Breathing and Mourning Underwater: A Black Journey Towards Identity in The Deep

Abstract

Afrofuturism has provided new means of reappropriation and subversion of white dominant discourses regarding society, history, and temporality. My essay examines how Rivers Solomon’s 2019 The Deep deals with what Michelle M. Wright defines as “Epiphenomenal time” – which moves outward and forward, contrary to the bi-dimensionality of white narratives, which “erases” the experiences of the Other. Inspired by an experimental hip-hop song by clipping. (inspired, too, in turn, by electronic duo Drexciya), Solomon’s novella narrates of an underwater civilization started by the descendants of the pregnant enslaved women who were thrown overboard from slave ships. By creating an imaginary world and an imaginary journey through the Black Atlantic and through different media and forms of storytelling, Drexciya, clipping., and Solomon work with and within Epiphenomenal time as a way to engage representations of blackness in the diaspora that do not depend on white-imposed linear narratives to define themselves.