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He couldn’t let himself dwell on the larger magnitude of it all. His thoughts threatened to spiral to places he feared he could not control unless he brought them down to the familiar distraction of language. ‘Dàn
They were all white men who seemed cut from precisely the same cloth as Mr Baylis – superficially charming and talkative men who, despite their clean-cut attire, seemed to exude an air of intangible dirtiness. Apart
The company men all chuckled, though Robin couldn’t see what was so funny. A certain smugness underwrote this entire exchange, an air of brotherly fraternity, of shared access to some long-running joke the rest of them didn’t understand. It reminded Robin of Professor Lovell’s gatherings in Hampstead, as he’d never been able to tell what the joke was back then either, or what the men had to be so satisfied about. No one
That’s unjust seizure of British property, I tell you. Surely that’s grounds for war. Captain
‘But that’s cruel,’ said Robin. ‘That’s – that’s terribly cruel.’ ‘It’s their free choice, isn’t it?’ Mr Baylis said. ‘You can’t fault business. Chinamen are simply filthy, lazy, and easily addicted. And you certainly can’t blame England for the foibles of an inferior race. Not where there’s money to be made.’ ‘Mr Baylis.’ Robin’s fingers tingled with a strange and urgent energy; he didn’t know whether he wanted to bolt or to hit the man. ‘Mr Baylis, I’m a Chinaman.’ Mr Baylis, for once, fell silent. His eyes roved over Robin’s face, as if trying to detect the truth of this statement in his
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When they crossed from the foreign enclave into the Cantonese suburbs, no one stopped them; no one seized them by the arm and insisted they return to where they belonged. Even Ramy’s face attracted no peculiar comment; Indian lascars were a common sight in Canton, and they attracted less attention than white foreigners. It was, strangely, a complete reversal of their situation in England. Robin
But what else had he expected? Canton had always been a shifting, dynamic city, sucking in what the sea delivered and digesting it all into its own peculiar hybridity. How could he ever assume it might remain rooted in the past? Still, this transformation felt like a betrayal. It felt like the city had closed off any possible path home. ‘Where
He thought of his mother reminiscing bitterly about the gardens she used to tend and the dresses she used to wear before his uncle frittered their family fortune away in an opium den like this. He imagined his mother, young and desperate, eager to do anything for the foreign man who promised her coin, who used and abused her and left her with an English maid and a bewildering set of instructions to raise their child, her child, in a language she couldn’t speak herself. Robin was birthed by choices produced from poverty, poverty produced from this. ‘A draught,
The din of it, the cacophony of a language he’d spent so much time away from and now had to focus on to decipher, made Robin want to press his hands against his ears, to block out a soundscape that should have but did not feel like home. ‘I’m
From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’ Robin
Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain. ‘It’s sick,’ he whispered. ‘It’s sick, it’s so sick . . .’ ‘But it’s just trade,’ said Ramy. ‘Everyone benefits; everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more.
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These trade networks were carved in stone. Nothing was pushing this arrangement off its course; there were too many private interests, too much money at stake. They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all. ‘It was so easy to forget,’ he said. ‘The cards it’s built on, I mean – because when you’re at Oxford, in the tower, they’re just words, just ideas. But the world’s so much bigger than I thought—’ ‘It’s just as big as we thought,’ Ramy
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He had decided to suffer through the rest of his duties in Canton by doing the bare minimum required of him, and this did not involve egging on Mr Baylis’s racist diatribes. Mr Baylis
‘And,’ continued Commissioner Lin, ‘does not the sanction against your own civilians’ use of opium prove that you know full well how harmful it is to mankind? We should like to ask, has China ever sent forth a noxious article from its soil? Have we ever sold you anything save for that which is beneficial, that which your country has great demand for? Is your argument now that the opium trade is, in fact, good for us?’ ‘The
‘Now look here,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘The British don’t fall under your jurisdiction, Commissioner. You haven’t got any real authority.’ ‘I am aware that you believe your interests will always supersede our laws,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘Yet we stand inside Chinese territory. And so I will remind you, and your masters, that we will enforce our laws as we see fit.’ ‘Then
‘Why do you call them yi? You must know that they hate it.’ ‘But all it means is “foreign”,’ said Commissioner Lin. ‘They are the ones who insisted on its connotations. They create the insult for themselves.’ ‘Then wouldn’t it be easier just to say yáng?’ ‘Would you let someone come in and tell you what words in your own language mean? We have words to use when we wish to insult. They should feel lucky guǐ* is not more prevalent.’ Robin chuckled. ‘Fair enough.’ ‘Now
He knew Baylis, Jardine, and Matheson had no intention of compromising with the Chinese. Compromise required some acknowledgment that the other party deserved equal moral standing. But to the British, he’d learned, the Chinese were like animals. ‘No,’
The fragile truce struck on the morning of his arrest was never sustainable. They’d been lying to themselves for too long, he and his father. Things could not remain buried, hidden, and wilfully ignored forever. Sooner or later, things had to come to a head. ‘I’m
What he wanted, Robin thought, was for Professor Lovell to admit what he’d done. That it was unnatural, this entire arrangement; that children were not stock to be experimented on, judged for their blood, spirited away from their homeland in service of Crown and country. That Robin was more than a talking dictionary, and that his motherland was more than a fat golden goose. But he knew these were acknowledgments that Professor Lovell would never make. The truth between them was not buried because it was painful, but because it was inconvenient, and because Professor Lovell simply refused to
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He had become so good at holding two truths in his head at once. That he was an Englishman and not. That Professor Lovell was his father and not. That the Chinese were a stupid, backwards people, and that he was also one of them. That he hated Babel, and wanted to live forever in its embrace. He had danced for years on the razor’s edge of these truths, had remained there as a means of survival, a way to cope, unable to accept either side fully because an unflinching examination of the truth was so frightening that the contradictions threatened to break him. But
But Robin had been bending for so long. And even a gilded cage was still a cage. He stepped
