Underwater with the Feminist Waves: Black Gender and Oceanic Lifeworlds in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep

Abstract

This essay stages an intervention in perhaps the most influential story about feminism—that of its progressive waves—such that its discursive legacy becomes reconfigured by modalities of racial capitalism. Moving past the familiar image of surface waves crashing on the shore, the essay considers the oblique presence of the internal wave as a renewed paradigm for narrating feminism, especially as an oceanic manifestation that has evaded the grasp of human perception. It offers a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep to show how this conceptual submergence of the wave metaphor displaces frames of knowing predicated on human exceptionalism. In a gesture of speculative worldbuilding, the text tells a different story of the feminist waves: one that arises from a gathering of black and queer forms of being acculturated to the depths of the sea.

>> Wave Work, Wake Work

In an early scene of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the airy spirit Ariel channels an irresistible allure when he sings to the shipwrecked Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples Alonso: “Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands.”¹ Ariel’s enchanting appeal is part of an elaborate ploy by the exiled magician Prospero, whose strategy to recover his usurped dukedom involves uniting his daughter Miranda with Prince Ferdinand in marriage. Ferdinand’s ill-fated arrival on the island is marked by deep sorrow, as he mistakenly believes his lost father to have drowned at sea. In some of the most famous lines of the play, Ariel confirms the fact of Alonso’s watery demise: “Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are coral made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”² It is at this time that he will lead the grieving Ferdinand to Miranda through the mesmerizing refrain of the song.

As it turns out, Ariel’s account of Alonso’s death is a complete fabrication, for the latter has in actuality washed up alive on another part of the island. Yet this imaginary event that Ariel presents to Ferdinand is precisely what offers a point of departure for this essay. In this alternative reality, Alonso’s body lies in the depths of the ocean, and has become utterly changed by the living environment in which it is submerged. What Ariel recounts in detail are the nonhuman forces of the sea laying claim to an ostensibly decaying corpse. But in the process, some of the most recognizable features of Alonso’s human corporeality have not merely decomposed into imperceptible matter. They have instead been reclaimed and further made anew by various forms of marine life.³ Indeed, it is through this transformative power of the ocean that Alonso has undergone a “sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”⁴

Ariel’s lyric, originally sung under Prospero’s command to bewitch the unsuspecting Ferdinand, holds a different implication for the omniscient reader. In describing Alonso’s body, Ariel displaces human selfhood and singularity by invoking the nonhuman capacity of the sea. But he does not simply refer to the ocean as a profound force of nature. Rather, Ariel compels us to consider how the particular conditions of its materiality might be suggestive of a different mode of thinking—one that lies beyond the order of the human.⁵ He first underscores the liquid abyss of the ocean: “Full fathom five” below the surface is where Alonso’s body has come to rest.⁶ In so doing, Ariel’s utterance does not only manifest as a charm that artfully captivates Ferdinand. It also initiates a process of sensory disorientation that attunes us readers to the ontological status of the sea, thereby estranging us from our given ways of being and knowing.⁷ More to the point, it is our expectations about what it means to be human, here reflected in certain anthropocentric truths about life and death, that come to be upended. Ariel refuses the logic of finitude that marks human processes of death and dying by conjuring the unsettling image of a body whose parts have been reconfigured by the transgressive workings of sea creatures. This is an image that disavows the sovereignty of human identity and existence in favor of a multispecies ecology that is now thriving underwater. But the figure of the human has neither disappeared nor been destroyed; after all, Ariel tells us that there is “nothing of [Alonso] that doth fade.”⁸ Instead, it has acquired new and unexpected significance that can only be generated by thinking with, or perhaps more accurately, through the sea. Ariel’s song moreover demonstrates the radical effect of adopting such an oceanic perspective, for what was presumed dead has in fact assumed another kind of otherworldly, subaquatic life. If Ariel has cast a spell to irrevocably alter the course of Fernando’s actions, then he has also delivered an incantation that remembers and raises the dead through the elemental specificities of the sea.

