11.04.2024
Painful Transformations: Embodied Knowledge, Collective Trauma and Reclamation of Voice in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep | Vortrag von Julia Gatermann |"Transitions" Tagung der Science Fiction Research Association | Tartu, Estland | 7.-11. Mai
Painful Transformations: Embodied Knowledge, Collective Trauma and Reclamation of Voice in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep
Julia Gatermann at the annual conference of the Science Fiction Research Association: “Transitions”
May 7-11, 2024
University of Tartu, Estonia
Occupying liminal spaces such as those between land and water, shallow and deep, human and Other, to name but a few, mermaids are mutable, polyvalent figures with immense posthuman potential. African goddesses, Scandinavian fairy tales, Disney princesses – mermaids carry a multitude of meanings and have complex ancestries. Especially in Western pop culture, their ambiguous bodies have come to be associated with painful (female) transformation and a romanticized, if not fetishized, disempowerment.
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep also deals with most visceral pain, albeit with a distinctly different ideological inflection, and it breaks up all gendered connotations. A product of a series of interesting remediations, the novella is the latest Afrofuturistic step of what Navah Wolfe has described as “a game of artistic Telephone”[1] across the Black Atlantic that started out with a song by the Detroit-based electronic duo Drexciya and continued with an album by the LA experimental hip hop group clipping. The story of the wajinru, the merfolk descendent of the pregnant enslaved women who had been thrown in the ocean from the slave ships and, in death, birthed their still water-breathing embryos, therefore is collective re-storying of survival, a re-inscription of life. Rivers Solomon’s protagonist Yetu is her people’s historian, sole holder of their collective memory, speaker for the dead – a traumatic past that would overwhelm the individual to remember. But is also does overwhelm Yetu who breaks free from her duties – accidentally unleashing the pain of the past on her community and abandoning them to their downfall into catatonic madness.
Pain is the catalyst for transformation, and a loss of identity is the result. But in Solomon’s The Deep pain and identity are complexly layered and stand in a complicated relationship: pain is an inherent part of the wajinru’s existence and it needs to be experienced and shared to become productive. Yetu’s story is about the shedding of an overwhelming traumatic heritage, followed by a more intentional reclamation of the past, one that is shared with one’s community and therefore can bring about healing - and a reclamation of a more authentic voice.
[1] clipping. “Afterword.” In The Deep, by Rivers Solomon. New York: Saga Press, 2019. 157.