scant considerations of the environment… let alone more specific discussions of the Anthropocene and climate change” (p. 4). Econarratology thus aims to “identify and categorize innovative narratological structures that represent the human-created world of the Anthropocene” (p. 5), exploring how narrative has formally adapted to new temporalities, spaces, and perspectives. While existing discussions of narrative in the Anthropocene often prioritize “content rather than form” (p. 16), James argues that a closer examination of narrative structures can “provide clarity on the ability of narratives to represent the Anthropocene” (p. 16). This aligns with the shift in narratology from a purely descriptive practice to a contextualist narratology, which “links narrative structures to the contexts of their production to question how textual elements can encode or challenge certain ideologies” (p. 16). Similar to feminist and postcolonial narratologies, econarratology underscores the intersection of form and content, positioning narrative as an evolving site of inquiry that not only reflects but also shapes contemporary understandings of climate change and the Anthropocene.

James introduces the concept of “despatialization” to account for the increasing spatial instability of the Anthropocene, challenging traditional narratological approaches that rely on stable spatial contexts (such as Zoran 1984; Ronen 1986; and Herman 2001). James argues that the Anthropocene’s “unstable spacescapes” resist a clear mapping, and she proposes the narrative technique of despatialization to highlight spatializing cues that are deliberately inexact and difficult to mentally structure. This approach aligns with the recognition that space has never been merely a passive background but is inherently dynamic. Water narratives serve as particularly useful sites for exploring despatialization. As James notes, much of the instability predicted by IPCC scientists in the Anthropocene stems from water (p. 126), and scholars in the blue humanities have long linked water’s fluidity to the spatial confusion. Stacy Alaimo, for example, highlights the deep sea’s resistance to human spatial mastery, noting that its vast, dark expanses lack clear borders and defy conventional ways of perceiving depth, scale, or perspective. She describes these “unnervingly violet-black seas” as rejecting “mastery, transcendence, and stable, terrestrial frames of reference” (Alaimo 2013, pp. 241, 245). Similarly, Astrida Neimanis argues that water challenges conventional cartographies, embracing fluidity as a force of “difference and repetition” that disrupts fixed spatial understandings (Neimanis 2017, p. 4). Despatialization, thus, emerges as a vital narratological tool for representing the instability and transformation of space in the Anthropocene, particularly in narratives shaped by the shifting geographies of water.

James, moreover, argues that an Anthropocene narrative theory must move beyond conventional omniscient narration, which has traditionally reinforced notions of human exceptionalism and supremacy—the very values that have contributed to the environmental crises of the epoch. She highlights how traditional omniscience fosters an illusion of detachment, allowing readers to perceive themselves as separate from or unaffected by the environmental conditions that shape the Anthropocene. Instead, she advocates narrative resources that immerse readers in storyworlds, emphasizing collective agency and interconnectedness. James aligns this perspective with critiques such as those of Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who, in The Shock of the Anthropocene (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016), argue that the “blue marble” image of Earth from space has reinforced a sense of ecological separateness and dominance. In response, she explores alternative narrative strategies that can challenge this detached viewpoint, facilitating an imagination of collectivity and embeddedness that better reflects the entangled realities of life during the Anthropocene. By destabilizing omniscient narration and its associations with mastery and control, such approaches encourage readers to recognize their coexistence within planetary systems, fostering a more relational and decentered environmental consciousness.

Both despatialization and immersion within the storyworld are defining features of The Deep, where the ocean is presented as a space in constant transition, an environment that defies stability: “the ocean pulsated. The water moved, animated” (p. 10). Here, the ocean is not a static setting but an active, living entity that shifts and resists spatial fixity. This instability is further emphasized in Yetu’s recollections: “There was nothing like the cities Yetu had seen in her rememberings” (p. 11). The absence of familiar urban structures within the ocean highlights its fundamental difference from terrestrial spaces, reinforcing its status as an environment that does not conform to the traditional spatial logic. Similarly, the ocean’s fluctuating light and color—and a focus on notions of color “rather than concrete representations of space or of characters/agents moving in a specific spatial context” (James 2022, pp. 131–32)—contribute to its spatial ambiguity, making it difficult for readers to produce a mental model of this place:

in the sacred waters, there was never color because there was never light. That was how Yetu knew the remembering had overcome her, because there was blurred color. Light from above the ocean’s surface peeked through, painting the water a dark, grayish blue.

