Reality in Fantasy
Exploring The Deep
The Pop Fic Collection
The Deep by Rivers Solomon is one of the most traumatic epochs in human history made accessible through the lens of fantasy.
Parts of life, both personal and communal, are too painful when approached straight-on. They bear down on each person who remembers, vast and weighty, bigger than any one individual, and they flatten them, taking up their whole known worlds. These memories, events, and, more truly, the emotions they generate, are beyond human capacity to parse when faced as reality. When everything from one psychological horizon to the other is painful, that reality becomes unbearable. Those who suffer need escape.
This is why many people read the genre that takes them farthest from their reality: fantasy. It might seem not to matter where the story takes them or what it is about as long as it's away, but here is where the human mind tricks us. When entering a story, readers connect most to things that echo the emotional truths they know in their own lives. Most connect even more deeply to stories that combine those truths with a future that has hope for the protagonist, the reader's avatar for the hours he, she, or they are submerged in text.
Fantasy gives readers the ultimate out. It allows them to escape reality by echoing the emotions that the reader feels and by showing how the protagonist deals with those struggles. It lifts the burden from the reader's shoulders and offers an escape while showing them how to cope with that weight. Often, the similarities between fantasy and reality are oblique. Often, they are direct.
This is why fantasy is such a powerful medium to explore the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade. There are few events in human history that are as sickening, as cruel, and as damaging. It is an echoing trauma, generational in ways that many still fail to recognize.
In the specifics of The Deep, Rivers Solomon created powerful symbolism and imagery that draws on truths that surround memory, tragedy, and family. By exploring these ideas as fantasy, they made them accessible. The surrounding, pressing oceanic waters were representative of a womb, the cradle of life on earth, and were metaphorically connected to both the pain of displaced foremothers and the promise of humanity's birthplace in Africa. At the same time, this was never directly spelled out, which allows the reader come to this knowledge organically. The reader is able to construct through the process of a building narrative a history as deep and troubled, as dangerous and nurturing, as the waters in which the wajinru live.
The Deep is fantasy in the form of a guided meditation that touches on the effects of intentional harm, the way unintentional harm can be repeated when it is forgotten and dismissed rather than considered and learned from, and the deeps both of history and of the mind. It allows the reader to consider from a bearable distance the value of sharing a burden in an effort to lighten the weight for all. It allows the reader to examine, because it's just a story, after all, the ways in which the cruel and the great-hearted exist in the same history, inextricable from each other. It is its own version of a Historian giving the memories back to her people, but in a form more easily borne than the raw and sensate mercilessness of reality.
Life and history on this scale are vast. They are the Leviathan that could crush any person who feels them fully. But in reading The Deep, we can watch, consider, and feel the water shift as the Leviathan passes over us, and away.
