As always, the unfolding of the rememberings was influenced by Yetu’s own recent experiences. She couldn’t let go of what had happened a few days ago with the sharks. She couldn’t distance herself from it now. She couldn’t forget as easily as her amaba did that she’d been so close to being eaten.
“Listen!” called Yetu to the wajinru. “Listen and remember, I command you,” she said, her voice growing louder with rage and sadness, with every wild emotion she could no longer contain. This was her chance to let it explode out of her, and she would luxuriate in the combustion. They would feel pain, but she would feel release.
“Listen and remember, I command you,” she repeated, then showed them the remembering that had possessed her a few days prior. It was the first remembering she’d ever had, and soon it would be their remembering too.
“Let it overtake you,” she shouted, strained voice piercing the water.
They gave themselves over to it, copying Yetu’s ecstatic movements. She shook her head back and forth so fast and so hard that she lost her sense of equilibrium as the remembering overwhelmed them. They all watched together in the remembering as hundreds of sharks gathered to share a feast of bodies that looked so much like them, just like wajinru.
“They’re killing us!” someone screamed.
Shrieks and sobs erupted throughout the womb as they saw their brethren, sistren, and siblings gobbled alive by massive white sharks. “Wait!” someone called. In the remembering, they swam closer to the site of the slaughter, putting themselves in danger of becoming victims of the massacre. “Wait! Look! It’s not us. It’s not us!”
Closer up, the differences between wajinru and the strange floating bodies became clearer. Their tail fins were split into two. Two legs. They had no scales. They were land dwellers. Dead land dwellers at the mercy of the cruel sea.
Outside the remembering, wajinru knew what two-legs were. They knew to avoid them, to stay clear of shallow waters where their boats sometimes roamed. But in the remembering, it was like they were seeing them for the first time, possessed by the wajinru ancestor who’d seen this two-legs mass grave.
Yetu stopped speaking, stopped guiding the memories. It was a communal experience, and the wajinru needed to do some of the figuring out.
“The split-fins are our kin!” someone said.
Another said, “They are nearly our twins.”
Their differences were great too, but anyone looking at the two creatures could see they were of the same heritage.
“I’ve never seen anything in the deep that looks so much like us,” said another.
The moment the wajinru understood how related they were to the two-legs, the remembering changed, just how it had for Yetu two days ago. They were all now one of the floating dead bodies. Their lives recently extinguished, some spark still remained, brains starved for oxygen but pressing on. The wajinru felt the deadness like it was their own.
Like Yetu, they couldn’t take it. It was too strange to carry both truths at once: the aliveness of their own bodies, and the deadness of the two-legs corpses. The conflict split their minds in half, threatened their own bodies.
That was why Yetu had squeezed a dragonfish to death, pried open its dead jaw, pressed its teeth into her scales until she stained the water red, then swum to where sharks hunt easy prey. To join the realities. To make sense of it all. Sometimes, the rememberings took precedent over everything else, even over the survival of the present.
Yetu saved them from wanting to die, pulling them out of the remembering when they were on the verge of breaking out of the womb to go to the sharks the same way she had. They still had far to go. There were still so many stories to tell.
It went on and on till she butted up against the memories of the last historian. For this, she had to brace herself. Basha, brave Basha. So much braver than Yetu, he had suffered more in his lifetime than she ever would. He had never let the rememberings steal so much of his power and strength. He had let them ignite him. She wanted it to be like that for her, too.
Yetu worked to push the remainder of the rememberings out of her, putting distance between herself and the memories. It didn’t work. The pang of his eventual death shot through her. She could feel it so fresh, could feel her fins around his face as she harvested memories from him, living his life as if it were her own. How it hurt her to see his story unfold, to end. If such a vibrant thing as he could die, Yetu would meet that end sooner rather than later.
Despite the waves of pain rocking her into a catatonic trance, she continued. Images, stories, songs, feelings, smells, hungers, longings, tears—memories—left her mind. She coughed them up like something burning in her lungs, hoarse and ugly, the violence of it shaking her whole body.
And the wajinru swallowed them.
If she could just get this sickness out of her once and for all, the sickness of remembering, she would survive. She wanted to survive. She didn’t want to be the wajinru with a death wish, who swam with sharks as she bled because she could not tell past from present.
The wajinru reveled in knowing, desperate for the stories of their past. Soon, they were full on it.
Yetu let herself feel her body. The cold, heavy water. The brush of currents. Her mind was empty. Blessedly empty. Nothingness filled her in a rush of heat. There was no one there. No voices, no stories, no visions of deaths.
Blissed out, she floated limply until she could no longer ignore the pings of water coming from the other wajinru.
She felt them, though for a moment she forgot who they were. She forgot who she was altogether, let alone who she was to them. Small bits of it came back to her. Her name. Her life. Her amaba.
It wasn’t a complete picture, but from the scattered fragments, she understood one important thing. The wajinru were her people, and for now they were held captive by the History, living the lives of the ancestors from beginning to end. At some point, collectively, when they’d learned and internalized all they could, they would give the History back to Yetu, their historian, who would keep it for them while they lived out their days in blissful ignorance.
Yetu didn’t know much, but she knew she couldn’t let that happen. Not this time. Not again. Or she would die. She looked down at her own body, trifling and small. A mere wisp of dead seaweed billowing in the dark.
There were the burns. Amaba never knew about those, about the year Yetu became so sensitive to touch that she swam to the bottom of the sea and pressed her scales against a lava vent to scorch away the nerves. Her brain could not hold the History and the present. She felt the wajinru as they moved in the shadow of the womb, a great hulking black mass surrounding her. These were her people, her extended kin, but they were also death itself. When they’d had their fill of the rememberings, they would come for her and pour it back into Yetu, a cracked vessel.
In time, she’d be subsumed. She’d never been this close to annihilation before. It had always pained her to take back the rememberings, her own mind blotted out in favor of those who’d lived before. Those times, though, Yetu had managed to keep an inch of herself. Now she wasn’t sure even a speck would remain.
The ancestors pulled her deeper and deeper into the abyss of the past with each passing year. How long before she didn’t awaken from their summons at all? How long before, in a confused state and painted in blood, she went to the waters of the great whites like she had done before Amaba had found her? That couldn’t be what they wanted, for her to disappear. Yetu felt the wajinru swarming all around her. Yetu knew what they would do. First, seize her. Next, gut her mind. Last, fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake. This time, she wouldn’t emerge from it. There would be no Yetu left for the next Remembrance. She’d be dead.