In Gabrielle Tesfaye‘s The Water Will Carry Us Home and Rivers Solomon‘s The Deep, the ocean emerges a medium through which the ancestral memories and traumas of the Middle Passage are explored and remembered. In both texts, African pregnant women are thrown overboard and underwent a transformation into mermaid like creatures. Both narratives use that story to reclaim African diasporan narratives through the use of the ocean. The ocean therefore must be recognized as an archive that holds knowledge.