Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

‘Húlún tūn zǎo,’ he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable. He switched to English. ‘To accept without thinking.’

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

Oxford in 1836 was in an era of becoming, an insatiable creature feeding on the wealth which it bred.

We accept you not despite, but because of your foreign backgrounds.’ Professor Playfair emphasized this last part as if it was a matter of great pride. ‘Because of your origins, you have the gift of languages those born in England cannot imitate.

‘Now you’re part of the tower,’ Professor Playfair told them as he locked the drawers. ‘Now the tower knows you.’

One thing united them all – without Babel, they had nowhere in this country to go. They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment.

It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.

Everything Babel does is in the service of expanding the Empire.

Language is an infinite resource. And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’

He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

Ramy, Victoire, and Letty – they became the colours of Robin’s life, the only regular contact he had with the world outside his coursework. They needed each other because they had no one else.

He was a child starved of affection, which he now had in abundance – and was it so wrong for him to cling to what he had? He was not ready to commit fully to Hermes. But by God, he would have killed for any of his cohort.

Babel was the only place where his talents mattered. Babel was security. And perhaps all that was morally compromised, yes – but was it so wrong to want to survive?

‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

‘Don’t you want a memento of us?’ she asked. ‘Preserved at this moment in time?’ Robin shrugged. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, I do,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I want to remember exactly how we were now, in this year, in 1837. I never want to forget.’

Griffin had been robbed of everything – a mother tongue, a motherland, a family.

That this tower – this place where they had for the first time found belonging – treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke.

much like their father just then. ‘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?’

‘You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.’ He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin’s shoulder, squeezed so hard they hurt. ‘But realize this, brother. You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.’

‘Why won’t you dance with Letty?’ ‘I’m not looking to start a row.’ ‘No, really.’ ‘Please, Birdie.’ Ramy sighed. ‘You know how it is.’ ‘She wants you,’ Robin said. He’d only just realized this, and now that he said it out loud, it seemed so obvious that he felt stupid for not seeing it earlier. ‘Very badly. So why—’ ‘Don’t you know why?’

What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access?

But he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double. Unless he chose.

‘No, I want to be here,’ said Letty. ‘I want to know what happens next. I can’t just let you all . . . No.’ She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, then reopened her eyes and announced very slowly, as if she’d just come to the decision, ‘I’m in this. With you. All of you.’

‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’ ‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

‘Our minds are made up,’ Victoire said gently, but firmly. ‘We’re taking this to Hermes, as soon as we arrive in Oxford. And you don’t have to go with us – we can’t force you to take that risk; we know you’ve suffered so much already. But if you’re not with us, then we ask you at least to keep our secrets.’ ‘What do you mean?’ Letty cried. ‘Of course I’m with you. You’re my friends, I’m with you until the end.’

‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

‘But I’m a sceptic. I think decolonization must be a violent process.’

It was cruelty. Don’t ask me to love my master.’

Suddenly Letty was on the outside, and she couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t seem to crack the code, no matter how she tried, because every time she asked, the response was always Isn’t it obvious, Letty? Don’t you see? No, she didn’t see.

Still, she’d helped them, protected them, and kept their secrets. She loved them. She would have killed for them.

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.

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.

They would obey because he threatened violence.

But though Oxford was not the seat of power, it produced the occupants thereof.

It revealed more than the power of translation. It revealed the sheer dependence of the British, who, astonishingly, could not manage to do basic things like bake bread or get safely from one place to another without words stolen from other countries.

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.

They emerged from here the victors, the harbingers of an unrecognizable Britain, or they left this tower dead.

‘You said yourself you wanted this place to burn.’ ‘But even more,’ said Victoire, placing a hand on his shoulder, ‘I want us to survive.’

Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him. And the system cannot survive the shock.

I wanted the satisfaction. At Oxford Castle I kept taking it out, studying her face, trying to see . . . to see the person that would do this to us. But the more I look, the more I . . . I just feel sorry for her. It’s twisted, but from her perspective, she must think she’s the one who lost everything.

Symbolic; it was all supposed to be symbolic. But this time a body had toppled.

Victoire asked, in a flat and toneless voice, ‘Why?’ Letty flinched, but only just barely. ‘I had to,’ she said, chin high, unwavering. ‘You know it’s all I could have done.’ ‘No,’ said Victoire. ‘I don’t.’ ‘I couldn’t betray my country.’ ‘You didn’t have to betray us.’

‘We loved you,’ Victoire whispered. ‘Letty, we would have died for you.’

‘We destroy the tower,’ he said. ‘And we destroy ourselves.’

‘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.’