Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.

He watched the ocean for a long time, indifferent to the wind, staring until even his imagined vision of the shore faded away.

He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive.

For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them;

‘They make oats taste so good,’ he said, ‘I understand the joys of being a horse,’

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.

There was no pretending anymore, no hiding in their supposedly safe corner of the world

‘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.

it tiptoed around a complicated tangle of love and jealousy that ensnared them all, for which they had no name or explanation,

He hoped until hope became its own form of torture.

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.

It all felt so absurdly normal. Did no one here know the world had broken?

‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

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 first two days they spent together in begrudging silence – but together, still,

We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them.

All warmth and cheer—but the moment you tried to step closer, solid ground gave way to empty space.