Babel

by R.F. Kuang

You have such a great fear of freedom, brother. It’s shackling you. You’ve identified so hard with the colonizer, you think any threat to them is a threat to you. When are you going to realize you can’t be one of them?’

keep your mouth shut, will you? Otherwise I’ll have to come and tie up loose ends, and I don’t like to be messy.’ ‘I won’t tell a soul. You have my word—’ ‘I don’t really care about your word,’ said Griffin. ‘But I do know where you sleep.’

‘I’m not a traitor,’ Robin pleaded. ‘I’m just trying to survive.’ ‘Survival’s not that difficult, Birdie.’ Ramy’s eyes were very hard. ‘But you’ve got to maintain some dignity while you’re at it.’

Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.’

I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’ ‘Well,’ said Robin, ‘there’s Letty.’ ‘Yes,’ said Anthony after a pause. ‘I suppose there’s Letty. But she’s a rare case, isn’t she?’

feels foreboding

One day Robin would ask himself how his shock had turned so easily to rage; why his first reaction was not disbelief at this betrayal but black, consuming hatred. And the answer would elude and disturb him, for it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation, a truth they’d only been starting to wake up to and now, after this, would never acknowledge.

But just then, all he knew was red blurring out the edges of his vision, crowding out everything but Letty. He knew now how it felt to truly want a person dead, to want to tear them apart limb by limb, to hear them scream, to make them hurt. He understood now how murder felt, how rage felt, for this was it, the intent to kill he ought to have felt when he killed his father. He lunged at her. ‘Don’t,’ Victoire cried. ‘She’s—’ Letty turned and fled. Robin rushed after her just as she retreated behind a mass of constables. He pushed against them; he didn’t care about the danger, the truncheons and guns; he only wanted to get through to her, wanted to wring the life from her neck, to tear the white bitch to pieces.

It seemed to defy the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.

That’s one good thing about you. When you’re beaten, you don’t cry.

Griffin’s and Sterling’s bodies lay adjacent on the ground, blood pooling beneath each one, running together under the rain. Some kind of love story had concluded on this square – some vicious triangle of desire, resentment, jealousy, and hatred had opened with Evie’s death and closed with Griffin’s. Its details were murky, would never be known to Robin in full;* all he knew, with certainty, was that this was not the first time Griffin and Sterling had tried to kill each other, only the first time one of them had succeeded. But all the principal characters were dead now, and the circle was closed.

I need to know everything abt them NOW 🙏

Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

And though it killed her, she had to act with resolve – for if she could not save her friends, she had at least to save herself.

‘We’re dead men walking.’ ‘But that’s what makes us frightening.’ She set the lamp down between them. ‘We’ve nothing left to lose.’

Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

‘I want a spectacle. I want Armageddon. I want them to think that a dozen Magdalen Towers will fall every day until they listen to us.’

Privately, Robin did not want this to end. He would never confess it to the others, but deep down, where the ghosts of Griffin and Ramy resided, he did not want a speedy resolution, a nominal settlement that only papered over decades of exploitation. He wanted to see how far he could take this. He wanted to see Oxford broken down to its foundations, wanted its fat, golden opulence to slough away; for its pale, elegant bricks to crumble to pieces; for its turrets to smash against cobblestones; for its bookshelves to collapse like dominoes. He wanted the whole place dismantled so thoroughly that it would be as if it had never been built. All those buildings assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artefacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded continuous extraction and violence – destroyed, undone.

the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody.

‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’

They glared at each other, and Robin thought he understood now the way that Griffin had once looked at him. This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it?

The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry. The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred. Not yet. That might change after the bridge fell. But then, Robin thought, invoking hatred might be good. Hatred might force respect. Hatred might force the British to look them in the eyes and see not an object, but a person. Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him. And the system cannot survive the shock. ‘Oderint dum metuant,’ he said.* ‘That’s our path to victory.’

‘Imagine that,’ he said. ‘A brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’

‘You have to believe there’s an after,’ she murmured. ‘They did.’ ‘They were better than us.’ ‘They were.’ She curled around his arm. ‘But it all still wound up in our hands, didn’t it?’

Go on, he thought; do it again; kill more of them; turn the streets red with the blood of your own. Show them who you are. Show them their whiteness won’t save them. Here, at last, was an unforgivable offence with a clear perpetrator. The Army had killed this girl. And if Oxford wanted vengeance, there was only one way to get it.

‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry.

‘Be selfish,’ he whispered. ‘Be brave.’

Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin’s did; or that Griffin and Sterling had quarrelled once over Evie, bright and vibrant and brilliant and beautiful Evie, or that Griffin truly hadn’t meant it when he’d killed her. In his retellings of that night, Griffin made himself out to be a calm and deliberate murderer. But the truth was that, like Robin, he’d acted without thinking, from anger, from fear, but not from malice; he did not even really believe it would work, for silver responded only sporadically to his command, and he didn’t know what he’d done until Evie was bleeding out on the floor.

Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.