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. And rage, of course, came from madness.* Afterwards,
What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was what a truly fleeting moment the actual killing had been – no more than a split second of impulsive hatred, a single uttered phrase, a single throw. The Analects of Confucius made the claim sìbùjíshé;* that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy’s, Letty’s, and Victoire’s should have taken minutes at least,
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The only way to get Ramy to stop was to let him finishing narrating the entire sick fantasy, which he always did, with more and more ludicrous descriptions of their executions every time. They actually brought Robin some relief – it was relaxing, in a way, to imagine the very worst that could happen, since it took the terror out of the unknown. But
How could they tell her she was being delusional? That it was insane to imagine that the British legal system was truly neutral, that they would receive a fair trial, that people who looked like Robin, Ramy, and Victoire might kill a white Oxford professor, throw his body overboard, lie about it for weeks, and then walk away unscathed? That the fact that she clearly believed all this was only evidence of the starkly different worlds they lived in? But
There was no going back. They all knew it. There was no pretending anymore, no hiding in their supposedly safe corner of the world while unimaginable cruelty and exploitation carried on beyond. There was only the vast, frightening web of the colonial empire, and the demands of justice to resist it. ‘Then
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ‘Letty, I tried.’ Victoire’s voice broke. There was such pain in her eyes. And it made Robin deeply ashamed, for only now did he see the cruel pattern of their friendship. Robin had always had Ramy. But at the end of the day, when they parted ways, Victoire only had Letty, who professed always to love her, to absolutely adore her, but who failed to hear anything she was saying if it didn’t comport with how she already saw the world. And
Letty, Robin thought, was close to a breaking point. She was running out of arguments. She had the look of a dog backed into a corner. But her eyes darted around, desperately seeking an escape. She would find any flimsy excuse, accept any convoluted alternative logic before she let go of her illusions. He knew,
‘The Quakers presented the first antislavery petition to Parliament in 1783,’ said Victoire. ‘Equiano published his memoir in 1789. Add that to the countless slave stories the abolitionists were telling the British public – stories of the cruellest, most awful tortures you can inflict on a fellow human. Because the mere fact that Black people were denied their freedom was not enough. They needed to see how grotesque it was. And even then, it took them decades to finally outlaw the trade. And that’s slavery. Compared to that, a war in Canton over trade rights is going to look like nothing. It’s
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Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort. Chapter
Babel’s departmental prejudices were just as arbitrary as they were confusing. The Romanticists enjoyed most of the literary prestige,* though Arabic and Chinese were highly prized mostly by virtue of how foreign and different they were, while languages closer to home like Gaelic and Welsh had almost no respect at all. This made small talk very dangerous; it was very easy to give offence if one displayed either too much or too little enthusiasm about one’s research. Walking
‘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.’ ‘Come
‘But if this is a war, then you’ve lost.’ Still Robin refused to take the gun. ‘There’s no way you win on the battlefield. Your ranks are what, a couple dozen? At most? And you’re going to take on the entire British Army?’ ‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Griffin. ‘The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the
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‘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.’ 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. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’ ‘Well,’
We need to convince them that a global British expansion, founded on pyramids of silver, is not in their own best interest. Because their own interest is the only logic they’ll listen to. Not justice, not human dignity, not the liberal freedoms they so profess to value. Profit.’ ‘You
Robin wondered then how much of Anthony’s life had been spent carefully translating himself to white people, how much of his genial, affable polish was an artful construction to fit a particular idea of a Black man in white England and to afford himself maximum access within an institution like Babel. And he wondered if there would ever be a day that came when all this was unnecessary, when white people would look at him and Anthony and simply listen, when their words would have worth and value because they were uttered, when they would not have to hide who they were, when they wouldn’t have
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Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He
And he did not want to feel anything else, did not want to sink into his body and register its hurts, because that physical pain would mean he was alive, and because being alive meant that he had to move forward. But he could not go on. Not from this. He was
But even as he said this, the last false binary he’d constructed in his head – the one between scholars and the blades of empire – fell away. He recalled Griffin’s words. He recalled his father’s letters. Slave traders and soldiers. Ready killers, all of them. ‘You
Sterling Jones was just the same as Letty, except without the shallow sympathy of purported friendship. They both thought this was a matter of individual fortunes instead of systematic oppression, and neither could see outside the perspective of people who looked and spoke just like them. ‘Oh,
Why, he wondered, did white people get so very upset when anyone disagreed with them? ‘Your
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. ‘I think
Next to them, tomes by Plato and Locke and Montesquieu waited to be read, discussed, gesticulated about; theoretical rights like freedom and liberty would be debated between those who already enjoyed them, stale concepts that, upon their readers’ graduation ceremonies, would promptly be forgotten. That
But in spite of all that, look at them – they were here, they were thriving, defying the odds. They’d got into the castle. They had a place here, where they could transcend their birth. They had, if they seized it, the opportunity to become some of the lauded exceptions. And why would they be anything but unfailingly, desperately grateful? But
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. Chapter
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. FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox A hidden
But they could not touch that abyss of grief. It was too early yet to give it a name, to shape and tame it with words, and any attempt would crush them. They
So instead they came to stand witness, for, despite the risks, someone had to remember the sight of the betrayal. Someone had to register the loss. The
The world has to break, he thought. Someone has to answer for this. Someone has to bleed. But
