Babel

by R.F. Kuang

Languages affect each other; they inject new meaning into each other, and like water rushing out of a dam, the more porous the barriers are, the weaker the force.

Language is a resource just like gold and silver. People have fought and died over those Grammaticas.’

‘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.’

‘Words tell stories.’ This was how Professor Lovell opened their first class that afternoon, held in a spare, windowless room on the tower’s fifth floor. ‘Specifically, the history of those words – how they came into use, and how their meanings morphed into what they mean today – tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.

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.

Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.

The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’

if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’

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.’

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

A hundred arguments swam through Robin’s head – that he had not requested these privileges of Oxford, had not chosen to be spirited out of Canton at all, that the generosities of the university should not demand his constant, unswerving loyalty to the Crown and its colonial projects, and if it did, then that was a peculiar form of bondage he had never agreed to. That he had not wished for this fate until it was thrust upon him, decided for him. That he didn’t know what life he would have chosen – this one, or a life in which he’d grown up in Canton, among people who looked and spoke like him.

Ramy did not begrudge his parents for not fighting to keep him at their side. (He knew, by then, how dangerous it was to defy a white man.)

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.

‘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.’

‘But, Victoire love, the slave trade was abolished in 1807.’* ‘And you think they just stopped?’ Victoire made a noise that was half laugh, half sob. ‘You don’t think we sell bars to America? You think British manufacturers don’t still profit from shackles and irons? You don’t think there are people who still keep slaves in England who simply manage to hide it well?’

In Chinese, the phrase huǒyàowèi* meant literally ‘the taste of gunpowder’; figuratively, ‘belligerence, combativeness’. His brother smelled of gunpowder. He reeked of violence.

Robin doubled over, screaming, but there was no sound to his anguish, no shape to his pain; he was incorporeal, voiceless, and though he suffered the kind of shattering grief that demanded shrieking, beating, a ripping of the world – and if not the world, then himself – he could not move; until the square was clear, all he could do was wait, and watch.

Oxford wanted only one kind of scholar, the kind born and bred to cycle through posts of power it had created for itself. Everyone else it chewed up and discarded. These towering edifices were built with coin from the sale of slaves, and the silver that kept them running came blood-stained from the mines of Potosí. It was smelted in choking forges where native labourers were paid a pittance, before making its way on ships across the Atlantic to where it was shaped by translators ripped from their countries, stolen to this faraway land and never truly allowed to go home.

He couldn’t believe these words were coming out of his mouth. This was not him speaking; this was the ghost of Griffin, the braver, madder brother, reaching through the underworld to pull his strings.

Such an interesting word, Robin thought, strike.* It brought to mind hammers against spikes, bodies throwing themselves against an immovable force. It contained in itself the paradox of the concept; that through nonaction, and nonviolence, one might prove the devastating consequences of refusing to accommodate those one relied upon.

What became clear was how deeply Oxford relied on silver, how without the constant labour of its translation corps, of the talent it attracted from abroad, it immediately fell apart. 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.

Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option.

Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him. And the system cannot survive the shock. ‘Oderint dum metuant,’ he said.* ‘That’s our path to victory.’ ‘That’s Caligula,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘You’re invoking Caligula?’ ‘Caligula got his way.’ ‘Caligula was assassinated.’

In theory this decision they’d made was something beautiful. In theory they would be martyrs, heroes, the ones who’d pushed history off its path. But none of that was a comfort. In the moment, all that mattered was that death was painful and frightening and permanent, and none of them wanted to die. But even as they trembled, not one of them broke. It was only a wish, after all.

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.

‘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.’

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

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.

Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.