Mythic Afterlives: Monstruous Becomings and Painful Transformation in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep

This paper examines how, in Rivers Solomon’s novella The Deep, non-hegemonic bodies— those deemed monstrous, disposable, or “less-than-human” by hegemonic norms—become agents of transformative futures through a complex navigation of trauma and vulnerability. Reworking the Afrofuturist Drexciya myth of water-breathing descendants of pregnant African captives thrown overboard during the Middle Passage, Solomon imagines the wajinru, an underwater merfolk society whose collective remembrance practices preserve the embodied memory of slavery and colonial violence. Drawing on disability studies and Black feminist theory, particularly the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Jasbir Puar, Christina Sharpe, and Hortense Spillers, I analyze how the novella negotiates communal debility produced through systemic violence and explores alternative forms of knowledge and subjectivity in order to resist exclusionary conceptions of “the human.” I argue that The Deep reframes pain and vulnerability as sources of embodied knowledge and communal transformation without romanticizing suffering. Through the wajinru’s collective memory practices, Solomon reimagines kinship, gender, and relationality beyond hegemonic structures of identity and humanity.