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

Abstract

The Deep (2019), a novella achieved through collective authorship by Rivers Solomon, Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes, is adapted from Clipping’s song of the same name ‘The Deep’ (2017). The novella contemplates collective memory, generational trauma, and identity issues. This article compares the song and novella, discusses how both song and novella express historical issues of slavery and contemporary issues of environmental destruction, traces diverse inspirational source materials, and examines the novella’s depictions of negotiation and reconciliation between individual versus communal identities within a context of generational trauma. This article argues that, with wajinru representing a bridging of humanity and nature, and with complex thematic interplay between forgetting, remembrance, and healing, the novella constitutes an Afrofuturist, magical realist, counternarrative challenge to dominant historical narratives, and illuminates the importance of reconnecting communal memory to individual identity-construction for recovering from generational trauma, and of building a more utopian world through cultivating love that transcends species and gender. In addition, this article analyzes how Solomon’s novella and its diverse source materials highlight the palimpsestic and intertextual nature of artistic adaptations and encourage audiences to engage in egalitarian, boundary-defying cultural production, and innovative blurring of genres, media, and authorship.