Following Ariel, what richer and stranger things abound when our human paradigms of knowledge are plunged into the depths of the sea? What surprising, and more expansive, forms of meaning might such an ontological immersion bring forth? This essay examines the possibilities held open by these questions by taking on the conventional, and arguably most prominent, framework for narrating the history of feminism: the metaphor of the waves. In this precise context, I ask what it might mean to take seriously the materiality of the metaphor—not simply as a figurative model for feminist historiography, but also as a literal one. If the conceptual metaphor of the feminist waves has been used as a key device for documenting the historical and political gains that have progressively been accorded to women, then what I will trace from its categorical displacement into the ocean is an account of black and queer social life occluded from this normative telling—a countergenealogy of feminism that cannot be captured by dominant methods of archival production. At stake is another approach to thinking and writing feminist history, one that departs from liberal, humanist ideas of gendered identity and experience as the basic measure of historiographic value.

This question of critical practice, which animates my more overarching commitment to stay with the organizing metaphor of the waves, should be seen as inextricable from the ethical premise of this essay. My intention is not for us to hold on to the longstanding narrative it has disclosed, but to show how a reflexive critique of the metaphor itself might effectively disrupt the kinds of gendered histories it has thus far legitimized. I deliberately circle back to—and reckon with—the feminist waves in a gesture that tracks what Christina Sharpe has defined as wake work: “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.”⁹ On the one hand, wake work is articulated through its consciousness of the unfinished time of slavery, its occupation of the reality of black subjection that has subsumed the entirety of this world.¹⁰ This essay therefore begins by remaining in the wake of the feminist waves, dwelling in the long shadow of a violent and exclusionary history of feminism from which its central metaphor has originated. Its exegesis ensues from the belief that this is a history that must be rewritten from an ontological standpoint for it to be more ethically recast at all.¹¹ On the other hand, wake work also contends with the invariable present despite its sedimentation as such; wake work demands another horizon of black life that might be envisioned out of the inevitability of such configurations of history. To refute the assumptive logic of a feminist archive forged in the epistemic order of Western modernity, this essay thinks through and against the wave metaphor to reveal a locus of black and queer life that cannot be indexed by operative modes of feminist knowledge-making. It uncovers a domain of gendered resistance not only conditioned by, but also constitutive of, the material and historical environment of the sea.¹² This is a conception of being that can only arise from, and indeed then be registered by, the methodological submergence of what counts as feminist history.

To this end, I take my cue from Ariel’s lyrical invitation to tarry with the most tangible nature of the wave metaphor as beholden to the sea, mediating its symbolic currency for feminism through a perspective that is historicized in relation to distinct racial, colonial, and environmental modalities.¹³ I consider the manifest presence of the ocean to be what Melody Jue has termed an “environment for thought,” where its unique physical milieu presents a vantage point from which to productively deform the foundations of our entrenched frames of knowing.¹⁴ The aim is not merely to excavate what further knowledge the ocean might offer, but instead to conduct an exercise in what Jue calls “conceptual displacement,” through which the submarine potential of the sea is deployed to confront our implicit biases.¹⁵ Accordingly, this essay enacts a conceptual displacement of the wave metaphor, thus overturning its historiographic obligation to a category of female gender founded in the epistemological inventories of the human. It is by this same process that the meaning and significance of gender itself become profoundly changed. In this vein, the aquatic terrain through which I rethink the wave metaphor cannot then be understood as some ahistorical chasm of nothingness. It is instead saturated with the material histories of the transatlantic slave trade, comprising a literal graveyard of the human wreckage from the oceanic crossings of the Middle Passage. My rethinking of the wave metaphor is guided by its abiding claim to the embodied archive of black life and death, a line of inquiry that resonates with Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s appeal to “return to the materiality of water” when invoking metaphors used to theorize the black Atlantic.¹⁶ For if the abstractive function of these metaphors has come to hollow out the social, political, and historical import of the ocean, then what Tinsley urges for is a restoration of their elemental specificity as imbued with the corporeal matter of black and queer lifeworlds.

