Babel

by R.F. Kuang

London was voracious, was growing fat on its spoils and still, somehow, starved.

‘But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.

But he had to try, really try, to make sure that he did not stop dreaming in his native tongue.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers.

The English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

‘Now, what I wish,’ interrupted Mr Ratcliffe, ‘is that all these women would stop taking part in those anti-slavery debates. They see too much of themselves in their situation; it puts ideas in their head.’

‘She’d like to think that it’s a hop and a skip from abolition to women’s suffrage.’ Mr Ratcliffe let out a nasty laugh. ‘That would be the day.’

And with that, the conversation turned to the absurdity of women’s rights.

Never, Robin thought, would he understand these men, who talked of the world and its movements like a grand chess game, where countries and peoples were ...

They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.

‘Why are you girls?’

‘Well,’ she drawled, ‘I suppose we decided to be girls because being boys seems to require giving up half your brain cells.’

‘Translation, from time immemorial, has been the facilitator of peace. Translation makes possible communication, which in turn makes possible the kind of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation between foreign peoples that brings wealth and prosperity to all.

So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original.

And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases.

The most devout Christians think it does, but you’d think if the Holy Word were so innate and unambiguous, there’d be less debate about its contents.’

‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.’

‘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?’

They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

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.

They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’

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

‘In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.’

Oxford, which consistently ran about a century behind the rest of England’s major cities, could only pretend to be immune to change for so long.

This was about more than mill workers. Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade.

Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens.

Professor Lovell’s promised future of progress and enlightenment seemed only to have wrought poverty and suffering; the new jobs he thought the displaced workers should take up never materialized. Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.

And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’

‘You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores.

‘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.’

He did not know that impressing a white man could be as dangerous as provoking one.

Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart.

For the first time in a decade, Robin found himself gazing at the shores of his motherland.

Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe.

Ramy no longer had any ideological grounds to resent him, for between them, only one of them had killed a colonizer.

They were co-conspirators now, and this brought them closer than they ever had been.

‘But the Qu’ran also speaks of Allah’s infinite mercy.’ Ramy was quiet for a moment. ‘And I think . . . well, Professor Lovell was a very bad man, wasn’t he? You acted in self-defence, didn’t you? And the things he did to you, to your brother, to your mothers . . . perhaps he did deserve to die. Perhaps the fact that you killed him first prevented unforetold harm from coming to others.

But that’s really not your decision to make.

And here someone called Goddard writes that deploying warships would be a “tranquil and judicious visit”. Imagine. A tranquil and judicious visit. What a way to describe a violent invasion.’

So shut up, Letty, and just listen to what we’re trying to tell you. It’s not right what they’re doing to our countries.’ His voice grew louder, harder. ‘And it’s not right that I’m trained to use my languages for their benefit, to translate laws and texts to facilitate their rule, when there are people in India and China and Haiti and all over the Empire and the world who are hungry and starving because the British would rather put silver in their hats and harpsichords than anywhere it could do some good.’

So that was the goal of the night: to shift the engines of history onto a different track.

Defying empire, it turned out, was fun.

‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable?

‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent.

The whole world was on the verge of some cataclysmic shift, it seemed, and he could only cling on to what was around him as they all hurtled towards the breaking point.

‘You’ll want to avoid rhetoric about anticolonialism and respecting national sovereignty. Use terms like scandal, collusion, corruption, lack of transparency, and whatnot. Cast things in terms that the average Londoner will get worked up about, and don’t make it an issue of race.’

‘You want me to translate things for white people,’ said Robin.

My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves.