Kinship in the abyss: submerging with The Deep

Abstract

ABSTRACT While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another, this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the “womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies, transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its “aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.