(Solomon et al. 2019, p. 17)

Here, space is not only in flux, but also perceptually unstable. For the Wajinru, however, the ocean is not just home (the Wajinru even translate the word “homeland” into “home-sea”, p. 122)—it is a mother, a caretaker, and a source of belonging. The deep envelops them, providing security and connection. This relationship is illustrated in Yetu’s descent:

We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude. Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another. Down here, we eventually find more of us.

(p. 50)

The ocean nurtures and protects, and its pressure acts as an embrace. Unlike humans, who view the sea as hostile and unknowable, the Wajinru experience it as an intimate and familial space.

From the viewpoint of human outsiders, the ocean is an overwhelming and disorienting force, a site of danger and power: “they were land dwellers. Dead land dwellers at the mercy of the cruel sea” (p. 36). Yet, from the Wajinru’s perspective, the ocean is home, structured by its own internal logic: “Water means where we live. Land is where she lives. Sky is what’s above. Sand, stone, trees, fire, hungry, hot, cold, sweat, sad” (p. 45). This passage illustrates the duality of perception—while the ocean may seem chaotic and unstructured to humans, the Wajinru experience it as a comprehensible and familiar space.

Even when novella provide spatializing cues for underwater cities, they remain disorienting and fragmented, defying clear mapping. The Wajinru’s cities are described as emerging from “scraps and leavings”, constructed from “mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater” (p. 55). This description presents a spatial environment that is constantly being built and rebuilt, resisting both permanence and order. Unlike terrestrial cities with clearly defined streets and structures, these underwater settlements are ephemeral, composed of the remnants of human civilization, further highlighting despatialization. Finally, despatialization in The Deep is reinforced by a disruption of the reader’s ability to construct a stable sense of time. Just as space is fluid and unfixed, so too is time in the narrative: “it was impossible to keep precise track of the passing of time in the dark of the deep” (p. 7). The absence of light and conventional time markers renders temporal perception unreliable, mirroring the instability of the oceanic space.

At the same time, Solomon reverses the traditional experience of spatial disorientation by making the land, rather than the ocean, an unfamiliar and unsettling space for Yetu. As she moves toward the surface and beyond, she experiences physical and sensory alienation: “Her body felt wrong, like it was flying apart. There was nothing at these depths to hold her together or squeeze her into place. As the light colored the water into a strange shade of dark, greenish blue, she closed her eyes, unused to the burn of sunshine” (p. 67). The ocean, which previously provided a sense of containment, is absent, and Yetu is left unmoored. This destabilization intensifies as she surfaces: “Her sense of north, south, east, and west were gone. The currents were a maze. Unfamiliar animals moved in ways she didn’t recognize” (p. 68, emphasis added). As she transitions to land, her bodily experience further alienates her: “Everything about life on land strained her senses. It was disorienting to use her eyes rather than her skin” (p. 79, emphasis added). The land, which to humans is a stable and navigable space, becomes for Yetu a fragmented and disjointed realm.

The ocean, moreover, is never treated as a passive backdrop where one never gets wet, as the Wajinry’s bodies are water entities always vulnerable to rupture. To think of bodies as water is to embrace the porous, shifting, and interdependent nature of existence, troubling dominant Western notions of embodiment as being discrete, autonomous, and self-contained. As Astrida Neimanis suggests in Bodies of Water (Neimanis 2017), our bodies are not sealed off but rather “leak and seethe” (p. 2), vulnerable to the continual renegotiation of our boundaries. In The Deep, Yetu “always kept herself tense against the ocean’s intrusions, [but] they found their way in” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 2); she is “syncronized with the ocean”, with her emotions “as dark and tumultuous as the deep” (p. 140). The Wajinru, descendants of those cast into the ocean during the transatlantic slave trade, exist in a symbiotic relationship with the sea, and in this more-than-human “hydrocommons” (Neimanis 2017, p. 2), boundaries are blurred and the self is always in flux with the material world. Yet, such a celebration of watery kinship cannot overlook the violent histories that birthed Wajinru’s existence: the novella reminds us that the ocean is not only a womb but also a grave, marked by the legacies of colonialism and transatlantic capitalism. When grief and rage take hold, the Wajinru’s collective energy transforms the sea itself: “taken by rage and grief from the rememberings, and without the cognizance to hold themselves back, the Wajinru all together could stir the ocean waters to a degree that would disrupt the natural weather cycles” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 77).