In what follows, this essay immerses the wave metaphor to delineate a black and queer gendered subjectivity rendered through the medium of seawater. Instead of the familiar image of surface waves crashing on the shore, which has so often been used to represent certain generational crests of feminist thought and action, I focus on the underwater phenomenon of the internal wave as a more oblique construct for charting a narrative of feminist history oriented by the otherworldly capacities of a black and queer existence. In essence, internal waves are propagated by the differences in density that mark the stratified layers of the ocean.¹⁷ These waves are immense and far-reaching, yet have proven difficult to observe due to their relative invisibility from above the surface of the sea; they circulate in the recesses of the ocean in ways that are almost imperceptible to the terrestrial human eye. By taking the physical and environmental properties of this subsurface wave as an interpretive frame, I turn to a close reading of Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novella The Deep to show how the text illuminates what lurks beneath—and indeed, lies beyond— the otherwise sweeping view of colonial modernity as all that we have been trained to see. My reading traces the literary expression of a temporal and queer ecological production of black life, which eludes the violent logics of human exceptionalism as ingrained in dominant modes of feminist historiography. At the close of this essay, I return to the question of method as initially raised by the metaphor of the waves. If the universalizing referent of gender that lies at the crux of the metaphor has now become irrevocably fractured, I offer a brief reflection on the literary as an alternative form of feminist knowledge production that might better account for the problematic of black gender.

>> Time Submerged, Suspended

In the first instance, it is worth providing a brief explanation for the oceanic manifestation of the internal wave so as to further clarify its conceptual implications for theorizing black gender. Internal waves are typically formed, as their name would suggest, within the sea, along the interface between two different layers of the oceanic water column marked by varying levels of density.¹⁸ They surge at the depths of the ocean rather than at its surface, moving only within the fluid medium of the sea. Internal waves are distinct from the waves that occur on the surface of the ocean, which are most frequently caused by wind blowing across the sea, or more precisely, by friction at the interface between the atmosphere and the ocean. Surface waves are a ubiquitous sight on the horizon, and their undulating dynamics are what scholars have most often referred to as the visual exemplification of the historical and political momentum of the women’s movement. By contrast, internal waves are largely obscured from public knowledge, although they are in fact a global phenomenon and can commonly be found in oceans and other bodies of water all over the world.¹⁹ This is perhaps due to the fact that they are effectively hidden in the ocean: even as they often feature colossal wavelengths of hundreds of feet, internal waves appear on the surface of the sea only as subtle ridges of smoother and rougher bands of water.²⁰ The under-sea presence of the internal wave has remained relatively invisible to the naked human eye; it is most often observed on satellite imagery that can record its imprint on the water surface, or by scientific instruments like echosounders that measure the depth and density of the ocean through sound waves. Against this backdrop, Thomas Peacock has described internal waves as the “lumbering giants of the ocean,” where their elusive appearance from above the water belies the fact of their tremendous size and power below.²¹

To train our attention on the phenomenon of the internal wave thus means to acknowledge the existence of what might reside unseen and unknown in the dark recesses of the ocean. It means moreover to be attuned to the power of what might lie in such a watery abyss where light cannot penetrate, and to be receptive to the potentialities of that which evades our limited field of vision. By this I refer not only to what might literally be occluded from our sight, but also to what cannot be perceived by, and therefore exceeds, our presiding frames of epistemological reference. In the latter sense, then, I rely on the speculative mode of Solomon’s The Deep to throw into relief a deep-sea life-world of the otherwise unimaginable. By birthing a submarine afterlife out of the horrors that brought forth the oceanic burial ground of the transatlantic slave trade, the novel intervenes at the rupture and irretrievable extinguishment of one world in order to summon the redemptive beginnings of another. More precisely, what it conjures into being is a civilization composed of the descendants of drowned, pregnant African enslaved people who were forced overboard during the Middle Passage, water-breathing dwellers called the wajinru who have made a seamless, if implausible, transition from the womb to the sea.²² The impossible existence of the wajinru discloses a form of black temporality suspended by the liquid memory of the sea, one that deviates from the teleological arc of progressive modernity. This is an anachronism of time prying open another dimension to narrating feminist history that centers and reclaims black experience over and against the unspeakable loss of slavery.

