The Deep

3

WAJINRU FLAPPED THEIR TAIL FINS against the water on Yetu’s command, a steady, pulsating thrum in meter with her beating heart. The pitch of it was deep, so deep. Yetu let the massive waves of their movement consume her. She submerged herself in their energy. All her nerves left her, now that the Remembrance was beginning. The History was her power, and it ignited her. She could do this. She would do this. She would be their savior.

“Remember,” Yetu ordered, voice filling the womb.

Yetu gave them a script, but they knew the words. It lived in their cartilage and their organs, as coded into them as the shape of the webbed appendages on their front fins or the bulbousness of their eyes. She only need remind them. That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

“Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers,” she said. In general, Yetu didn’t tell the Remembrance. She made her people experience it as it happened in the minds of various wajinru who lived it. At the start, however, she preferred to give them some guidance. It made the transition of memories much more efficient when they had context—context Yetu had never had. She’d discovered the History on her own, through out-of-order scraps and pieces. Slivers slicing through her.

Yetu twisted and tensed as pain overwhelmed her. That was something she should be over by now, after all this time, the physicality of it. But she felt her whole body go rigid and then snap. Her body was full of other bodies. Every wajinru who had ever lived possessed her in this moment. They gnashed, they clawed, desperate to speak. Yetu channeled their memories, sore and shaking as she brought them to the surface. The shock of it nearly knocked her unconscious. She had once imagined channeling as a sweet, beautiful flow of energy, the past running gently through her. It was more like slitting an opening in herself so they could get out.

Oh, was this pain real? It didn’t even belong to her. Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?

As Yetu’s body moved with the pain, her subjects moved too. They didn’t quite copy her. That would imply they could see anything but the black of the deep of the sea. They felt her and knew what to do. For once, all were in unison.

To see if the wajinru were ready to move on to the next stage, Yetu tuned in to individuals. Her amaba, Nnenyo, children she’d met over the years, her worshippers. Even with the rush of movement of their in-sync bodies, she could feel unique flourishes in each person. They each had a signature.

She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her. The Remembrance had officially begun, but she hadn’t gotten to the actual remembering part. This was the preparation. Stretching their bodies so they could be open to the truth.

She was weak—couldn’t handle the pain, and she wept to think about what was coming.

“Remember,” Yetu said again, her voice quiet, sharp, deep, insistent, forcing them to know what she knew. “Remember how deep we go.”

Their bodies became still but for the gentle flutter of fins to stay afloat, their scaled skin perked and ready to listen.

“Remember how deep we go.”

As she said it, it became true.

She honed in on the bottom of the ocean, deeper than any wajinru of this generation had ever lived, the old homes of their ancestors destroyed.

She let her mind sink into the dark, dense, salty waters. So heavy. She pulled the wajinru down into the rememberings with her, as her mind reached out to theirs. They could not resist her magnetic energy.

They had to adjust to this new depth. Wajinru ruled the deep as one of the hardiest and most flexible of sea creatures. Their ability to survive in the dark, sparsely populated depths as well as hunt meat in the shallower, slightly sun-touched waters gave them an advantage. But the deepness that Yetu shared with them now was something different altogether. It was so, so low to the ocean floor. Though their bodies were protected by the safety of the mud womb, in their minds they had become someone else, taken by the remembering Yetu foisted upon them.

At first, struggle and breathlessness. Then an uncomfortable stillness, like being wrapped in layers of kelp, too disoriented to break free. The waters suffocated them.

Yetu felt Amaba’s body cease to struggle and go limp, then someone else’s, then yet someone else’s, until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom of the womb, mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers, just as Yetu intended.

“Remember,” she said.

This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.

“Submit,” Yetu whispered, talking to herself as much as to them. She was begging herself to do what needed doing, what she told her mother she would do. As she commanded them to remember, she wished she herself didn’t have to. The rememberings had stolen Yetu away. Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?

Yetu sank into the pain, allowing her body to relax despite the intensity of feeling. She would transmit the story to them, as she had always done every year since she was fourteen, as historians before her had done for many years.