4. The Ocean as a Generative Space of Collectivity and More-Than-Human Kinship

The Deep, therefore, transforms the womb abyss pregnant with death (Glissant 1997; DeLoughrey 2022) into a generative space of community, more-than-human ontologies, queer and multispecies kinship, where the non-binary and hermaphroditic1 wajinru become-with and compose-with several marine mammals (and a few sharks). As we learn during the Remembrance, which takes the Wajinru back over 600 years from when they were first conceived, the first human being (a “two-legs”) to create a relationship with them was a woman named Waj, whose seemingly, lifeless body was discovered one day while floating on the surface of the water. Waj gives the Wajinru knowledge of language and gives them the name “zoti aleyu”, which, in her own language, means “strange fish” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 48). Over the years, they “raise so many pups [and] find more zoti aleyu”, the strength of their people being their togetherness (p. 61); as they grow in number, so does their sense of community (“we are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one” [p. 54]), a community that move “spontaneously but in unison, a single entity” (p. 11). For the new pups, they choose names, such as Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo: “their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them” (p. 53). Soon, they realize that they are not “zoti aleyu. We are more vast and more beauteous than that name implies” (p. 64), and they abandon the othering name “strange fish” to embrace the name “Wajinru”, “chorus of the deep” (p. 64): “we are a song, and we are together” (p. 64). Toward the end of the novella, when Yetu realizes that if they are all to survive, they’ll need to reclaim the memories and most importantly, to share them together rather than having one person bearing the heavy burden for the community’s deep history—Solomon describes the Remembrance as the moment when “when everybody became one” (p. 151).

The text inscribes several non-human figures in such a “complex rendering of the kinship networks of sea ontologies” (DeLoughrey 2022, p. 6). The Wajinru, to start with, are hybrid figures blending human and non-human traits. When Yetu flees to the surface and meets Suka and Oori, a two-legs woman who seems to prefer animals to people, she exclaims:

“Perfect, then. I’m not human.” […] “I am animal.” […]

“Yes, but only animal-ish?” […]

Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu did not like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, with the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it.

(p. 84)

If this passage rejects a human separation from nature ‘out there’, the whole text is populated with whales, sharks, and bacteria that configure the oceanic depths as a space of shifting kinship relations. Whales, in particular, are called “second mothers” by the Wajinru, as they nursed them after their drowning human mothers gave birth:

We live only by the graciousness of the second mothers, the giant water beasts we’ve years and years later come to call skalu, whales, who feed us, bond with us, and drag us down to the deepest deepest depths where we are safer. […] We live among them; they are our only kin.

(pp. 42–43)

