Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Griffin would have known how to compel them. Griffin was the storyteller, the true revolutionary; he could paint the necessary picture of imperial expansion, complicity, guilt, and responsibility with a handful of gutting phrases. But Griffin wasn’t here, and the best Robin could do was to channel his dead brother’s spirit. ‘Parliament

They’d moved past the realm of ideas now, into the realm of action, and this was something Oxford students were wholly unprepared for. ‘For

He was gambling on Professor Playfair’s cowardice, on the fact that he might wield a gun, but he wouldn’t pull the trigger. Professor Playfair, like every other Babel scholar, hated getting his hands dirty. He designed lethal traps – he never wielded the blades himself. And he didn’t know how much will, or panic, it took to really kill a man. Robin

‘They’ll set the troops on you,’ said Professor Craft. ‘But they can’t,’ said Victoire. ‘They can’t touch us. No one can touch us. They need us too badly.’ And

Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt. ‘Then

Faces of colour, faces from the colonies, except for Professor Craft. But

Strikers in this country never won broad public support, for the public merely wanted all the conveniences of modern life without the guilt of knowing how those conveniences were procured. And why should the translators succeed where other strikers – white strikers, no less – had failed? There

How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots. Victoire

‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’ By the

fragmentariness in

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. And

All those buildings assembled by slaves, paid for by slaves, and stuffed with artefacts stolen from conquered lands, those buildings which had no right to exist, whose ongoing existence demanded continuous extraction and violence – destroyed, undone. On the

But perhaps rationality had fled. Perhaps there was only the mob, fuelled by the sheer fury that something they thought was theirs had been taken from them. Some

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. And

‘It’s like the Ten Plagues,’ Victoire observed. Robin had not cracked open a Bible in years. ‘The Ten Plagues?’ ‘Moses asked Pharaoh to let his people go,’ said Victoire. ‘But Pharaoh’s heart was unyielding, and he refused. So the Lord cast ten plagues on the Pharaoh’s land. He turned the Nile to blood. He sent locusts, frogs, and pestilence. He cast all of Egypt into darkness, and through these feats he made Pharaoh know his power.’ ‘And did Pharaoh let them go?’ Robin asked. ‘He did,’ said Victoire. ‘But only after the tenth plague. Only after he had suffered the death of his firstborn son.’ Occasionally

The country now lay in the throes of an invisible battle of words and meaning; its

‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’ ‘Well,

He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn. Victoire

this required no further explanation, for it was a motive that the British public were all too ready to believe. We

Christian organizations printed pamphlets criticizing the spread of an illegal vice to an innocent people, though the prowar evangelists responded with the supposedly Christian argument that it would in fact be God’s work to expose the Chinese people to free trade. Meanwhile,

‘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.’ ‘Jesus

The ghosts of Anthony and Griffin loomed between them: one guided by the conviction that the enemy would at least act in rational self-interest, if not altruism, and the other guided less by conviction, less by telos, and more by sheer, untrammelled rage. ‘I know

‘You are the proximate cause,’ insisted Professor Chakravarti. ‘You can make it stop.’ ‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ‘Even

They glared at each other, and Robin thought he understood now the way that Griffin had once looked at him. This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. 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? Professor

So many of them were orphans, all ties to their countries severed except that of language.* But

He had never thought before about the lacuna of written history they existed in and the oppressive swath of denigrating narrative they fought against, and now that he did, it seemed insurmountable. The

Only Chinese had a character that encapsulated how much simple words could hurt: 刺, cì, the character for thorns, for stabs, for criticism. Such a flexible character. In a phrase, 刺言, 刺語, it meant ‘barbed, stinging words’. 刺 could mean ‘to goad’. 刺 could also mean ‘to murder’. ‘So

‘They’re not your motherlands,’ said Letty. ‘They don’t have to be.’ ‘They do have to be,’ said Victoire. ‘Because we’ll never be British. How can you still not understand? That identity is foreclosed to us. 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. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.’ Letty’s face tightened. The

‘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. But

He didn’t understand his heart himself. He felt resolved, but perhaps that was only the adrenaline; perhaps his fear and hesitation were only pushed temporarily behind a flimsy wall, which would shatter upon closer examination. ‘No,

The bars were singing, shaking; trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves, which was that translation was impossible, that the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known, that the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them. He went

‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘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.’ The

Liberation was a string of coincidences, of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and luck. Victoire

She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them. Good. It should. She’s

Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory

the