“Tell us!” someone shouted, their voice high-pitched, loud, and demanding, a screech that sliced through the water. “Tell us! Tell us now!”

“Remember,” Yetu told them. “Remember.”

It wasn’t a story that could be told, only recalled.

The wajinru who’d shouted nodded their head, and soon every other wajinru was nodding as well. A dance of bopping heads, causing a beautiful pattern of zigzags in the water. It went from a nod to a dance, their bodies rising from the wombfloor where they’d sunk. They moved their shoulders, then torsos, then waved their fins.

“Tell us! Tell us! We must know!” the screeching wajinru called again. “I do not remember. I must remember.”

“What is your name?” Yetu asked. The wajinru felt her soft voice easily through the moving water, so attuned her people were to her in that moment.

“I have no name. I am nothing. I am sunk!”

“Remember your name,” said Yetu.

“No name! I have no name,” they said again. “Help! Tell me!”

They were drowning in that deepest deep Yetu had shared with them. Swallowed by the blackness of the below. “Remember!” Yetu said. “Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”

“Ayel!”

“Ayel!”

The chorus shouted their name. They were all in this together. They couldn’t let any one wajinru get lost in the grief of the remembering.

Yetu joined the chorus in calling Ayel back into the fold.

“The feeling of emptiness will pass. Soon you will be overfilled,” said Yetu.

Ayel swam up to her, weaving through the mass of wajinru. “I am starving. I am no one.”

This happened sometimes. The process of remembering demanded an openness, and in some people, openness became nothingness. The void of the ocean washed out their identity as the History tried to get in. “Help me!”

Though it hurt to do it, Yetu reached out her front fins and grabbed Ayel’s. She shared with the woman the image Yetu often used to retether herself: the first infant wajinru being rescued by a whale.

Images of connection. “Do you remember?” Yetu asked. “Do you remember this moment?”

Ayel said, “Yes, yes. I remember. I remember now.”

Yetu transmitted the memory to the others as well, something to calm them.

Perhaps she shouldn’t have started with the lonely heaviness of the deep, not at a time when she was so consumed with her own loneliness. It was too much for them.

She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Ayel and any others who were overwhelmed. They didn’t know how to live with this pain. Yetu had become accustomed to it, its sharpness blunted by time.

“I’m here! I’m alive!” said Ayel, surprised by her own existence.

Yetu sent her back to the other wajinru and carried on. Pressure built up inside her as she called the History to the forefront. She and her people were lost in a bubble of agony. It went on and on.

There was no way to measure the passing of time, or whether time was passing at all. But traditionally the first part, where Yetu handed over the memories, lasted for hours, and the next part, where the wajinru soaked up all the memories, days. And though not all of it was suffering—there were times of true happiness, joy, whole decades of bounty—the sad moments were totalizing. So, arrested by the images, they were paralyzed. Through Yetu’s machinations, the wajinru experienced the rememberings like they were living out their own memories. They were the ancestors.

Piece by piece, Yetu showed them their past, filled them with it. Soon, she’d give them all of it. It would be theirs, and she would be free from it, for a little while.

For a short time, the History would be outside of her. It was their people’s one concession to the historian: three days of emptiness while they processed the rememberings.

Yetu rushed it as much as such a thing could be rushed. The people would not get the release they needed if she skimped. And any piece she left untold, she would keep. But she didn’t want to keep any of it. She wanted to live how she had lived before she turned fourteen, before the History replaced Yetu with all the wajinru who had proceeded her.

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” she whispered under her breath, startling the wajinru. They swarmed around her, connected to her every thought.

“Yes, hold on,” they said, feeling her struggle.

“Please, please,” she said. She had to hold on a bit longer, then she’d get some peace… for a bit. Then another year wasting away as she neglected her own self for the History. Maybe she would finally die. Maybe that was for the best.