As both DeLoughrey (2022) and Wemakor (2024) highlight, The Deep lends itself well to being read in dialogue with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Gumbs 2020), in which the Black feminist philosopher and writer suggests that marine mammals have much to teach us about Black feminist practices such as breathing, remembering, and collaborating. In other words, both Solomon and Gumbs engage with Black Atlantic histories and marine life as sites of memory, resistance, and transformation. Let us note that Gumbs herself has published a short story in Strange Horizon titled “Blue Bellow” (Gumbs 2017), where she imagines mermaid zombie survivors of the Middle Passage; Gumbs’s speculative work, therefore, like Solomon’s, reinterprets the ocean as a space of historical reckoning and speculative liberation. Her theoretical meditations in Undrowned draw inspiration from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (Butler 1980), particularly the moment when the protagonist, refusing enslavement, leaps from a ship and transforms into a dolphin. This act of defiant metamorphosis echoes throughout Undrowned, where Gumbs asks how marine mammals’ survival strategies might inform Black feminist praxis. The book explores these lessons through several thematic inquiries, such as “listening” (where she suggests that echolocation might help us challenge conventional notions of vision and visionary action), “breathing” (where the adaptations that marine mammals have made in relationship to breathing are likened to the suffocating conditions of racialized existence), remembering (where, through the story of the only dolphin who has managed to keep her indigenous name despite colonization [Tuxuci, named in the Tupi language], she advocates for collective memory as a form of survival), collaboration (where pantropical spotted dolphines moving in tightly coordinated pods are seen as models of solidarity challenging the individualism of late capitalism), vulnerability (where she parallels the scars that bind small dolphin groups to the ways marginalized communities form alliances based on share wounds—as do the Wajinru in The Deep), and refusal (where, inspired by Black feminist theorists such as Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers and drawing from the story of the Atlantic gray whales who disappeared during the slave trade, she explores the radical potential of refusing to be seen). In asking “what becomes possible when we are immersed in the queerness of forms of life that dominant systems cannot chart, reward, or even understand” (p. 105), Gumbs offers a compelling framework for understanding The Deep and reimagining the ocean as a space of radical possibilities. As highlighted before, the Wajinru resist the wandering and conquering eye that “fucks the world” (Haraway 1988, p. 581) and propose an immersed and never omniscient position on worldly entanglements (Alaimo 2016), helped by a radical despatialization of the ocean and the land (James 2022).

In conclusion, let us return for a moment to the point from where we started: the ocean as a womb reproducing death only. It is not only the life within the ocean that enters into caring relationships with the Wajinru but the ocean itself. Their alliance is once again based on “shared wounds” (Gumbs), evident in the violence of deep-sea mining—destroying both the ocean and many of the Wajinru communities; the Wajinru’s breathing “is not separate from the breathing of the ocean, their breathing is not separate from the sharp exhale of hunted whales” (Gumbs 2020, p. 4). Moreover, as DeLoughrey observes, the conclusion of the novella opens up the possibility of the ocean itself being an agent: “Yetu didn’t believe that the sea was sentient. But it was where life began” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 154). The ocean was indeed “their first amaba” (p. 149)—in The Deep, the word “amaba” is used to refer to mothers or caretakers within the Wajinru society—the mother who taught them to breathe water (p. 150). As the novella comes to a close and Yetu realizes that they will need to reclaim the painful memories collectively if they want to survive, she claims that when “she found the History most overwhelming and brutal” she “went to one memory in particular: their first caretaker” (p. 149). In other words, the burden of a traumatic communal memory is more bearable through a posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics of care arising from the materiality of the ocean. In DeLoughrey’s view, the transformation of the ocean from a figure of death to a figure of queer and multispecies radical relationality leads to “a nonreproductive futurity that is simultaneously generative of new life forms” (DeLoughrey 2022, p. 8). Such watery gestationality resonates with what Sophie Lewis proposes in Full Surrogacy Now (Lewis 2019), where the feminist scholar discusses “amniotechnics” and water as figures for radical kinship. Drawing from hydrofeminist” Astrida Neimanis, Lewis suggests that if we are all watery, then we all possess the capacity for a fluid, generative form of care, and gestationality does not have to be confined to the biological function of a female human womb—what Neimanis defines as “heteronormative reprosexuality” (Neimanis 2017, p. 6). Gestation, writes Lewis, is “cyborg, because watery” (Lewis 2019, p. 162), and can be a source of radical kinship not necessarily tied to the female human. In other words, if we are all “multiply-pregnant with myriad entities, bacteria, viruses, and more, some of whom are even simultaneously gestating us” (p. 162), then the ocean in The Deep harbors the potential of gestationality for the Wajinru. The “dark loneliness” inside a belly is, indeed, “hardly distinguishable from floating in the deep”, as it is “all waters” (Solomon et al. 2019, p. 150).