In the Deep and the Use of Mythical Imagery

A new post from my MFA critical work, this book is an excellent sci-fi piece of a world where african peoples who lept overboard during the transatlantic slave trade adapted to a new aquatic life. In this critique we’re talking about mythical imagery.

In The Deep by Rivers Solomon, the author uses mythic imagery to tell the fantastic tale of a race of people called the Wajinru, the aquatic descendants of Africans. They throw over the board from slave ships. The story uses an image as a vehicle to create the fantastical world of the Wajinru and their society on the bottom of the ocean. Image is the transportation to tell the story. The plot of the book is simple but is bolstered by the use of mythical imagery.

The mud hut used to tell the history of Remembrance of the Wajinru people is called the womb in the book but is also a powerful image replete in mythic tales like the story of Persephone or even Jesus Christ. The idea of going into the ground or the dirt and then rising as a new person is a consistent mythological image in many religions. The Anasazi had the kiva for sacred rituals. There’s an element of earth, the hand-built construction, and the ceremony. It all adds up to a powerful image. 

Another image in chapter 2 is the children transported in the whale. Chapter 2 tells the origin story of Wajinru and how when the first Wajinru was born, they lived in the mouth of a whale and were nourished by whale milk. This image is two-fold. One is the idea of being preserved in a whale, which recalls the story of Jonah in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the nourishment of milk that is particularly poignant in the Hindu tradition. 

There is also the image of a hurricane. When the bombs from above threaten the Wajinru, they create a storm to fight back. They destroy the land to protect themselves. This is a primal image that stems from an age when humanity did not understand how weather worked. This is similar to the Greek goddess Meteora who controlled the weather, or Zeus throwing his lightning bolts forged by Vulcan. The ocean itself is an image of being both plentiful and yet threatening. 

The main image in the book is that of Remembrance and its ritual. This is what Yetu is trying to escape when she leaves her people in the middle of sharing their history with them. The idea that one person holds the record in their bodies and then shares it once a year with everyone is another primal image of the shaman or wise person. Even the bard is comparable as they know all the lineages, and it is their job to know the history of a people. In a world before writing, this was an essential job. The sharing and the one person who forgets themselves in the remembering are more images that tell us about the Wajinru society and how people have forged a life under the waves. 

The main character acts as a historian of her people. It bears the impossible burden of remembering everything about her people and their suffering and interactions with the surface world. This image evokes the idea that memory is not just an intellectual pursuit but something we keep in our bodies. The memories of our ancestors and our story are in our skin and bones, and we carry them with us whether we consciously know it or not. 

The use of an image is a powerful story vehicle because rather than taking up pages explaining all of these things in great detail, we are simply left with the idea of them and the meaning that invokes. The author accomplishes this by being cautious with the description and letting the reader draw their visions from the images presented. The main focus around the images is the characters interacting with each other and experiences those images with us. The book is short, but due to the powerful images and their mythology, we experience an entire undersea world. The book does not world-building in a sci-fi or fantasy sense but instead uses the mythological image to paint fantasy impressions. The image is more powerful and evocative for the reader than simply describing all of Wajinru’s society. In some ways, the reader must fill in the gaps for themselves. It is a masterful use of image and mythology to create a story of possibility.