46 pages • 1 hour read
Rivers SolomonThe Deep
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Chapter 5 returns to Yetu’s perspective. She is fleeing the wajinru and eventually finds herself in a small pool of water in a cove on a beach. Traveling from the deep to the surface takes time, and as she travels across new, seemingly unfamiliar parts of the ocean, memories of hunting, ships, and fire drift in and out of her mind. She is not sure if they are her own memories. As she lets herself float and drift weightlessly, Yetu realizes a sense of self is beginning to emerge: “Rememberings didn’t haunt her. She was just Yetu. She wasn’t quite sure who that was, but she didn’t mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain” (70).
Yetu meets Suka, a two-leg woman who is interested in her and with whom she shares a language. Their interactions are tense at first, as Yetu does not want to appear too vulnerable. Yetu is surprised at her ability to use her nose and mouth to breathe air and make noise above water. Suka tells Yetu that Oori, another two-leg woman, has been bringing her fish and other food to help her heal, and Yetu is determined to meet her. She is particularly interested in the way that Suka describes Oori as a woman who does not take requests nor respond to demands. When they finally meet and talk, Yetu discovers that Oori has a strained relationship with the concept of “kinship” and does not cultivate emotional connections without reservation. Yetu understands the way that duty and obligation can strain kinship and feels connected to Oori, even though Oori is reserved and rather cold.
Yetu longs to be close to Oori and attempts to connect with her by teaching her things that will improve her fishing practice, including understanding the wind and calling to fish using underwater sounds. As they get to know each other, they discuss their relationships to home and their kin. Yetu is shocked to learn that Oori’s people and homeland have been destroyed. When Yetu shares her reasons for leaving home, the two get into a conflict, as Oori accuses Yetu of not “understand[ing] the importance of having a history” (95).
Chapter 6 Summary
Without Oori, Yetu spends days dwelling in her memories and history, remembering and reconnecting with who she was before she became the historian. As she recalls, she was only 14 years old when she took on the rememberings, and it was a difficult transition that isolated her from her peers and produced conflict between her and her amaba. Yetu remembers being depressed, overwhelmed, and feeling disconnected from everyone and all aspects of present life because of the burden.
In a flashback, Yetu describes to her mother what she has seen, and the grim memory is hardly fathomable to her amaba. Yetu “yearn[s] to know herself as just Yetu” (101) and considers abandoning the History altogether. When she finally agrees to her amaba’s request and joins her friends on a hunting trip, Yetu kills a frill shark in a ritualistic manner, allowing the shark’s blood to wash over her. She attempts to summon her ancestors, offering the shark as a sacrifice and requesting that finally she “be free of the History” (104). No such miracle occurs. The chapter ends with a resignation: “There was no saving Yetu” (105).
Chapter 7 Summary
In Chapter 7, Oori finally returns, and she and Yetu have a tense reunion. As they rebuild their relationship and Yetu learns more about Oori, Yetu finds herself reflecting on her own memories, feelings, and needs. She finds that she is able to enunciate a need by demanding that Oori apologize to her. She admits how much she has come to rely on Oori.
The two realize that they share a strained relationship with their people, having no close friendships, romantic partnerships, or relationships of any kind. Their conversations inspire Yetu to reflect on her past and the opportunities for connection that the History robbed from her. She feels that she is coming to understand her true self, which brings a smile to her face for the first time. She delights in keeping her thoughts and memories to herself.
Even so, the decision to leave the wajinru continues to weigh on Yetu, who is still recovering from the Remembrance and her journey. Suka and Oori take care of her, offering natural remedies to soothe her injuries. The care brings Oori and Yetu even closer, and the two begin to exchange information about themselves, their worlds, and their bodies. Yetu asks Oori to describe the sex organs of two-legs, and the conversation proceeds from a clinical discussion of sex to the admission that the two have feelings for each other, an interest that is special enough to pursue sexually.
