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.
She’s not sure where she’s headed now. She has some envelopes in her coat pocket: parting words of advice from Anthony and the code names of several contacts. Friends in Mauritius, in the Seychelles, and in Paris. Perhaps one day she’ll head back to France, but she’s not quite ready yet. She knows there’s a base in Ireland, though at the moment she’d quite like just to be off the continent. Perhaps one day she’ll go home and see, with her own eyes, the historical impossibility of free Haiti. Right now she’s boarding a ship to America, where people like her are still not free, because it was the first vessel that she could book passage on, and because she needed to get out of England as quickly as she could.
She has the letter from Griffin that Robin never opened. Meanwhile she’s read it so many times she’s memorized it. She knows three names – Martlet, Oriel, and Rook. She can see in her mind’s eye the final sentence, scrawled before the signatures like an afterthought: We’re not the only ones.
She doesn’t know who these three are. She doesn’t know what this sentence means. She’ll find out, one day, and the truth will dazzle and horrify her. But for now they are only lovely syllables that signify all sorts of possibilities, and possibilities – hope – are the only things she can cling to now.
She has silver lining her pockets, silver in the inseams of her dress, so much silver on her person that she feels stiff and heavy when she moves. Her eyes are swollen from tears, her throat sore with stifled sobs. She has the faces of her dead friends engraved in her memory. She keeps imagining their last moments: their terror, their pain as the walls came crumbling down around them.
She does not, will not let herself think of her friends as they were, alive and happy. Not Ramy, torn down in his prime; not Robin, who brought down a tower upon himself because he couldn’t think of a way to keep on living. Not even Letty, who remains alive; who, if she knows Victoire lives too, will hunt her to the ends of the earth.
Letty, she knows, cannot allow her to roam free. Even the idea of Victoire is a threat. It threatens the core of her very being. It is proof that she is, and always was, wrong.
She won’t let herself grieve that friendship, as true and terrible and abusive as it was. There will come a time for grief. There will come many nights on the voyage when the sadness is so great it threatens to tear her apart; when she regrets her decision to live; when she curses Robin for placing this burden on her, because he was right: he was not being brave, he was not choosing sacrifice. Death is seductive. Victoire resists.
She cannot weep now. She must keep moving. She must run, as fast as she can, without knowing what is on the other side.
She has no illusions about what she will encounter. She knows she will face immeasurable cruelty. She knows her greatest obstacle will be cold indifference, born of a bone-deep investment in an economic system that privileges some and crushes others.
But she might find allies. She might find a way forward.
Anthony called victory an inevitability. Anthony believed the material contradictions of England would tear it apart, that their movement would succeed because the revels of the Empire were simply unsustainable. This, he argued, was why they had a chance.
Victoire knows better.
Victory is not assured. 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.
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 together by the same drive to exploit that which is not white and English. She knows only that she will be in it at every unpredictable turn, will fight until her dying breath.
‘Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’ she’d told Anthony once, when he’d first asked her what she thought of Hermes, if she thought they might succeed.
He’d tried his best to parse Kreyòl with what he knew of French, then he’d given up. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘At least, we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’
‘And what’s it literally mean?’
She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.’
Acknowledgements
Babel is about infinite worlds of languages, cultures, and histories – many of which I do not know – and its writing would not have been possible without the friends who shared their knowledge with me. Many, many thanks are in order:
First, to Peng Shepherd, Ehigbor Shultz, Farah Naz Rishi, Sarah Mughal, and Nathalie Gedeon for helping me ensure that Robin, Ramy, and Victoire were written with detail and compassion. To Caroline Mann and Allison Resnick for their Classics expertise; to Sarah Forssman, Saoudia Ganiou, and De’Andre Ferreira for their help with translations; and to my dear professors at Yale – in particular Jing Tsu, Lisa Lowe, and Denise Ho – for shaping my thinking about coloniality, post-coloniality, and the bearing of language on power.
I am supported by the most wonderful teams at Harper Voyager on both sides of the pond. Thank you to my editors, David Pomerico and Natasha Bardon; as well as to Fleur Clarke, Susanna Peden, Robyn Watts, Vicky Leech, Jack Renninson, Mireya Chiriboga, Holly Rice-Baturin, and DJ DeSmyter.
Thank you to the artists who made Babel look the way it does: Nico Delort, Kimberly Jade McDonald, and Holly Macdonald.
Thank you also to Hannah Bowman, without whom none of this would be possible, and the entire team at Liza Dawson Associates – especially Havis Dawson, Joanne Fallert, Lauren Banka, and Liza Dawson.
Thank you to Julius Bright-Ross, Taylor Vandick, Katie O’Nell, and the Vaults & Garden cafe, who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable. And thank you to the New Haven homies – Tochi Onyebuchi, Akanksha Shah, and James Jensen – for the pizzas and the laughs. All hail the Great Egg.
Thank you to Tiff and Chris for helping run Coco’s Cocoa, a most wonderful interdimensional, magical dog-owned café at which most of this manuscript was written.
Thank you to Bennett, who was the best company I could have asked for during that long, lonely, terrible year in which Babel came together, and whose counsel shaped so many details of this story. He would like everyone to know that he named the book, as well as the Hermes Society, for while I have a sense for the literary, he has a sense for the awesome.
Finally, thank you to Mom and Dad, to whom I owe everything.
About the Author
REBECCA F. KUANG is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award–nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the novel Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
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