Babel

by R.F. Kuang

It had not registered until now that he would not step foot on his native shore again for many years, if ever. He wasn’t sure what to make of this fact. The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

A lie was not a lie if it was never uttered; questions that were never asked did not need answers. They would both remain perfectly content to linger in the liminal, endless space between truth and denial.

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

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decided he might as well dazzle.

Follow along, feel free to have a look – books are meant to be touched, otherwise they’re useless, so don’t be nervous.

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.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

But that afternoon they could see with certainty the kind of friends they would be, and loving that vision was close enough.

that they were all four of them drowning in the unfamiliar, and they saw in each other a raft, and clinging to one another was the only way to stay afloat.

‘It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heaven, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth.

Only now – perhaps because of the wine, or perhaps it had all been building up for so long that things were past the tipping point – he felt he wanted to scream. Cry. Kick the wall. Anything, if only to make his father look him in the face.

Then he blinked, because he’d just registered what this most mundane and extraordinary moment meant – that in the space of several weeks, they had become what he’d never found in Hampstead, what he thought he’d never have again after Canton: a circle of people he loved so fiercely his chest hurt when he thought about them. A family.

they had unlocked a part of him, a place of sunshine and belonging, that he never thought he’d feel again. The world felt less dark.

Every weakness we display is a testament to the worst theories about us, which is that we’re fragile, we’re hysterical, and we’re too naturally weak-minded to handle the kind of work we’re set to do.’

You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Languages aren’t just made of words. They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. And that’s knowledge worth killing for.’

Tabby cats were named after a striped silk that was in turn named for its place of origin: a quarter of Baghdad named al-‘Attābiyya.

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.

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.’

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

‘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.

‘It’s just that we forgot the rest of it mattered. We got so good at refusing to see what was right in front of us.’

But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage.

‘How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’

It’s hard to accept what you don’t want to see.’

‘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.

Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe.

neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them.

Harsh, perhaps. Cold, blunt, severe: all the words one might use to describe a girl who demanded from the world the same things a man would.

And the grand accomplishment of the imperial project was to take only a little from so many places; to fragment and distribute the suffering so that at no point did it ever become too much for the entire community to bear. Until it did.

It defied what he had come to expect of the world. He was scared to let it make him hope.

‘Every soldier’s conscience has a limit,’

Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world.

‘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.’