Babel, whose original derivation from the Hebrew name for Babylon dates even further back to Akkadian—an extinct East Semitic language spoken in ancient Mesopotamia—refers to the Akkadian name of the city, Bab-ilim, meaning “gate of God.” Ilim, in Arabic, also connotes knowledge, the opposite state denoted by Babel’s homophone, “babble”—that signals excessive, excited, confused, foolish chatter.
Together, these two similar-sounding words with different meanings and linguistic etymological roots: one in the ancient Semitic language Akkadian, the other derived from the Indo-European Middle Low German—might comprise what the author of Babel: An Arcane History (published in 2022), calls a “match-pair”—a conceptually brilliant device employed in her novel, that calls attention to the key role of language in the establishment and maintenance of Empire. Match-pairs, as R.D. Kuang terms them, are used by her legion of young linguistic foot soldiers (aka scholars) forcibly recruited into the service of the British Empire during the Victorian era, from regions of material interest to the British (and to other European colonial nations of the era)—such as China and India and Haiti—whose fluency in “native tongues” is harnessed to proliferate match-pairs that are necessary for consolidating the silver-work that in turn serves as the bedrock of the Industrial Revolution that bankrolls the spread—nay contagion-of Empire.
In return—and this is how force or coercion gives way to ideology–the scholars from the poverty-stricken, disease-ridden margins of the Empire become willing janissaries in the intellectual armies of their masters by succumbing to the seductive promise of membership in elite academia, in this case, Oxford University. Not only are Robin Swift from Canton, Ramy, a Muslim from India and Victoire from Haiti (by way of France) plucked from financially precarious and marginal existences (marginal as seen from an imperial perspective)—they are now placed at the pinnacle of intellectual prowess at Oxford through their admittance to Babel.
In the universe of the novel, Babel’s tower of translation is dedicated to keeping the wheels of Empire turning by sleight of linguistic hand. Great Britain can maintain its hegemony as the center of the power/knowledge system by enabling the acquisition of ever-expanding riches—silver– stolen from “other” lands to power its Industrial Revolution whilst keeping the “margins” that are the source of the raw material– in perpetual thralldom. This thralldom, as Harral Burris explains in an essay linking the past to our present, was built via the economic philosophy of mercantilism, which dominated the so-called Age of Discovery, beginning in the sixteenth century.
European powers-Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and England—sent their agents cross oceans to find resources, from coffee to cotton, that they could plunder for their capitals. European factories turned those products into manufactured goods which they re-sold to domestic consumers and their colonies in return for currency, including gold and silver. Mercantilism enriched the metropole as it impoverished poor citizens and colonial subjects.
(https://democracyofhope.substack.com/p/the-return-of-mercantilism, Jan 14, 2025).
The originality of Kuang’s novel lies in placing language at the center of this mercantilist colonial enterprise, with Oxford University as the overseer of global language acquisition via its (fictional) Royal Institute of Translation housed in the Tower of Babel. Oxford’s translation experts have discovered that magical powers are unleashed by engraving these stolen silver bars with linguistic “match-pairs” created through the ingenuity of new scholars —babblers– plucked from “peripheral” regions. The entire purpose of plucking them from their native countries and bribing them with promises of success as members of the academic elite, is to use their knowledge and fluency in“other” languages to bring words from these far-flung and “exotic” tongues into serving the ends of Empire, by creating new and powerful match-pairs that possess both destructive and curative potential that the custodians of Empire can utilize as they see fit, for their own profit. And of course, by “matching” words from Chinese, Creole, or Sanskrit to words in Indo-European languages that must eventually be translatable into English, the aim is to enrich and expand the reach and hegemony of English, the Master Tongue, a colonial tool par excellence. The paradox that escapes the masters of this universe, and which Robin realizes once his peer Cathy points out to him that “one day, most of the world will speak only English” –is that such an (intended) dominance of English would ultimately “collapse the linguistic landscape” because there would be “nothing to translate. No differences to distort.” And that, as Cathy wryly observes, is precisely the “great contradiction of colonialism … it’s built to destroy that which it prizes most” (2022: 384).
Ms Kuang has read her postcolonial texts and writers well, and her novel elucidates their key insights in creative literary ways. As I was reading the novel, I thought of connections to many books and writers and films that have been elucidating the webs of complicity and resistance to modern Euro-American imperialism and earlier English/European colonialism over the past many decades—at least a half-century–following the publication in 1978of Edward Said’s Orientalism. These works now comprise the corpus of what in academia, became known as the (anti) discipline of Postcolonial Studies, a field fraught with its own internal differences and dissensions.
