Reconnecting Memory and Recovering from Trauma: The Adaptation of The Deep from a Song to a Novella.

This article analyzes *The Deep* (2019), a novella by Rivers Solomon collaboratively created with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, adapted from Clipping’s 2017 song of the same name. The novella and song draw on the Afrofuturist mythology originally developed by the Detroit techno duo Drexciya, imagining water-breathing descendants of pregnant African enslaved women thrown overboard during the transatlantic slave trade, and explore themes of collective memory, generational trauma, identity, and environmental destruction. The article highlights how Solomon’s novella expands the song’s narrative by focusing on the protagonist Yetu’s struggle to bear communal ancestral memories alone and her eventual healing through sharing memory with her community and forming a queer interspecies relationship, thereby offering a counternarrative that challenges dominant historical accounts and envisions healing through collective remembrance and love transcending species and gender. It also situates the novella within a broader intertextual and palimpsestic tradition of adaptation across media, emphasizing collective authorship and the blending of magical realism and Afrofuturism to address historical trauma and ecological crisis.