Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

“He felt a sharp ache in his chest as Canton disappeared over the horizon, and then a raw emptiness, as if a grappling hook had yanked his heart out of his body. It had not registered until now that he would not step foot on his native shore again for many years, if ever. He wasn’t sure what to make of this fact. The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.”

This scene is a convention of migration narratives; namely, leaving one’s homeland is a traumatic experience. Despite his young age, Robin is already abstracting his experience through the lens of language. Here, Robin realizes that language and experience are not commensurate—this difference is the foundation for translation as magic. Because of his migrant experience, Robin intuitively knows what Babel tries to teach. His induction into the world of translation begins long before he sets foot on English soil.

“They were both shaken by the sudden realization that they did not belong in this place, that despite their affiliation with the Translation Institute and despite their gowns and pretensions, their bodies were not safe on the streets. They were men at Oxford; they were not Oxford men. But the enormity of this knowledge was so devastating, such a vicious antithesis to the three golden days they’d blindly enjoyed, that neither of them could say it out loud.”

Robin and Ramy have only been at Oxford for three days before they have a dangerous encounter with violence. Their sense of not being safe defines them as others, an alienation that people of color are unable to escape as long as they are in Great Britain. This is also one of the first instances of “gold” as a motif for the intentional avoidance of truths about race and language as sources of difference. Finally, Kuang’s attention to the impact of racism and stereotypes on people of color is an intervention in more idealized representations of academia.

“Of all the marvels of Oxford, Babel seemed the most impossible—a tower out of time, a vision from a dream. Those stained-glass windows, that high, imposing dome; it all seemed to have been pulled straight from the painting in Professor Lovell’s dining room and dropped whole onto this drab grey street. An illumination in a medieval manuscript; a door to a fairy land. It seemed impossible that they should come here every day to study, that they had the right to enter at all.”

This is Robin’s first sight of Babel. The elevated language and references to dreams, paintings, and fairy tales indicate that Robin has an idealized notion of Babel that is different from reality. At this point, Robin believes that coming here is a privilege rather than a curse.

“‘We’re here to make magic with words.’” This was, Robin thought, the kindest thing anyone had ever had to say about his being foreign-born. And though the story made his gut squirm—for he had read the relevant passage of Herodotus, and recalled that the Egyptian boys were nevertheless slaves—he felt also a thrum of excitement at the thought that perhaps his unbelonging did not doom him to existing forever on the margins, that perhaps, instead, it made him special.”

Professor Playfair mystifies Babel even further by calling what they do “magic.” It is magic, but as the story about the Egyptian pharaohs shows, it is magic that depends on exploitation to function. Robin interprets the story differently than Playfair, showing his awareness early on that there is something exploitative about Babel’s reliance on international students.

“‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources. The professors like to pretend that the tower is a refuge for pure knowledge, that it sits above the mundane concerns of business and commerce, but it does not. It’s intricately tied to the business of colonialism. It is the business of colonialism.’”

Griffin offers Robin a counternarrative to Playfair’s. Griffin’s analysis is the first step in Robin’s education about what working at Babel really means. This quote also captures that Griffin is not just a half-brother, but a mentor whose intervention forces Robin to change his understanding of his role at Babel.

“‘Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?’”

The political implications of translation are in plain sight, but Robin accepts the more philosophical perspective on translation, one that is drawn from translation theory. As Robin listens to Playfair, he is more preoccupied with his concrete betrayal of his friends and Babel when he helps the Hermes Society steal silver and books. Robin’s ambivalence about his work for both Babel and the Hermes Society shows how torn he is between competing values at this point in his character development.

“‘We capture what is lost in translation—for there is always something lost in translation—and the bar manifests it into being.’”

This passage describes the novel’s system of magic. The quote is thus a key piece of worldbuilding in the speculative world Kuang creates. Her choice to make magic dependent on the practice of translation allows her to talk more explicitly about the way that power relations such as colonialism still apply in imagined worlds. In this novel, language as power is represented in the concrete form of a silver bar.