It is these internal poco battles on the intellectual terrain, between a Saidian analysis of the colonizer’s linguistic, cultural and political imperialism requiring from the colonized a more forceful rejection of Empire’s hegemonic power on the one hand and, on the other, a delineation of the more ambiguous strategies of sly mimicry and hybridity put forth by Homi Bhabha and Salman Rushdie as preferred modes of decolonial behavior, that play out in the lives of the friends who start out their academic careers in the Translation Institute of Oxford, Babel. What starts out as a promise of togetherness and solidarity in a place that regards them as outsiders, either because of their race or gender (or both, in the case of Victoire) ultimately tears them apart and ends in the demise of Ramy and Robin.
Robin, the unacknowledged and illegitimate son of the Babel scholar and expert of Mandarin Chinese, Professor, finds he has an older brother brought from China earlier by their father also to serve as a silver worker through his expertise in developing Chinese-English match pairs. However, Griffin (as his brother is known)—never learnt to dream in Mandarin (he was plucked from his homeland too early)—hence his abilities as translator are limited. Hence also his early disillusionment with Oxford, which he sees for what it is: the intellectual seat of Empire where folks like he and his half-brother are brought without their consent, to learn the language of the Master race, serving up their native tongues to enrich the imperial palate, and once/if determined to be of not much use to imperial designs, to be cast aside unceremoniously. That is how Griffin “disappears” from Babel/Oxford, and becomes part of an underground network of Oxfordian revolutionaries whose aim is to overthrow the Empire by decolonizing Babel. This can only be done by recruiting those on the “inside” like Robin, to help in accumulating more and more of the silver bars that are used to keep the British Empire’s military and economic wheels functioning smoothly, and to use them instead, as an arsenal of rebellion leading to liberation.
Because Robin eventually begins to “see Oxford now through Griffin’s eyes—an institution that never valued him, that had only ever ostracized and belittled him” (183)—he agrees to join his brother’s Hermes Society (as the secret underground organization calls itself)—and undertake dangerous tasks such as smuggling out silver bars from Babelfrom time to time when asked. However, as time goes on, and Robin finds himself becoming ever more comfortable in his colonial surroundings, he accosts Griffin thus—
Really Griffin, what on Earth have you ever done? The Empire’s still standing. Babel’s still there. The sunrises, and Britain’s still got her claws everywhere in the world, and silver keeps flowing in without end. None of this matters… I want to help you Griffin. But I also want to survive (2022: 218).
And this, of course, underlines the plight of the colonized—including those of us who made our own journeys to the West, to study in its well-endowed universities, on fully-funded scholarships, telling ourselves this was a way to survive, even thrive, that our acting as native informants, translators, weren’t acts of betrayal, or treason…traddutore, traditore!
Griffin in response to Robin’s outburst, outlines Britain’s attempted plans to conquer Afghanistan,
The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have the sepoys fight the Afghans…because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that its better to be a servant of Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because its safe.
Because its stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart (2022: 218).
Fanonian Violence: from Babel to Palestine
The truth of Griffin’s analysis about the world of Empire during the Victorian era, has been borne out over and over again throughout the subsequent centuries of European colonialism and its aftermath. We see how Empire continues to exercise its power through the various stages of neocolonialist violence and corruption en/gendered and encouraged in putatively “independent” postcolonial nations and their leaders by Euro-American imperialism, unleashing a global malaise that endures into our own times.
Indeed, at this very moment in world history, the last surviving white Western settler-colonialist state of Israel, is committing what is widely acknowledged by expert individuals and human rights organizations, as a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. And while the world looks on with horror at daily depredations of the IDF on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, following orders of its colonial master, is attacking its own brothers (and sisters) in the town of Jenin. “Better to be a servant of Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist…And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart” (2022: 218). The price of survival is betrayal. To resist, through violence as means of self-defense, as Gaza’s fate has shown the world, is to risk complete annihilation.
And yet, the novel’s denouement bears out the need for violence as a decolonial strategy that is necessary at particular historical junctures, to jam the cogs of the imperial machine, in pursuit of its ultimate destruction. The transformation of Robin Swift from a reluctant rebel to full-on revolutionary willing to do whatever is necessary to avenge the killing of his friend Ramy and other peers (who perish in a raid on their secret quarters led by the Judas in their close friend group—the sole white British person who they thought was on their side only to be disabused by her betrayal), reflects the arguments made by Frantz Fanon in the chapter “Concerning Violence” in his famous anticolonial tome: The Wretched of the Earth (NY: Grove Press, 1963). From being a “servant of Empire” as Robin had been, he now becomes the Fanonian subject of his own destiny –as does his Haitian friend Victoire (and others who join them in the apocalyptic destruction of the Tower of Babel)—thus instantiating Fanon’s observation that “violence … frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (1963: 94).
Fanon had noted that in the colonial context, the “systemic negation’ of the colonized subject over a sustained period of time forces them to question their identity by asking themselves “[i]n reality, who am I?” (1963: 252)—and we see Robin struggle with this same colonial neurosis throughout the novel.