By assembling the imaginative infrastructure of a world out of the bloodshed and cruelty of the Middle Passage, The Deep ultimately evokes a different future for black life. But it is also profoundly invested in the visceral cost of the wajinru’s triumphant evolution into aquatic beings: the traumatic legacy that inevitably follows from being “born of the dead.”²³ The text introduces as its central protagonist the character of Yetu, who has been appointed the historian of the wajinru, tasked to bear the painful weight of their collective ancestral memory. It is a “sickness of remembering”—both physically excruciating and mentally draining—that she must endure as the medium for the wajinru’s harrowing beginnings.²⁴ By contrast, the rest of her community is biologically predisposed to forgetfulness and spared from this onerous burden of remembering the past. But the blissful ignorance granted by the absence of such memories also amounts to a kind of empty, meaningless existence that eventually wears thin. As Yetu’s mother Amaba remarks: “One can only go for so long without asking who am I? . . . Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing.”²⁵ To alleviate their yearning for the past, the wajinru convene at an annual ceremony called The Remembrance, where Yetu shares stories of a history that she has collected with the others before taking possession of them again. Still in the throes of the most recent Remembrance, however, it dawns on Yetu that to continue with her responsibilities as historian would mean for her mind and body to soon be crushed by the unbearable pressure of the memories she is obliged to keep. She chooses then to flee the wajinru and ascend to the surface of the sea.

But this also means that Yetu has disconnected herself from the ocean, the very space that had occasioned, and now composes, the living world of the wajinru. This is a future world that has transpired from an Afrofuturist interruption of linear time—a world initiated by what Kodwo Eshun has called a “chronopolitical intervention,” which exacts a disruption of the colonial apparatus that has enforced a sequential unravelling of the future on its own predictable terms of violence.²⁶ Its conjecture is the result of a willful disturbance of this time of history that has permitted the unrelenting desecration of black life, in a way that allows other temporal openings to then unfold. In The Deep, the ocean is invoked as the space that provisions such a temporal multiplicity of endings and beginnings for the wajinru, and by extension, more radical forms of black being in the world. Now displaced from its depths, Yetu is not only removed from the collective presence of her wajinru kin, but also from the memories of her ancestors that have long permeated the shadowy waters. As Yetu realizes: “Absent the rememberings, who was she but a woman cast away?”²⁷ Yetu has fled the ocean to alienate herself from the wajinru, but this process has also brought her back to a primordial occasion of death by being thrown off a slave ship. Cast away from her water-dwelling society, she is also cast off from a temporal fault line that had opened a speculative counterfuture for the conception of the wajinru, and cast back into an oppressive history of enslavement. Yetu’s departure to land has figured as return to a wretched time of colonial modernity. The ocean cannot simply be construed as a more comfortable abode for Yetu; it is also the paradigmatic space of a newly fashioned possibility of survival in and out of the wake of slavery that she has now been barred from. Ultimately, what Yetu longs for is being “a part of not just the sea, but the whole world. Without the History, she felt out of place and out of time. She missed being connected to all.”²⁸ Indeed, it is the ocean that has encompassed the alternative cradle of civilization for the wajinru. Its waters have suspended those vectors of time and space that have otherwise been foreclosed by the violent, racialized logics of a progressive history.

