A short story that’s stuck with me for years since reading it for an English class is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s a story describing the fictional city of Omelas as a utopia. Everyone is happy, everyone is educated, everyone is housed, everyone is well-off, everyone is fed. If there’s one place you’d want to go and stay, Omelas is the place.

There is, however, one caveat to this paradise: everyone in Omelas knows of the child. The child is miserable, kept locked away in a windowless room that’s more akin to a broom closet and is tormented by those who would dare to look upon it. It begs to be let out with the promise that it will be good, holding onto the memory of its mother and the light that it was born into like every other citizen of Omelas. The child has a purpose: to bear the burden and experience of misery so that no one else in Omelas has to experience it. It serves as a reminder for the people of Omelas, especially for the children, that at least they are not the ones trapped alone in a dark room sitting in their own waste and abused constantly. It reminds the people of Omelas that they have it easy, that the source of their joy comes at the cost of the child’s misery. It would be easy to pull the child out of the room and into the light, to care for it and treat its wounds. But taking the child out of that room and letting it live amongst the people of Omelas exposes the fact that their joy has been at the expense of the child’s misery.

I noticed how similar this dynamic is in Rivers Solomon’s The Deep between the wajinru and the historian. Unlike the child, who is reviled and abused, the historian is lauded and praised for their duties towards the wajinru. The historian bears all of the memories of their ancestors, no matter how mundane or painful. Every year, all of the wajinru gather and allow the historian to share their ancestors’ and their collective memories before separating once more into their mostly-solitary lives, able to forget those memories but leaving the historian to remember it all. Yetu, the historian we are introduced to, bears the burden of holding all of these memories but is extra-sensitive to it, constantly torn between the pain of the past and the pain of the present while also bearing the burden of being seen as a guide amongst the wajinru.

Like the child of Omelas, Yetu the historian has a duty to fulfill. The wajinru forgetting their ancestors’ memories enables them to live peaceful lives in The Deep without the burden of remembering that their peaceful existence was born from pain. Yetu, on the other hand, cannot live as freely as they can because she must chronically experience the pain that their ancestors went through and remember that the wajinru only exist because of that pain.