Semblance: Two Essays

The eponymous two essays Divya Victor produced for Semblance: Two Essays are prefaced by an original contribution by the poet and librettist Douglas Kearney. Victor's first essay, "Cicadas in the Mouth," is a revised and annotated version of her 2014 Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture. Victor explores the politics of language and meditates on the meaning of being a plurilingual writer in relation to the history of colonialism. In her account, the cicada becomes a complex figure for the historical layers present in language ownership and usage. The second essay, "An Unknown Length of Rope," is a completely original essay/lecture on the history of black representation via an insightful discussion of Singleton Copley's painting, Watson and the Shark. Sir Brook Watson had lost his leg in Havana, Cuba to a shark attack in 1749 just as Cuba was becoming a thriving slave post and Victor speculates on the meaning of Copley's painting "gaining" a black actor thirty years after the incident he was commissioned to depict had taken place.