My designation of the wajinru as inhabitants of this other measure of oceanic time is in part an extension of Hortense Spillers’s provocative claim that those “African persons in ‘Middle Passage’ were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic’.”²⁹ Spillers transposes the Freudian psychoanalytic inclination of oceanic feeling—an originary state of undifferentiated identity—into the specific context of the transatlantic slave trade.³⁰ In this regard, her articulation of the oceanic becomes historicized in line with how the enslaved were “removed from the indigenous land and culture, not-yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.”³¹ The ocean is thus staged as the elemental scene of black death, the site of an unimaginable violation and dissolution of black identity at which the enslaved have become what Spillers calls the “culturally ‘unmade’.”³² In this rendering of oceanic space, they are excised from an identifiable category of the human, which traps them in a position of stasis, a state of suspension that compels their displacement from the temporal flow of history.³³ Having been dispossessed of all signifiers of personhood and humanity, which underwrite particular orientations to space and time, the enslaved are altogether forced out of a temporal formation that has come to track the developmental narrative of colonial modernity. They are made lost from a world that has coerced their exile.

But the banishing of the enslaved from familiar historical and spatial coordinates also generates a condition of possibility for envisioning alternative markers of temporality. It inscribes a plurality of counterhistories and futures of modernity that serves to puncture the telos of racial capitalism. On one level, the inertia that is embodied by these black subjects expunged from time presents an immediate critique of the velocity of progressive history. This is what Habiba Ibrahim would characterize as their “untimeliness,” a temporal inhabitation that is incommensurable with the configurations of colonial modernity, and therefore cannot be parsed by its attendant matrices of intelligibility.³⁴ This temporality of black existence thus constitutes a fracture of the seamless perpetuation of dominant time, a refusal of its totalizing regime. On yet another level then, what Spillers also intimates is the transformative capacity of the process of “unmaking” that, at the incursion of the Middle Passage, has become so foundational to the nature of black existence.³⁵ More precisely, it is the event of this unmaking that eventually calls forth the speculative reimagination of black life underwater. It is only in the context of this brutal unmaking that such acts of remaking paradoxically come to be made viable, acts that find their true bearings in the watery depths of the sea. To put it simply, then, the ocean offers blackness another beginning. This is the radical juncture that is underscored by The Deep: the text exploits the oceanic suspension provoked by the crossings of the transatlantic slave trade to bring into being other temporalities of a black lifeworld now held by the sea. If the waters of the ocean have long suspended the embodied trauma of slavery, then they too have sustained the precipitate of a different kind of future for black life.

>> Breathing Underwater

The Deep continues to position the agentic properties of the sea as imperative to its countergenealogy of black life, especially as one that rejects the hegemonic lineage of the human. In this regard, my analysis of the text is shaped by another characteristic of the internal wave, namely the crucial role that it plays in maintaining the ocean ecosystem. The biological impact of internal waves cannot be understated: they supply nutrient-rich water to coral reefs near the coastline, for instance, and transport marine life like zooplankton around the water column as the precondition of wider ecological processes.³⁶ Cetaceans such as humpback and pilot whales have also been observed to forage by following behind an internal wave, insofar as its physical forces carry the potential to draw in prey in the form of small fish and squid.³⁷ Internal waves can thus be said to be part of a complex, nonhuman web of multispecies interactions in the ocean. In this section, I examine how the kinship of a queer, nonhuman genealogy, once more imbued by the embodied materiality of the sea, sustains the oceanic lifeworld in the text.³⁸ The Deep rejects the monolithic definition of the human as a transcendent and discretely bounded subject in favor of the openness and fluidity of the ocean. By drawing on the ocean as “the progenitor of all life,” the text instead populates its narrative with amphibious beings that are inextricably enmeshed in a more-than-human underwater ecology.³⁹ Moreover, since it has been revealed that the wajinru are the descendants of enslaved victims of the Middle Passage who were forcibly denied humanity at the advent of Western modernity, their remarkable animation is also emphasized as the defiant continuation of this specific register of life beyond the human. In this light, the existence of the wajinru must not only be read as an acknowledgement of their transcorporeal entanglements with the sea, which indeed disclose the nonhuman transgressions of their genesis.⁴⁰ It must further be traced against the racialized logics of liberal humanism that have privileged the sanctity of the human as such.

