She couldn’t determine which was worse: the pain of the ancestors or the pain of the living. Both fed off her. The Remembrance had officially begun, but she hadn’t gotten to the actual remembering part. This was the preparation. Stretching their bodies so they could be open to the truth.
She was weak—couldn’t handle the pain, and she wept to think about what was coming.
“Remember,” Yetu said again, her voice quiet, sharp, deep, insistent, forcing them to know what she knew. “Remember how deep we go.”
Their bodies became still but for the gentle flutter of fins to stay afloat, their scaled skin perked and ready to listen.
“Remember how deep we go.”
As she said it, it became true.
She honed in on the bottom of the ocean, deeper than any wajinru of this generation had ever lived, the old homes of their ancestors destroyed.
She let her mind sink into the dark, dense, salty waters. So heavy. She pulled the wajinru down into the rememberings with her, as her mind reached out to theirs. They could not resist her magnetic energy.
They had to adjust to this new depth. Wajinru ruled the deep as one of the hardiest and most flexible of sea creatures. Their ability to survive in the dark, sparsely populated depths as well as hunt meat in the shallower, slightly sun-touched waters gave them an advantage. But the deepness that Yetu shared with them now was something different altogether. It was so, so low to the ocean floor. Though their bodies were protected by the safety of the mud womb, in their minds they had become someone else, taken by the remembering Yetu foisted upon them.
At first, struggle and breathlessness. Then an uncomfortable stillness, like being wrapped in layers of kelp, too disoriented to break free. The waters suffocated them.
Yetu felt Amaba’s body cease to struggle and go limp, then someone else’s, then yet someone else’s, until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom of the womb, mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers, just as Yetu intended.
“Remember,” she said.
This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.
“Submit,” Yetu whispered, talking to herself as much as to them. She was begging herself to do what needed doing, what she told her mother she would do. As she commanded them to remember, she wished she herself didn’t have to. The rememberings had stolen Yetu away. Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?
Yetu sank into the pain, allowing her body to relax despite the intensity of feeling. She would transmit the story to them, as she had always done every year since she was fourteen, as historians before her had done for many years.
“Tell us!” someone shouted, their voice high-pitched, loud, and demanding, a screech that sliced through the water. “Tell us! Tell us now!”
“Remember,” Yetu told them. “Remember.”
It wasn’t a story that could be told, only recalled.
The wajinru who’d shouted nodded their head, and soon every other wajinru was nodding as well. A dance of bopping heads, causing a beautiful pattern of zigzags in the water. It went from a nod to a dance, their bodies rising from the wombfloor where they’d sunk. They moved their shoulders, then torsos, then waved their fins.
“Tell us! Tell us! We must know!” the screeching wajinru called again. “I do not remember. I must remember.”
“What is your name?” Yetu asked. The wajinru felt her soft voice easily through the moving water, so attuned her people were to her in that moment.
“I have no name. I am nothing. I am sunk!”
“Remember your name,” said Yetu.
“No name! I have no name,” they said again. “Help! Tell me!”
They were drowning in that deepest deep Yetu had shared with them. Swallowed by the blackness of the below. “Remember!” Yetu said. “Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.” Yetu told them. “Everyone, shout this person’s name so they remember!”
“Ayel!”
“Ayel!”
The chorus shouted their name. They were all in this together. They couldn’t let any one wajinru get lost in the grief of the remembering.
Yetu joined the chorus in calling Ayel back into the fold.
“The feeling of emptiness will pass. Soon you will be overfilled,” said Yetu.
Ayel swam up to her, weaving through the mass of wajinru. “I am starving. I am no one.”
This happened sometimes. The process of remembering demanded an openness, and in some people, openness became nothingness. The void of the ocean washed out their identity as the History tried to get in. “Help me!”
Though it hurt to do it, Yetu reached out her front fins and grabbed Ayel’s. She shared with the woman the image Yetu often used to retether herself: the first infant wajinru being rescued by a whale.
Images of connection. “Do you remember?” Yetu asked. “Do you remember this moment?”
Ayel said, “Yes, yes. I remember. I remember now.”
Yetu transmitted the memory to the others as well, something to calm them.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have started with the lonely heaviness of the deep, not at a time when she was so consumed with her own loneliness. It was too much for them.
She couldn’t help but feel sorry for Ayel and any others who were overwhelmed. They didn’t know how to live with this pain. Yetu had become accustomed to it, its sharpness blunted by time.
“I’m here! I’m alive!” said Ayel, surprised by her own existence.
Yetu sent her back to the other wajinru and carried on. Pressure built up inside her as she called the History to the forefront. She and her people were lost in a bubble of agony. It went on and on.
There was no way to measure the passing of time, or whether time was passing at all. But traditionally the first part, where Yetu handed over the memories, lasted for hours, and the next part, where the wajinru soaked up all the memories, days. And though not all of it was suffering—there were times of true happiness, joy, whole decades of bounty—the sad moments were totalizing. So, arrested by the images, they were paralyzed. Through Yetu’s machinations, the wajinru experienced the rememberings like they were living out their own memories. They were the ancestors.
Piece by piece, Yetu showed them their past, filled them with it. Soon, she’d give them all of it. It would be theirs, and she would be free from it, for a little while.
For a short time, the History would be outside of her. It was their people’s one concession to the historian: three days of emptiness while they processed the rememberings.
Yetu rushed it as much as such a thing could be rushed. The people would not get the release they needed if she skimped. And any piece she left untold, she would keep. But she didn’t want to keep any of it. She wanted to live how she had lived before she turned fourteen, before the History replaced Yetu with all the wajinru who had proceeded her.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” she whispered under her breath, startling the wajinru. They swarmed around her, connected to her every thought.
“Yes, hold on,” they said, feeling her struggle.
“Please, please,” she said. She had to hold on a bit longer, then she’d get some peace… for a bit. Then another year wasting away as she neglected her own self for the History. Maybe she would finally die. Maybe that was for the best.
Yetu remembered, remembered, and remembered. She called to the memories, drew them to her, then pushed them out to her people one by one in an unrelenting torrent. Not quite sequentially, but a complete telling of their story, with some sections rearranged as necessary.
She remembered the first mothers, the images of their floating bodies as seen by their children or other wajinru. She remembered whales, their gigantic, godlike forms. She remembered shelters made of seaweed and carcasses. Castles, too, made out of the bones of giant sharks. Kings and queens. Endless beauty, endless dark. Then death, so many deaths. Looming extinction. The History of the wajinru included triumph and defeat, togetherness and solitude.