Yetu remembered, remembered, and remembered. She called to the memories, drew them to her, then pushed them out to her people one by one in an unrelenting torrent. Not quite sequentially, but a complete telling of their story, with some sections rearranged as necessary.

She remembered the first mothers, the images of their floating bodies as seen by their children or other wajinru. She remembered whales, their gigantic, godlike forms. She remembered shelters made of seaweed and carcasses. Castles, too, made out of the bones of giant sharks. Kings and queens. Endless beauty, endless dark. Then death, so many deaths. Looming extinction. The History of the wajinru included triumph and defeat, togetherness and solitude.

As always, the unfolding of the rememberings was influenced by Yetu’s own recent experiences. She couldn’t let go of what had happened a few days ago with the sharks. She couldn’t distance herself from it now. She couldn’t forget as easily as her amaba did that she’d been so close to being eaten.

“Listen!” called Yetu to the wajinru. “Listen and remember, I command you,” she said, her voice growing louder with rage and sadness, with every wild emotion she could no longer contain. This was her chance to let it explode out of her, and she would luxuriate in the combustion. They would feel pain, but she would feel release.

“Listen and remember, I command you,” she repeated, then showed them the remembering that had possessed her a few days prior. It was the first remembering she’d ever had, and soon it would be their remembering too.

“Let it overtake you,” she shouted, strained voice piercing the water.

They gave themselves over to it, copying Yetu’s ecstatic movements. She shook her head back and forth so fast and so hard that she lost her sense of equilibrium as the remembering overwhelmed them. They all watched together in the remembering as hundreds of sharks gathered to share a feast of bodies that looked so much like them, just like wajinru.

“They’re killing us!” someone screamed.

Shrieks and sobs erupted throughout the womb as they saw their brethren, sistren, and siblings gobbled alive by massive white sharks. “Wait!” someone called. In the remembering, they swam closer to the site of the slaughter, putting themselves in danger of becoming victims of the massacre. “Wait! Look! It’s not us. It’s not us!”

Closer up, the differences between wajinru and the strange floating bodies became clearer. Their tail fins were split into two. Two legs. They had no scales. They were land dwellers. Dead land dwellers at the mercy of the cruel sea.

Outside the remembering, wajinru knew what two-legs were. They knew to avoid them, to stay clear of shallow waters where their boats sometimes roamed. But in the remembering, it was like they were seeing them for the first time, possessed by the wajinru ancestor who’d seen this two-legs mass grave.

Yetu stopped speaking, stopped guiding the memories. It was a communal experience, and the wajinru needed to do some of the figuring out.

“The split-fins are our kin!” someone said.

Another said, “They are nearly our twins.”

Their differences were great too, but anyone looking at the two creatures could see they were of the same heritage.

“I’ve never seen anything in the deep that looks so much like us,” said another.

The moment the wajinru understood how related they were to the two-legs, the remembering changed, just how it had for Yetu two days ago. They were all now one of the floating dead bodies. Their lives recently extinguished, some spark still remained, brains starved for oxygen but pressing on. The wajinru felt the deadness like it was their own.

Like Yetu, they couldn’t take it. It was too strange to carry both truths at once: the aliveness of their own bodies, and the deadness of the two-legs corpses. The conflict split their minds in half, threatened their own bodies.

That was why Yetu had squeezed a dragonfish to death, pried open its dead jaw, pressed its teeth into her scales until she stained the water red, then swum to where sharks hunt easy prey. To join the realities. To make sense of it all. Sometimes, the rememberings took precedent over everything else, even over the survival of the present.

Yetu saved them from wanting to die, pulling them out of the remembering when they were on the verge of breaking out of the womb to go to the sharks the same way she had. They still had far to go. There were still so many stories to tell.

It went on and on till she butted up against the memories of the last historian. For this, she had to brace herself. Basha, brave Basha. So much braver than Yetu, he had suffered more in his lifetime than she ever would. He had never let the rememberings steal so much of his power and strength. He had let them ignite him. She wanted it to be like that for her, too.