In many ways, this idea of an errant genealogy is explicitly dramatized in The Deep. By drawing on a mythology centered on the afterlives of pregnant enslaved women who drowned during the Middle Passage, the text delineates a wayward—if impossible—genealogy, one that defies its initial severance to extend its momentum underwater. For the wajinru, who are born from these fallen bodies directly into the liquid depths of the sea, the ocean had first given “all of itself to [them], giving the wajinru the spark of life, showing them that if only they knew how, water could be breathed.”⁴¹ Here, the ocean comes to acquire an unmistakably maternal quality, assuming the role of an unlikely custodian serendipitously assumed in the wake of the tragic incapacitation of slavery. It is the gestational capacity of its waters, not quite so different from the amniotic fluid that surrounds and protects an unborn fetus in the womb, that sustains the otherworldly forms of life manifesting as the wajinru. If the text is invested in disclosing the ancestral lineage of the wajinru, it stresses its deviation from normative filiations of the human. These water-breathing beings have taken up an alternative line of descent that ensues from a derangement of the human pedigree; they occupy a speculative condition of being otherwise. But what the narrative further clarifies is an oceanic origin story that in fact sub-tends the material conception of what has come to be known as the human altogether.

To make this argument, I draw on the work of Rachel Carson, who has characterized the sea as “the great mother of life” from which all animate beings on Earth originated millions of years ago.⁴² While the precise scientific alchemy of oceanic conditions for this emergence of life remains unclear, Carson observes that “the sea produced the mysterious and wonderful stuff called protoplasm”: such matter that flows through both its briny waters and the biochemical makeup of all animals that now exist on the planet.⁴³ As she continues, “each of us carries in our veins a salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as sea water.”⁴⁴ And this truth is perhaps made most plain in the “miniature oceans” of amniotic fluid that we all have inhabited at some point in our lives.⁴⁵ Carson draws our attention to the overlooked universality of all living bodies as implicated in and by the ocean.⁴⁶ She exposes the dominant understanding of the human as a self-enclosed, insular, and autonomous individual to be the stuff of mere fiction, explicating instead its perennial and inescapable entanglement with more-than-human forces of existence. Carson accordingly establishes such a definition of the human to have been derived from and upheld by anthropocentric modes of thinking and knowing. In turn, what The Deep conveys is that this same definition of human exceptionalism must also be seen as inseparable from the violent apparatus of colonial modernity.

It is from this opening that the text unfurls its countergenealogy of black life, one reckoning with the legacies of racial capitalism that have authorized such a consolidation of the human. And its critique of such paradigms—or, as Yetu puts it differently in the novella, its disavowal of those “specific ways of classifying the world that [she] didn’t like”—is further exemplified by the multispecies kinships the wajinru have come to forge underwater.⁴⁷ If the very first mothers of the wajinru were destined to death by drowning, then their offspring released into the wide expanse of the ocean ultimately lives “only by the graciousness of the second mothers, the giant water beasts . . . whales.”⁴⁸ These immense creatures of the deep become the wajinru’s “only kin”; the marine mammals feed the newborn wajinru who would otherwise die of starvation, bond with them, and guide them away from the surface of the sea and down into safety.⁴⁹ In its designation of these whales as nonhuman guardians of the wajinru, the text invokes the radical politics of a queer, multispecies ecology that coalesces between the whales and the wajinru underwater.⁵⁰ The existence of the wajinru, as the aberration of conventional processes of human evolution, becomes further compounded by their vital affinity with the whales as cetaceans that have long traversed the expanse of the ocean.⁵¹ If the wajinru are said to inhabit a “world beyond this world,” then it is a world in which the hierarchical demarcations between humans and other beings are dissolved in favor of distinctively queer, relational possibilities of living.⁵²

