Richard J. King lives in Santa Cruz, California and is a visiting professor in Maritime Literature and History with the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is the author of five books of nonfiction about our relationship to the ocean, including most recently
Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea.
[
The Page 99 Test: Ahab's Rolling Sea]
At Electric Lit King tagged "
ten great works of sea literature in English by people of color." One title on the list:
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
“She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her.” So thinks Yetu, the young protagonist of The Deep, 
who is charged with the weighty task of holding the horrific memories of her entire underwater society, to archive their history yet not burden all the other individuals with the daily sufferings of the remembrance. Author Rivers Solomon, in collaboration with hip-hop musicians Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes (who had composed music riffed off the work and mythologies of previous multi-media artists), crafted a novel of a submarine world after the Middle Passage. This world of wajinru beings with Yetu as historian is composed of descendants of the thousands of pregnant human women who died and were cast overboard, as well as those women who were forced or chose to jump into the waters instead of living and subjecting their children to the terrors and inhumanity of enslavement. The Deep has a fantasy façade, but like all profound science fiction, or any sea literature for that matter, its message and struggle are crucial for our navigation of today’s world on land.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Richard J. King lives in Santa Cruz, California and is a visiting professor in Maritime Literature and History with the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is the author of five books of nonfiction about our relationship to the ocean, including most recently Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea.
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