The realization is exhilarating for Yetu, but Oori quickly announces that she’s leaving and doesn’t know when she’ll return. She delayed returning to her homeland because she wanted to be with Yetu, but now, it’s time for her to go because a storm is coming in that threatens to erase the place forever. She invites Yetu to join her, and Yetu refuses, hurt that Oori would abandon her. The next day, Yetu already regrets staying behind. She fears that the pain that the wajinru experience will usher in a storm so devastating or a series of conflicts so deadly that the whole world might be destroyed. Oori’s departure helps Yetu see that it is time to face her people.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
Chapters 5-7 offer a revision or recurrence of the wajinru origin story, as Yetu relives an encounter with the two-legs that inspires her to act toward her people. Like Zoti before her, Yetu cultivates intimacy with a two-leg, a creature that is both kin and Other, and through their relationship, she realizes the value of her mission and role in wajinru society. The doubling back over the creation myth that is described through the Remembrance allows Solomon to illustrate a few key ideas.
First, the relationship between the past, present, and future is dynamically shaped by stories. The novella repeatedly doubles back on itself to give images, events, and feelings described in past pages new significance. Like Yetu, readers move forward and backward in time and, through that process, gain new insight into how the past and future are interdependent. For example, the suicide attempt that opens the novella is not the first time that Yetu has considered this option, nor is it the first time that sharks have represented hope, freedom, and desperation to be relieved of pain. In these chapters, Yetu is a 14-year-old historian with a “shark tooth in her front fin” held to her neck in a gesture that cries for help from her amaba (97). In the same set of memories, Yetu aggressively kills a frill shark, hoping against hope that the ancestors will accept the sacrifice and fulfill her wish to be liberated from The Burden of History. Retrospectively, Solomon shows both what inspired Yetu’s flirtation with death in the novel’s opening pages and how she’s been stuck in the same mental trap for most of her life. Just as the image of sharks and Yetu’s relationship with them accumulates meaning over time in her memory, this accumulation is shown as a pattern in the narrative’s imagery. Meaning is experienced as an accumulation through time. The past can be given new meaning by the present, and the future can be shaped by one’s memory of the past.
Yetu relives the experience of Zoti, who is both fundamentally changed by and devastated to lose Waj. Like Zoti, Yetu’s experience with Oori allows her to learn about the two-legs and remember her personal history—the ways her life has been shaped by allowing the History to take precedence over her present and future. Without the burden of holding the Collective Memory and Cultural Identity of the wajinru, she realizes that she “[can] build herself back up however she want[s]” (75). This level of freedom allows Yetu to realize her own desires, needs, and feelings. For example, she realizes that her feelings for Oori are different than those she feels for Suka: “With Oori, she always wanted more, desperate for time together, for conversation, for closeness. The depth of want seemed endless” (123). The realization of a desire for intimacy is powerful for reshaping Yetu’s sense of self and feelings of grief. When Oori leaves Yetu, she is better equipped to empathize with the loss and grief that the wajinru must be experiencing in her absence. Through a recollection of her personal past, she is able to reshape her relationship to their collective past—and imagine a different future.
The novella’s doubling back on the past also reveals the capacity for the process of remembering to inspire change or project forward a different future. By reliving Zoti’s encounter with the two-leg surface dwellers, Yetu is given the opportunity to make a different decision about the ethos and fate of the wajinru. Zoti emerged from their relationship with Waj determined to safeguard all of the abandoned zoti aleyu and educate them in language and history. However, because of the conflict between the two-legs and the wajinru, Zoti created the role of the historian to protect the wajinru from the past. The practice appears to have remained unquestioned and unexamined, as historian after historian accepted their duty. Yetu revisits this question by choosing to leave the wajinru to face the History without her. Now, she has the chance to go back in time, revising her understanding of the relationship between the two-legs and the wajinru, and go forward into the future to make different choices with and for her people.
The reiteration of the conflict between the past, present, and future suggests the ways that people can always make and remake choices that are in the best interests of themselves and their people. The Conflict Between Self-interest and the Interests of Society, a central animating conflict in the novella, might just have a resolution.