The text further inflects this existence through the material histories of the wajinru, in which the queer ecology that gathers in its narrative is shaped by the racialized politics of blackness now plunged into the sea. Aside from attending to the neonatal demands of the wajinru, The Deep describes how the sonic presence of the whales also figures as a kind of connective tissue that affirms the relations between each of their disparate forms of life. During a close encounter with a looming blue whale, one of the first wajinru prepares themself for a certain demise. But the whale opens its mouth only to reveal pups that it has thus far kept safe and well-fed, miniature versions of the wajinru that it has now intentionally reunited in recognition that they all are “one kind.”⁵³ And while their attempts to converse with the whale are fraught with some level of incomprehension— the sounds that it makes lie “beyond the most rudimentary levels of communication”— the wajinru nevertheless construes the proximity of the immense creature as an expression of radical, interspecies care.⁵⁴ More precisely, it is the sorrowful hums of the whale, “thunderous and sad,” that register the immeasurable grief surrounding both the fate of the wajinru’s ancestors and the other wajinru offspring who have not been so lucky to survive.⁵⁵ The cries of the whale in response to these deaths are interminable, and the acute “pang of loss” that is crystallized in their reverberations comes to resonate with the wajinru in a manner that transcends the seemingly unsurpassable language barrier between each of their constitutive lifeworlds.⁵⁶

This mourning of the whale for its newfound wajinru kin is yet another transgression of long-held boundaries that are necessarily troubled by a queer ecological modality. Its familiar anguish eclipses the inheritance of trauma by a singular human species, gesturing instead to the violent repercussions of colonial modernity that can be felt on more sweeping, planetary scales of time and space. The calls of the whale can therefore be perceived as a sonic remembrance of those lost to the ongoing histories and the present of slavery. For Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the calling of blue whales connotes this exact historical meaning. As she writes: “we are all living in the long water prayer of the blue whales, that meditative sound that travels hundreds of miles underwater. With one breath they send sound across entire oceans, envelop the planet in far-reaching chant.”⁵⁷ The enfolding lament of these whales not only serves as an infinite and unforgettable testament to slavery in the holding environment of the ocean.⁵⁸ It is also a ceaseless benediction for the dead, which in its monumental significance is “still blessing our water selves now.”⁵⁹ In these ways, the text shows how its queer ecology composed under the auspices of the ocean resists the structural dimensions of history, illuminating other possibilities of living and living on that might be located only in such ungovernable terrains beyond the human.

>> A Story of Black Gender

In many ways, my reading of The Deep stakes less a claim to a fully knowable conception of black gender than to a problematic of black gender that remains irreducible to the symbolic economy of gender itself. This is to bring Spillers’s work into the conversation once more, in which she has famously argued that the process of “ungendering” that occurred in the Middle Passage stripped black bodies of their social identities and transformed them into commodified flesh.⁶⁰ Spillers identifies the violent historical and material circumstances surrounding the formation of black female subjectivity, a subjectivity expunged by, and rendered unintelligible in, the language of gendered being. From the novel’s portrayal of black life as inhabiting an anachronistic temporality that cannot be reconciled with the progressive timeline afforded to (white) womanhood, to its cultivation of a black and queer multispecies ecology that subverts normative arrangements of the human, it becomes clear that the prescriptive analytic of gender simply cannot speak for these sites of blackness. The intimation of the possibilities of black gender as immersed in its aquatic origins is necessarily complicated beyond social categorization and binary schemas of being. Black gender lies beyond gender as an index of sexual difference that continues to rely on whiteness as its denotative structure of meaning. In the context of this essay, then, the somewhat paradoxical tracing of black gender must be viewed as coextensive with a critique of the discretionary terms of history and historiographic study that have not only conceived, but also upheld, the familiar narrative of the feminist waves as a self-evident marker of gendered progression.

