Language and translation become tools of the colonialist project, warped into weapons to violate and take, take, take. Thus, silver-workers exhaust the magic of languages by using it for the pleasures of the wealthy and for maintenance of the Crown’s military might, rather than providing for the very people these languages were taken from. Silver-working is not an infinite resource as a language is spoken by more and more people, it loses some of its untranslatability. Native speakers, like Robin, are stolen from their motherlands and trained at Babel to then be dispatched back to these countries to negotiate for the Crown. Translators manipulate treaties, trade agreements, and other legal documents in favor of the Empire. In Babel, language is a resource stolen from the mouths of native speakers. In this (un)naming, we see the first act of language as violence. The boy is never able to tell us his Chinese name instead, he is asked to pick an English one, one that would allow him to acclimate more easily to British society and, eventually, to Babel. Silver-working draws its power from untranslatability, or the way some words in one language can never be fully expressed in another. Not too far from this center is Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation, or simply Babel: the center of silver-working, a forceful magic that materializes as words etched onto silver bars. This is the heart of the British Empire, a city molded by the hands of powerful white men who can move the fate of countries like gods under the guise of saviorism, globalism, and free trade. A boy, plucked from the cholera-infested dead of Canton, China, is whisked across the ocean and into nineteenth-century London. We are brought into Babel’s world from the very first page. Kuang forces us to walk the fine line between reality and the speculative, and we grow more and more unsettled as Babel’s world begins to bleed into ours.

Based upon the history of British colonialism, diasporic identity, the power of language, and Kuang’s own experiences with racism at Oxford, Babel manages to build a magical world of its own while still being grounded in the very real effects institutions based in white supremacy have on marginalized bodies. Here, what is imagined is far from escapism. Kuang’s latest fantasy book-and yet it is so much more than a fantasy.

Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution is R.F.

Babel rf kuang