Yetu worked to push the remainder of the rememberings out of her, putting distance between herself and the memories. It didn’t work. The pang of his eventual death shot through her. She could feel it so fresh, could feel her fins around his face as she harvested memories from him, living his life as if it were her own. How it hurt her to see his story unfold, to end. If such a vibrant thing as he could die, Yetu would meet that end sooner rather than later.

Despite the waves of pain rocking her into a catatonic trance, she continued. Images, stories, songs, feelings, smells, hungers, longings, tears—memories—left her mind. She coughed them up like something burning in her lungs, hoarse and ugly, the violence of it shaking her whole body.

And the wajinru swallowed them.

If she could just get this sickness out of her once and for all, the sickness of remembering, she would survive. She wanted to survive. She didn’t want to be the wajinru with a death wish, who swam with sharks as she bled because she could not tell past from present.

The wajinru reveled in knowing, desperate for the stories of their past. Soon, they were full on it.

Yetu let herself feel her body. The cold, heavy water. The brush of currents. Her mind was empty. Blessedly empty. Nothingness filled her in a rush of heat. There was no one there. No voices, no stories, no visions of deaths.

Blissed out, she floated limply until she could no longer ignore the pings of water coming from the other wajinru.

She felt them, though for a moment she forgot who they were. She forgot who she was altogether, let alone who she was to them. Small bits of it came back to her. Her name. Her life. Her amaba.

It wasn’t a complete picture, but from the scattered fragments, she understood one important thing. The wajinru were her people, and for now they were held captive by the History, living the lives of the ancestors from beginning to end. At some point, collectively, when they’d learned and internalized all they could, they would give the History back to Yetu, their historian, who would keep it for them while they lived out their days in blissful ignorance.

Yetu didn’t know much, but she knew she couldn’t let that happen. Not this time. Not again. Or she would die. She looked down at her own body, trifling and small. A mere wisp of dead seaweed billowing in the dark.

There were the burns. Amaba never knew about those, about the year Yetu became so sensitive to touch that she swam to the bottom of the sea and pressed her scales against a lava vent to scorch away the nerves. Her brain could not hold the History and the present. She felt the wajinru as they moved in the shadow of the womb, a great hulking black mass surrounding her. These were her people, her extended kin, but they were also death itself. When they’d had their fill of the rememberings, they would come for her and pour it back into Yetu, a cracked vessel.

In time, she’d be subsumed. She’d never been this close to annihilation before. It had always pained her to take back the rememberings, her own mind blotted out in favor of those who’d lived before. Those times, though, Yetu had managed to keep an inch of herself. Now she wasn’t sure even a speck would remain.

The ancestors pulled her deeper and deeper into the abyss of the past with each passing year. How long before she didn’t awaken from their summons at all? How long before, in a confused state and painted in blood, she went to the waters of the great whites like she had done before Amaba had found her? That couldn’t be what they wanted, for her to disappear. Yetu felt the wajinru swarming all around her. Yetu knew what they would do. First, seize her. Next, gut her mind. Last, fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake. This time, she wouldn’t emerge from it. There would be no Yetu left for the next Remembrance. She’d be dead.

Yetu wouldn’t let them do it.

The ancestors were needy but rarely cruel. Surely they would understand why she couldn’t do this again. To let the wajinru put the rememberings back inside of her would be to commit suicide. To live, she must flee. With a last look to her wajinru kin, soaking up their beauteous dance in the mud womb, Yetu left. She swam, and she swam, and she swam, and she forgot, the rememberings becoming more distant with each upward meter gained. They didn’t need her. They were stronger than her, always had been. Where Yetu was sensitive and high-strung, they were free-spirited and happy. The History would not undo them like it had undone her.

Yetu did not look back, but she felt them in her wake. They were trapped in the memories with no one in the wings to relieve them of the burden. They were in the Remembrance now, one with every wajinru who’d ever lived. She felt them churning the water, even though the womb was supposed to prevent that. She felt them remember. Yetu feared the world would feel it too.