The Deep by Rivers Solomon

This book had me like 😯🤯

The Deep started as a song by @clppng then expanded to a book by @rivers.solomon which felt like reading a movie.

Escape into a world where we the land-dwelling two-legged are not alone. Where an underwater society of people protect the Deep, protect the memory of their first mothers, the pregnant African women thrown overboard by slavers in the Middle Passage, and have the power to guide the ocean towards calm or chaos.

At the center of this story is Yetu, the young historian who is charged with remembering all of the pain and joy of her people. That remembering is destroying her, so she swims away from home to heal and forget. But Yetu soon realizes her true power, and what she must do to save her people.

Yetu was so relatable to me because of all the pain, confusion, resistance, love and respect that she feels towards her responsibility to remember the past.

The Deep, while offering a world of beautiful and resilient Black life, also gave me a better sense of what it means to belong in a community:

We need each other.
No one can do it alone.
Self-care *is* community-care.
Share pain, share joy.

Shoutout to @ijeomanjaka for recommending this amazing tale of Afro-futurism!! Thank you friend🙏🏽