Babel

by R.F. Kuang

They’d been chosen for privileges they couldn’t have ever imagined, funded by powerful and wealthy men whose motives they did not fully understand, and they were acutely aware these could be lost at any moment. That precariousness made them simultaneously bold and terrified.

And he wondered at the contradiction: that he despised them, that he knew they could be up to no good, and that still he wanted to be respected by them enough to be included in their ranks.

He wanted Pendennis’s life, not so much for its material pleasures – the wine, the cigars, the clothes, the dinners – but for what it represented: the assurance that one would always be welcome in England. If he could only attain Pendennis’s fluency, or at least an imitation of it, then he, too, would blend into the tapestry of this idyllic campus life.

They could no longer look at the world and not see stories, histories, layered everywhere like centuries’ worth of sediment.

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.

But slaves we are, and labour in another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s.

Reality was, after all, just so malleable – facts could be forgotten, truths suppressed, lives seen from only one angle like a trick prism, if only one resolved never to look too closely.

‘Oh, opium’s not as harmful as all that,’ said Reverend Gützlaff. ‘Indeed, it’s prescribed as laudanum in Britain all the time. Little old ladies regularly use it to go to sleep. It’s no more a vice than tobacco or brandy. I often recommend it to members of my congregation.’

And Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them.

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.

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.

So it did feel cathartic, seeing her break down like this, knowing that at last she understood how they all felt. It was a relief to see that in her they still had an ally. 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.

‘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.’

No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’

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.

He couldn’t remember why the thought of acting had scared him so before. Griffin was right – the obstacle was not the struggle, but the failure to imagine it was possible at all, the compulsion to cling to the safe, the survivable status quo.

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.

The future would be fluid. It was just as Griffin had predicted. One individual choice, made at just the right time. This was how they defied momentum. This was how they altered the tracks of history. And in the end, the answer had been so obvious – to simply refuse to participate. To remove their labour – and the fruits of their labour – permanently from the offering.