However, as Jean-Paul Sartre claimed in his preface to Fanon’s book, “the native cures himself of colonial neurosis by thrusting out the settler through force of arms” (1963: 21)– and we see these cathartic effects of violence once the decision to follow that path is taken by Robin and those who come to the same realizations he does. Indeed, we witness these cathartic effects most clearly in the change in Robin’s outlook and behavior, as he grows increasingly more confident about the righteousness of this course of action, no matter the personal costs involved. In his case(and the case of those who choose to remain with him in Babel and decide to destroy it in order to begin the process of jamming Empire’s machinery), the price to end his fear, his neurotic inaction due to his previous acquiescence to colonial ideology, is death, as the tower collapses on him and his fellow rebels. The young Babblers (and a few professors who throw in their lot with them)—bring down the tower (once they realize that the Empire at this juncture will not negotiate with them to prevent war with China). They do so by manipulating the linguistic match-pairs endowed with destructive powers that are engraved on the silver bars stored in the Tower of Babel, an act that only these scholars trained by Oxford in the seductive science of translation, can pull off successfully.
It is fittingly ironic and in sync with a dialectical materialist understanding of history, that the contradictions that threaten to break Robin apart—the double consciousness of being an Englishman and not, that Prof Lovell was his father and not (whom he kills in an act of revenge though he can’t bring himself to admit it, claiming all along it was an accident)—that the Chinese are (as the British claim), a stupid, backwards people whilst recognizing he is himself one of them, that he hated Babel (and all it stood for), yet wanted to remain forever in its embrace—are also the contradictions of Empire itself. As such, their exacerbation becomes the engine of revolution that can hasten its end, especially when (as happens in the novel)—white workers begin to see their connections to the racialized “others” brought in from overseas to fuel the engine of a capitalist colonial state that makes the rich richer and their own lives, poorer. When, in return, the likes of Robin and Victoire begin to acknowledge the realities of exploitation of the working poor of Britain, of Oxford, and, recognizing similarities of oppression despite differences, to throw in their own lot with them in terms of demands for justice, well then, the local working-class revolutionaries erect barricades (reminiscent of Les Miserables)–to protect Robin and his cohort from the army unit sent in by the government to storm the Tower. The barricades last long enough to give them the time they need to put their final, apocalyptic plan into action: destroying the Tower from within, which will jam the machinery of the British Empire and give it pause for self-reflection, for course correction, but barring that—at the very least, delay or defeat its intention to declare war on China in a bid to acquire its silver.
As the multiple ironies of history have shown, today it is China and its “stupid, backwards people” whose power and technological superiority the West in general, fears, as it confronts the loss of its own hegemonic dominance resulting from the self-destructive forces inherent in the contradictions of colonialist capitalism.
The feminist twist to the novel consists of Victoire, the black Haitian scholar in the group of friends around whom the novel revolves—refusing to play the role of martyr and die alongside her compadre Robin. The only one of the group who manages to “escape” to the New World (after their betrayal by Letty, the sole white British woman in their group), she realizes that “Victory is not assured” and recognizes that it has to be urged on by “violence, suffering, martyrs, blood.” Yes, it requires ingenuity, persistence, sacrifice on the part of the oppressed and the colonized—human struggles that must needs coax the contingent nature of history into “making sure everything goes right.” Neither decolonial failure nor the permanence of colonial power are inevitable outcomes!
Indeed—revolution itself “is always unimaginable.” As Victoire realizes, her own past, present, future (the future after all is history-in the-making)–must be reshaped through a drastic overhaul in re-interpreting these histories through the lens of revolution, whose effect, like all revolutions, is to shatter the world as we know it, as she knows it. One such myth that is shattered is that of the Haitian Revolution “as a failed experiment.” As a result of revolutionary ongoing struggles of the Haitian peoples and their allies, Victoire has learned that now—and not just to her, misled and misinformed as she was by her colonial masters in France and then England–but to much of the rest of the world that is moving toward decolonization, the Haitian Revolution is in fact, always already, “a beacon of hope.”
And thus, when Victoire states
The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them….(2022: 510)
she might as well be referring to our own moment of decolonial struggles today, from Haiti, to Sudan, to the Congo,to the ongoing liberation struggle for the decolonization of Gaza, and indeed, of Palestine. On the one hand, we are witnessing masses of humanity and international legal tribunals across the globe demanding justice for Palestine and an end to the genocidal war against them that began 100 years ago, not just after Oct 7, 2023 when the oppressed and imprisoned population of Gaza rose up against their Occupiers, their colonial masters via an attack that instantiated the theory of violence as elaborated by Fanon. On the other hand, we see increasing repression against all those who are standing alongside the Palestinians in their demands for justice, including and especially in academia across the USA, a waning imperial superpower which has revealed the naked truth of its imperialist agenda through its unconditional support of Israel in its genocidal mission against the native Palestinian peoples. In order to maintain and extend white supremacist control over the entire region– an aim that the US shares and, in a sense, inherited from the former European colonial empires once their sunset at the end of WW1—supporting and funding ethnic cleansing and genocide of native colonized peoples becomes a prerequisite.
