Tag Archives: week 15

Week 15: The Deep Chapters 5-7

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In Chapters 5-7 of The Deep, Rivers Solomon deepens the emotional and cultural significance of memory for the wanjiru, revealing how remembrance functions as both a burden and a necessary act of collective survival. What struck me most in these chapters is Yetu’s growing realization that carrying the pain of the past is not an unfortunate duty, rather that it is the thread that binds identity, ancestry, and community. Her confrontation with the memories shows that history is not passive, it actively presses against the present, shaping how people understand themselves.

These chapters complicate the idea that forgetting is a form a freedom. The wanjiru believe that releasing their trauma to a single historian allows them to live peacefully, but Solomon illustrates how this system fractures Yetu’s sense of self. In absorbing generations of suffering she becomes a living archive, one that is overwhelmed, uncontained, and searching for boundaries. When she finally separates herself from the community, the physical and emotional relief that she experiences exposes the unsustainability of placing an entire history of a people into one body. The compelling shift from silence to shared accountability suggests that healing, whether collective or personal, depends on not erasing the trauma, but confronting it together.

Week 15: Chapter 5-8

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Delving into this Chapter of River Solomon’s The Deep, I notice that it starts off in a hectic moment where Yetu is parting ways from the wajinru and is consistently facing obstacles that makes it that much more difficult to achieve or journey, “Yetu focused on making sense of her surroundings. There was nothing solid that she could see. No land. No boats. No birds. Just water and sky” (pp. 69). This internal struggle Yetu faced has now been matched with the harsh and unpredictable environment which reflects the overall erratic experience when getting caught up with other societies and abilities (breathing out of water).

This sort of tense moment then shifts to a more mournful tone when Yetu meets the last member of the Oshuben tribe named “Oori” which mentions how everything and everyone they once knew has either passed on or has been destroyed. Not only did this bring back memories of class where the correlation was made between Yetu (and now Oori) and people that ultimately have to carry the generational trauma for ages, sometimes for the rest of their lives. The difference in the way Oori and Yetu have processed their past experiences is reminiscent of studies where two completely different people can go through the same events and or treatment, yet interpret them in their own unique ways. The pain and the suffering aspects of life seems to consistently occur with many believing that it is “unfair,” but as Yetu soon realizes and comes to term with, the best way to respond to this resistance is to face it head on.

“Who Is That Girl I See?”: The Search for Identity as a Form of Resistance

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In chapter 5 of The Deep by Rivers Solomon, the text explores the complicated relationship between identity and history as Yetu struggles to find herself and create a personal identity apart from being the historian and an archive of the struggles the ancestors of the Wajinuru had faced. The fight for identity and autonomy becomes an important part of the narrative because it helps serve as a form of resistance by not letting the trauma and collective history of the slave trade be the single element that defines who Yetu is as an individual.

While stuck in a small pool onshore, Yetu explains to her new friend Oori that it might not be a bad thing if one is not consumed by history because “Before, [she] was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. […] [She] didn’t exist” (Solomon 95). It is here that Solomon posits the idea that it is dangerous for identity to be solely constructed of a traumatizing history. When Yetu was a vessel for “everyone in the past” as the historian, it essentially erased her personhood. She existed as a way for the past to emerge into the present and not as an individual who had needs. Despite her role being an important one in the community, Yetu as a person “didn’t exist” because she was only defined by the memories that she carried inside her. She is then positioned as a lost individual because she is constantly weighed down by the “Six hundred years of pain” (Solomon 94) that she is holding on to. It is no wonder then, that her subsequent rejection of her role as Historian becomes a way for her to explore who she is outside of the suffering of her ancestors. Yetu takes a bold act by moving away from being “just a shell for their whims” (Solomon 94) to an entity that is complex and multifaceted.

Yetu’s struggle with personal identity then transforms into a way to resist the narratives that try to define enslaved people and their ancestors solely through a painful history. By noting that her role as an archive of “everyone in the past” made her “just a shell” for the Wanjinru to use for their benefit, she is rejecting the same subjugation that her ancestors on the Middle Passage endured, since they were not given the ability to engage their autonomy and explore their own personality. This passage about the complexities of identity is then a form of resistance because it widens the narrow confines in which Yetu exists as a Wanjinru and allows for the expansion of what it means to be a Wanjinru through the idea that individuals can be more than their trauma. This then allows Yetu and her people to stop the cycle of oppression and suffering by not allowing it consume their personhood.