Oori studied it with sharp, serious eyes, her brow pinched tightly together as she bit her lower lip. “Where did you get this?”
“It is from one of the first mothers. The wajinru’s earliest ancestors.”
Oori blinked several times as she processed and wept silently. “When I die, there will be none of us left.”
“Then don’t die,” Yetu said.
A bare shadow of a smile pressed through Oori’s usual glum countenance.
“Stay with me, and we will make a new thing. What’s behind us, it is done.”
“How could I possibly stay with you?”
“Didn’t you know the ocean grants wishes?” asked Yetu.
It wasn’t really that simple. Of course, Yetu didn’t believe that the sea was sentient. But it was where life began. It was where the life of the wajinru began, and reaching backward, the life of the two-legs, too.
“Let me show you something?” asked Yetu.
Oori tried to wipe the tears from her face, but her hands were wet from the water, and finally that was when she laughed, at her own silliness. “Show me anything, everything,” she said, swimming closer so that her thighs brushed against Yetu as her legs moved furiously to keep herself afloat.
“It might be easier if we touch.”
“Touch me, then,” said Oori.
They held each other close until Yetu was able to transfer to Oori the remembering of the womb. Lost in it, Oori stopped treading, and she sank a little. Yetu let her sink, holding her tightly so she could quickly return her to the surface if need be.
But when Oori jolted from the remembering, she was breathing underwater, just as she’d breathed in the womb.
She did not transform in the way wajinru pups transformed in the two-legs’ bellies. She didn’t grow gills or fins, but like Yetu, she could breathe both on land and in the sea. She was a completely new thing.
Yetu beckoned her downward into the dark, into this world of beauty. For most of her life, Yetu had had to shut it out, split between the past and the present, her mind unable to manage even the dullest input. But the world was infinite and magnificent, and she had finally found her place in it.
“Come,” said Yetu. Oori followed. This time, the two-legs venturing into the depths had not been abandoned to the sea, but invited into it.
AFTERWORD
THE BOOK YOU CURRENTLY HOLD in your hands—and are likely upset that you read too quickly and that is now over—is only one step in what its editor, Navah Wolfe, described as a game of artistic Telephone. You know how the game works: A phrase is whispered from ear to ear, and as it’s misheard by each participant, the cumulative errors transform the phrase into something new and unexpected. It’s an obvious metaphor, and something of a cliché, but it’s usually deployed to illustrate how signal accumulates noise, how transduction degrades information, how truth becomes fiction when it’s passed along as gossip. What that use of the metaphor ignores is that the phrase’s transformation is a feature of Telephone, not its failure—it’s what makes the game fun. Each new telling of The Deep has been productive, rather than destructive, and each new iteration has been carried out with admiration for the previous. The Deep has gone through three major rounds of Telephone to find itself now in book form, and might continue indefinitely, happily taking on the adaptations of each new interpreter, into the future.
Drexciya started the game. The Detroit techno-electro duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald—along with collaborators like “Mad” Mike Banks and Cornelius Harris of Underground Resistance, illustrators like Frankie Fultz and Abdul Qadim Haqq, DJ Stingray, members of the Aquanauts, and others—created the original mythology:
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us?
Their story took one of the most gruesome details of the Atlantic slave trade and reframed it. The murder of enslaved women was reimagined as an escape from murderous oppression, and the founding of a utopian civilization. Drexciya’s music was, for the most part, instrumental, and what lyrics there were provided only small glimpses into the mythology they had created. As writer Kodwo Eshun explains: “It was a world that was only being filled in partially, track by track, and you were doing a lot of that navigating, with the help of the music and the track titles. In a sense, to be a Drexciya fan was to build the mythos by yourself.” With our song “The Deep,” we took up that project, navigating the undersea world that Stinson and Donald had created, filling in and building upon that mythos for ourselves.
Drexciya’s music has fascinated us, ever since we encountered it many years ago, for several reasons. For one thing, we admired how much story they were able to tell with so little written content. With a combination of only several hundred words, they created a fictional universe that nonetheless felt real to us. In our music we have always been focused on storytelling. We often talk about lyrics and themes as if we were writing short stories or novels. Although Splendor & Misery—the 2016 science-fiction concept album we made before we made “The Deep”—contains considerably more words than appeared in Drexciya’s entire oeuvre, we often referred to their technique of spare, elliptical world-building when we were making it. We wanted listeners to fill in the narrative and cocreate the world of the album as they heard it.
In the second place, we admired the fact that Drexciya’s elaborate, ambitious concepts were grounded in the most functional of music. Their tracks serve at least one concrete purpose above alclass="underline" they make you dance. And this is not to say that they bridge some sort of highbrow/lowbrow divide—because we don’t believe in such a thing—but it’s essential to remember that Drexciya were much more than their narrative themes. To this day, the experience of listening to their music is communal, and it is deeply physical. This is as much a part of their politics as was the science-fiction story of Drexciya—the rave, the block party, the live concert… they are all approaches to utopian world-building. Drexciya continue to teach us the radical potential of bodies moving together in space.
The three of us wrote “The Deep” together. (Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.) We did so at the request of This American Life producers Stephanie Foo, Neil Drumming, and Ira Glass, who commissioned the song for their episode “We Are in the Future” and each gave generous notes contributing to the final result. We emphasize collaborative authorship at every stage of this ongoing work because collaboration and collectivity tie into our initial idea for the song. The first rule we established shortly after clipping. formed was that Daveed’s lyrics should never be written from a first-person perspective—this extended to the banishment of all first-person pronouns and possessives: I, me, my, etc. For “The Deep,” we continued to follow this rule, but narrowed it even further: the only pronoun allowed in the song was y’all. Our prohibition of the first person was, in part, a reaction to the fiercely individualistic authorship presumed in rap lyrics, so in imagining what a Drexciyan utopia might look like, through the lens of clipping.’s linguistic rules, we imagined their culture might affirm collectivity over the individual, and therefore, the plural over the singular. The word y’all, for us, became both an emblem of the Drexciyans’ advanced communal society, and a reference to the multiple-authorship of the song, shared between those of us in clipping. and our partners at This American Life, as well as with Drexciya and their collaborators.