Babel

by R.F. Kuang

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage.

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

‘What happened?’ Ramy gave him a long look. ‘The British, Birdie. Keep up.’

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

But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’

hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speak to its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

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.

You fly no one’s flag. You’re free to seek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.’

‘How strange,’ said Ramy. ‘To love the stuff and the language, but to hate the country.’ ‘Not as odd as you’d think,’ said Victoire. ‘There are people, after all, and then there are things.’

‘You want to do the right thing,’ said Ramy, bullish. ‘You always do. But you think the right thing is martyrdom. You think if you suffer enough for whatever sins you’ve committed, then you’re absolved.’

You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

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.

‘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.’

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.

we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’ ‘And what’s it literally mean?’ She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.’