“‘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.’”

Anthony Ribben is countering Letty’s insistence that language exists in an idealized space beyond politics. Anthony’s response reflects his understanding that language defines people’s relationship to reality, each other, power, and identity. The distinction between how Letty and Anthony see language comes out of Letty’s status. Because Letty is a member of the dominant culture and language, she has been able to avoid clearly seeing her privileged place in that power structure.

“Robin, too, thought the photograph looked strange, though he did not say so aloud. All of their expressions were artificial, masks of faint discomfort. The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it. Violets cast into crucibles, indeed.”

The photograph is both a faithful and a faithless translation of the friendships among the cohort’s members. It is faithful because it accurately represents that their closeness is to some extent forced. They have been thrown together because they are all others. The daguerreotype is faithless because it fails to represent that there are moments of true friendship despite the friends’ differences. “Violets cast into crucibles” is an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s argument against the translation of poetry word for word. The photograph is no more capable of capturing who the members of the cohort are than burning a delicate flower in a crucible (a burning hot container used to purify metal) to reveal its true nature.

“Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower—this place where they had for the first time found belonging—treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn’t, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke. No one said that out loud. It came too close to breaking the spell.”

The faculty’s refusal to publicly mourn Anthony is a failure rooted in its dehumanization of translators. Mourning is a ritual that recognizes the loss of a community member as well. Ignoring the need for communal mourning shows Babel values the relationship of scholars to the school and not the relationships that exist between scholars. Kuang relies on a convention of dark academia by revealing the inhumanity of institutions such as colleges.

“‘You’re lost, brother. You’re a ship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.’”

Griffin proves key to Robin’s character development here by changing how Robin defines his relationship with Babel (and Britain more generally). By taking people like Griffin and Robin from their home countries, the empire creates a class of people who are neither British nor Chinese. This lack of home is part of Babel’s cruelty. Robin still sees attending Babel as a privilege and an opportunity, whereas Griffin is fully aware of it as an exploitative institution.

“She was gorgeous, gorgeous, she made Aphrodite herself jealous—indeed, he intoned, she ought to feel lucky she hadn’t been turned into a mayfly already. This made Letty giggle, which stopped her crying somewhat, and that was good; that meant he’d done his job. He had the oddest feeling of disappearing as he spoke, of fading into the background of a painting depicting a story which must have been old as history.”

Robin is more aware of the cost of friendship with Letty as time goes on. In this key moment, he begins to understand that Letty consistently centers her feelings and emotions over his. He is a sidekick or background character and resents Letty’s assumption that he should have that role because he is a person of color while she is white. This is one of the moments when they are not able to overcome their differences across racial and cultural lines. Letty is blissfully unaware of this difficulty, a luxury she has because of who she is.

“Lie, Ramiz. This was the lesson, the most important lesson he’d ever been taught. Hide, Ramiz. Show the world what they want; contort yourself into the image they want to see, because seizing control of the story is how you in turn control them. Hide your faith, hide your prayers, for Allah will still know your heart.”

Ramy’s strategy for dealing with alienation from his family, language, and culture is masking—the performance of an identity for the sake of survival. A lie is at the heart of the identity he presents to the world in Britain, which leads him to feel a sense of inauthenticity and despair later. By joining Hermes, he assumes a mask that is more truly self-empowering.

“Canton was wildly different from the way he’d left it. The construction on the docks, which had been going on since Robin could remember, had exploded into entire complexes of new buildings—warehouses, company offices, inns, restaurants, and teahouses. 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?”

Robin returns home and finds that nothing is the same. Even the house where he grew up is gone. Kuang’s representation of home here rejects the colonialist perspective that colonized countries somehow exist outside of history and thus are ripe for exploitation by the West. This is also a key moment in Robin’s migration narrative. Namely, he realizes that he doesn’t have the same relation to home because both he and home are now different. Canton is no longer home to him because of his migration and his encounter with Britain.

“Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. 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.”

Only in Canton is Robin finally able to comprehend, in concrete terms, what “coercive extraction”(Griffin’s term from Page 176) is. His epiphany is such that he can no longer be contently complicit in that exploitation. This is thus a key moment in his evolution as a character.

“‘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.’”

Part of the exploitative nature of colonialism is that it dehumanizes colonized people. Ramy is pointing out the seeming paradox that colonizers love to appropriate the cultures of the colonized. Victoire is pragmatic, so she is able to point out there is no paradox once one realizes that the dehumanization of the other is central to colonialism.

“‘There are no kind masters, Letty,’ Anthony continued. ‘It doesn’t matter how lenient, how gracious, how invested in your education they make out to be. Masters are masters in the end.’”

Letty sees Anthony Ribben’s membership in the Hermes Society as a betrayal of all the good she believes England and Babel gave him by purchasing his freedom from his master. Letty is not yet able to see Babel as just another master. Anthony, who is aware of the exploitative relationship between Babel and speakers of other languages, can name them as such.

“Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself—and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.”

This key piece of characterization happens in a footnote. It is nevertheless important because it links Griffin’s political beliefs and his personal experiences. Griffin’s belief in violence isn’t just a philosophical stance; it is a part of who he is. This truth reflects that even the most intimate parts of one’s experience happen in a specific political context, but that context isn’t everything. Griffin’s belief in violence is the result of loneliness and isolation. It whittles him; it makes him less than he was but also more defined in who he is. Violence has two sides, in other words. Footnotes like these create a reading experience that allows for multiple, sometimes contradictory ways of understanding the events. Kuang uses her novel to show what decolonized knowledge looks like. Her work is in contrast to the kind of knowledge places like Babel create.

“But the dream was shattered. That dream had always been founded on a lie. None of them had ever stood a chance of truly belonging here, for 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.”

This description of Babel shows the evolution of Babel as a symbol. While Robin’s first sight of Babel relies on elevated language that references fairy tales and paintings, his description of Babel here is more realistic. The reference to “faraway lands” echoes the more grim elements of such tales, however. Babel is a nightmarish place rather than a dream.

“She thought the Empire inevitable. The future immutable. And resistance pointless.”

Letty chooses to remain complicit in Babel’s work because she accepts British imperialism as unavoidable. This is a failure of imagination that reflects her privilege as a white, British woman in that system. It also reflects her lack of understanding of what colonized people and their countries are capable of. Her belief in the inevitability of empire explains why she betrays her cohort as well. She sees political change as futile and their sacrifice as wasteful.

“‘We’re already in the history books, for better or for worse. Here’s a chance to intervene against the archives, no?’”

Ibrahim explains to Robin why he believes a history of the revolution from the perspective of a participant is necessary. He acknowledges the old saying that history is written by the victors; that is, historical narratives are also part of the colonization of knowledge about reality. Intervening in what counts as history is one way of countering powerful interests, but writing speculative fiction is another way to do so. Kuang gives the novel a subtitle that references this use of imagination to create counter histories.

“‘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 I don’t want to die, Robin.’ Her throat hitched. ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be their Imoinda, their Oroonoko.* I don’t want to be their tragic, lovely lacquer figure. I want to live.’”

The works Victoire references are ones in which English writers saw people of color and immigrants as humans only if they were dead. Thinking of others as either dead and human or alive and threatening is a dichotomy that allows colonizers to avoid responsibility for doing harm. Victoire’s desire for a third choice highlights her pragmatism and her different perspective on the aims of decolonization compared to Robin.

“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.”

Victoire’s vision of life after Babel falls contrasts with Letty’s. Her vision is one in which colonized and formerly colonized people are self-determining. Kuang’s description of how Victoire thinks about history shows what the Oxford Translators’ Revolution wrought: a person whose psychology is decolonized.