This essay has aimed to dislocate the wave metaphor from the ruse of female gender as the universal referent of feminist history. But in the process, the requisite agency of literature has ensured the now-submerged metaphor’s unfolding of a new and alternative story about feminism—a story of black gender that prevails in the wake of the feminist waves, yet does not concede to, and furthermore radically alters, the formal logics of its central metaphor. This is a story that has featured a black and queer lifeworld as its narrative cornerstone, which upends liberal, humanist constructs of gendered identity so as to interrogate the very form and definition of feminist history. Just as Ariel’s description of Alonso’s body imagines it to have undergone a “sea-change” into an otherworldly entity that tests the limits of the human, the commanding narrative of the feminist waves has been completely transformed by the watery dynamics that underpin my analysis of The Deep. It has yielded the proof of a counterhistorical statement that troubles the epistemological grounds of feminism, and lays bare the fact of the latter’s representational violence. In both instances, my deployment of the literary alludes once more to the question of critical method that has been threaded through this essay as a whole. The speculative capacity of literature is what has made manifest this otherwise inconceivable account of black gender that, in the words of Saidiya Hartman, is “predicated upon impossibility.”⁶¹ This impossible expression of black gendered experience must be construed as the unmediated consequence of ways of knowing that are by their nature oppressive; these same interpretive acts that have constituted the archive of gender as a project Patrice Douglass has diagnosed to be “structurally anti-black.”⁶² In this sense, my reading of Solomon’s novel does not merely affirm the presence of marginalized life forms that are deemed less than human, for this would mean to seek the recognition of and conscription into existing feminist codes of intelligibility. Rather, the reading taps into the vitality of the literary medium to enact its own practice of the impossible, making legible a different history of feminism that has been obfuscated by the material and discursive taxonomy of its own archive.

My emphasis on literature’s overture to other, more imaginative, renditions of feminist history is by no means groundbreaking. For one, Barbara Christian once insisted on training our focus on black feminist literary and cultural production as a strategic undertaking against totalizing formations of academic knowledge.⁶³ But I suggest that Christian’s now decades-old case for the value of literary study for black feminist thought has attained new and urgent significance, alongside a particular strand of contemporary feminist theorizing that has pressed for a more reflexive consideration of our prevailing habits of feminist inquiry, and the kinds of epistemologies they have established and secured.⁶⁴ In this vein, Clare Hemmings has called on us to pay closer attention to the “political grammar” that has oriented certain hegemonic narratives about Western feminism, lest its exclusionary force continues to be insinuated into the feminist knowledges that we will produce.⁶⁵ What the ontological bearings of black gender clarify are the racialized implications of Hemmings’s understanding of political grammar; black gender stipulates the rewriting of this grammar—or indeed, the invention of a different grammar altogether—as the necessary condition for its eventual articulation. This essay’s engagement with literature and its transitive acts of storytelling thus demonstrates what an intervention of the dominant political grammars of feminism might look like.⁶⁶ Mediated through the fictional exploits of The Deep, the story that it still tells about feminism refuses the ingrained grammar of feminist political progress that has generated and sustained the developmental arc of female gender. But this is not only because the literary text displays an outright contempt for temporal realism and liberal formations of the social; not only because the literary imagination cannot fully be disciplined by the apparatus of political critique. The text has also presented an account of black gender that “prompts,” as Katherine McKittrick would observe, insofar as it ”demands representation outside itself.”⁶⁷ Intrinsic to a different kind of feminist method, literary inquiry offers a way of knowing black gender that attends to its fraught relationship to feminism. Literature prompts the possibility for black gender to be imagined—and indeed, to flourish—beyond its ongoing subjugation in the feminist present.