From the Abyss of the Middle Passage to the Currents of Hydrofeminism “Getting Wet” with the Ocean in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep

This article proposes a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep, a recent eco-story about water, memory, and survival. Solomon’s work is inspired by a song called “The Deep” from experimental hip-hop group clipping, a dark science fiction tale about the underwater-dwelling descendants of African women thrown off slave ships during the Middle Passage. This imaginative alternate history, or counter-mythology, was invented by the Detroit techno band Drexciya, which, in a series of releases between 1992 and 2002, tells us the story of an underwater realm in the mid-Atlantic, where merpeople and their descendants establish a utopian society in the sea, free from the war and racism on the surface. My analysis uses Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to make productive sense of the gaps in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that silence the voices of enslaved women, listening to the voices of water to imagine not only what was but also what could be. Moreover, this article examines The Deep through a trajectory that moves from the ocean as a space that reproduces death only to the ocean as a generative force for posthuman and multispecies kinship. Using Black hydrocriticism, hydrofeminism, and econarratology, I will argue that this transition is made possible by the “despatialization” of the ocean—a concept introduced by Erin James—where the ocean is conceived not as a fixed or stable environment, but as a space in constant flux, defying stability, and the subsequent immersion in its waters.