The only way forward into just futures where annihilation of the human race isn’t a certainty, spurred on by climate change fueled by predatory colonialist, imperialist wars that fuel –and are fueled by—the capitalist, racist,patriarchal war machine—is to choose.
Traveling the pathways to liberation from systemic and interrelated structures of economic, political, racial, gender oppression requires that we choose.
Double consciousness must be abandoned now, in favor of a single, clear vision: we have to choose.
The intellectually seductive call to embrace hybridity, to inhabit the interstitial and thus enjoy the crumbs of Empire, made possible by getting a seat at its table, all the while imagining the power bequeathed by living in a state of sly mimicry—such a postcolonial positionality today feels morally vacuous at best, a depraved resignation to injustice at worst. So, we must choose.
Robin, much like Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, realizes he too must choose:
…he could not go on like this. He could not exist a split man, his psyche constantly erasing and re-erasing the truth. He felt a great pressure in the back of his mind. He felt like he would quite literally burst, unless he stopped being double. Unless he chose (2022: 319).
Robin’s choice proves fatal—he dies, a martyr to the cause of justice. Victoire’s choice, to run rather than embrace martyrdom as a strategy to challenge Empire, even as she runs from one colonial master to the shores of another where she knows she will face many similar challenges as she did in Britain—is, nonetheless, not one of embracing hybridity or mimicry, sly or otherwise. Rather, in recalling an exchange about language, translation and meaning that she had had with another member of the Hermes society, Anthony (a formerly enslaved Barbadian who was killed during the raid in which Letty shot Ramy)—Victoire concludes their conversation on a note of secrecy.
Asked by Anthony if she thought the decolonial mission of the Hermes society had a chance of success, she’d responded with an untranslateable phrase in her native Kreyol, which even Anthony, with his gift for languages, was unable to parse.
When asked what the phrase meant, she had told Anthony it indicated either that the speaker did not know the answer, or did not care to share it. What did the words mean literally? She had winked at Anthony then, and said she would tell him later.
Her final words, then, which conclude the novel–“Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you” (2022:542)–feel like a prescient prophecy, chronicles of a world foretold, on the brink of being born.
A world that cannot rely on the meanings at hand to come into existence.
Between the Spivakian idea of the impossibility of subaltern speech, and the exhortation to secrecy enjoined by Quechuan speaker and Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu as a survival strategy against imperialist vampirism,Victoire’s response in Kreyol to Anthony urges him, and us to choose the path of resistance to the end, a path of struggle she too has chosen unambiguously, despite knowing that victory-victoire—is not assured.
She cannot know what shape that struggle will take. There are so many battles to be fought, so many fights on so many fronts—in India, in China, in the Americas—all linked by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English. She knows only that she will be in it at every turn, will fight until her dying breath. (2022: 541)
The drive “to exploit that which is not white and English” is, of course undertaken with an eye to enrich and absorb all that is not so into the maintenance of white supremacy, and its avatar, the English language, through whose hegemony, colonialist control in the form of cultural imperialism, continues to make babus of us all.
The warning of the novel is clear though, and directed at the powers-that-be, those who wish to maintain control through imposing monolingual, ethnonationalist structures on our beautifully variegated, multiplicitousworld. Just as the mythical (Biblical)—Babel was destroyed by Yahweh to punish mankind’s hubris in building a tower showcasing the strength of linguistic purity and its hegemony—so too, we need to continue our fight for the maintenance and valuation of different languages, customs, peoples, religions, races and genders, challenging the myths of racial and nationalist purity. To co-exist, to keep moving in pursuit of justice, together, for, as Third World feminist Trinh T. Min-ha stated so perfectly many moons ago, “this is not it, this is till not it.” We need, in her words, “new ways of seeing, perceiving, and living in the world.”
La Victoire n’est pas assure—but when it comes, it will surely bear out the beautiful prophetic words of Aime Cesaire, linking decolonial thought and action from his time and place to the 21st century intimations of R.D Kuang—if only we learn to exercise our ability to choose wisely, correctly.
For it is not true that the work of man is
finished,
That we have nothing more to do in the
world,
That we are parasites in this world,
That it is enough for us to walk in step
with the world,
For the work of man is only just
beginning and it remains to conquer all,
The violence entrenched in the recess of
his passion,
And no race holds the monopoly of beauty,
of intelligence, of strength, and,
There is place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.—Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. (First published in 1939)