Now, Rivers has contributed their misheard whisper to the chain, filling out our song’s narrative with their particular concerns, politics, infatuations, and passions. Rivers has fixed on the refrain Y’all remember, which is repeated many times throughout our song. They have expanded that phrase into a major aspect of their world-building. In our song, the lyrics serve as a kind of ceremonial performance of remembering. We conceived it as something like a Passover Seder, where the history of whatever new society is formed after the Drexciyans rise up against the surface world is retold. Now we’ve learned who is burdened with this ritual of remembering and retelling. Rivers has given us Yetu, and in so doing, shown us something that our song elided: the immediate and visceral pain inherent in passing down past trauma. 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. In their translation from Drexciya to clipping. to this book, Rivers has added a dimension of pain to all three texts. Yetu’s painful remembering might be seen as an allegory for the painful process of adaptation that Rivers has accomplished by retelling a fictional, but nonetheless consequential, story of white supremacist violence. It’s a retelling that reaches back to the materials it adapts, and complicates them; makes them better. In this sense, Rivers has coauthored our song in as profound a way as we have inspired this book.
Ever since the book’s announcement, we’ve been asked by fans and journalists if Rivers’s version of the story is “canon.” The answer is yes, and no. Part of our rejection of first-person perspective is also a rejection of the authoritative position that the notion of a canon assumes. Readers and listeners have before them three—let’s call them objects of study: the recorded oeuvre of Drexciya and its associated artwork and liner notes, the clipping. song “The Deep,” and Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep. We prefer to imagine each of these objects as artifacts—as primary sources—each showing a different angle on a world whose nature can never be observed in totality. Each contributor has told their story about the same underwater city, and each telling has its own specific perspective, the way any two “true stories” about our own world can provide differing, or even incompatible, visions of our reality. Experiencing these works requires labor—something like that of an archaeologist who’s discovered multiple texts about the Drexciyan civilization and is tasked with assembling a picture of that civilization. We ask a lot of our readers and listeners. This is why we will return to the metaphor of the game of Telephone—it’s no fun with one person, and the joy of it is that no misheard utterance is more “correct” or “true” than any other. The pleasure is in the process, and the value is not in any one version of the phrase but in its gradual transformation purple monkey dishwasher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I AM THANKFUL FOR THE ocean, from which life springs. I am thankful for the ancestors, who lived, which is all any of us can do. And I am thankful for our vast human history, wide and various enough that there are legacies of triumph for every legacy of trauma. Everything is always changing, which means nothing can ever be hopeless. The battering rush of tides shapes and smooths rock, carves out new lands.
I am one person in a great network of people who made The Deep possible. It could not have happened without Navah, who dreamed up this seed and trusted me with its nurturing. All books are collaborative efforts, but this book more than average. Without the permission and support of clipping. to use their profoundly powerful sound “The Deep,” this text would not exist.
Thank you to my agent Laura, who always has my interests at heart, who calms my anxieties, who roots for me. Thank you to my partner, who is an editor, a support group, and a damn fine human all in one. To Bunny, who is my dearest friend and keeps me alive. To my mother, who is always there. To my grandmother, who is no longer here, but who is still always there. To Johnny, Susannah, Ibrahim, Johanna, Alice, and Aaron at Akashic Books, who published my very first book, who took an incredible leap of faith on me, without whom this second book would not exist.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
RIVERS SOLOMON is the author of An Unkindness of Ghosts, and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. They graduated from Stanford University with a degree in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and hold an MFA in fiction writing from the Michener Center for Writers. Though originally from the United States, they currently live with their family in Cambridge, England. The Deep is their second book. Find them on Twitter @cyborgyndroid or online at riverssolomon.com.
DAVEED DIGGS is an actor, producer, writer, and rapper. He is the vocalist of the experimental rap group clipping. In 2015, Diggs originated the role of, and won a Grammy and Tony for, the Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He also cowrote, produced, and starred in the film Blindspotting. Find him on Twitter @DaveedDiggs.
WILLIAM HUTSON is a composer, known for Room 237 (2012), The Mayor (2017), and Ten Minutes Is Two Hours (2013). He is part of the experimental rap group clipping. Find him on Twitter @clppng.
JONATHAN SNIPES is a composer and sound designer for film and theater, living in Los Angeles. He occasionally teaches sound design in the theater department at UCLA, and he is a member of the experimental rap group clipping. Find him at jonat8han.com.
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