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

Robin and Victoire hide in the safe room and use a silver warning beacon to let the rest of Hermes know what happened in London. They then occupy Babel using weapons. They tell their hostages how Babel is complicit in the British Empire’s imperialist exploitation. They give students and faculty who don’t support their cause the option to leave. Robin feels powerful when he realizes that the threat of violence is finally making people listen to him.

Two faculty members and four students stay: Professor Chakravarti, Professor Craft, Ibrahim, Yusef, Juliana, and Meghana. Everyone except for Professor Craft is from a colonized country. Ronin and Victoire crush the blood vials of everyone who leaves. With their occupation, the Oxford Translators’ Revolution comes out into the open.

Over the faculty’s objections, Robin destroys the silver resonance rods that enhance the silver that powers silver goods and machines in England. Without access to the tower and silver maintenance records, Babel scholars cannot maintain silver goods and machines. This leads to a breakdown in even mundane spells like lightening mail parcels. More serious failures lead to deaths in traffic accidents, and a tower at the university collapses. These events show Robin “[h]ow slender, how fragile, the foundations of empire. Take away the centre, and what’s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots” (469).

Some of the occupiers waver when they see these deaths. The Foreign Office sends increasingly urgent telegrams asking them to surrender, offering amnesty if they do. When the Oxford militia and Babel students attack the tower, Robin convincingly argues that the show of force means people are taking them seriously. The tower defenses Robin creates are so destructive that Victoire realizes Robin is more focused on perpetrating violence than survival.

The entire town of Oxford and cities around it cease to function, revealing the cost of Babel’s intentional effort to make people dependent on silver. Despite the anger of the townspeople closest to them, Robin and the rebels gain support from Abel Goodfellow, a working-class man who sees the silver industrial revolution as the end of the working class. He sets up barricades around the tower to slow down the inevitable arrival of the army.

Westminster Bridge, the major thoroughfare into London, is likely to fall when the silver in it fails. The revolutionaries face a conundrum: Do they let the bridge fall and kill many people, or do they intervene to save the bridge? Robin puts the matter to a vote. He argues that stopping the bridge failure is also a “failure of nerve […] Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option” (497). Professor Chakravarti rejects Robin’s argument because he believes that the only righteous war is one in “which violence is applied as a last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause” (498). Robin is after revenge, and he expels the professor from the tower.

Open war breaks out in the Oxford streets. With the British Army’s arrival, Robin and the remaining revolutionaries accept that they are under siege. People begin to isolate themselves, pair off, or work on projects. Robin tells Victoire that Letty killed Ramy because the thought that “a brown man refuse[d] an English rose” was too great a humiliation for her to bear (503). Victoire shows him the daguerreotype of their cohort and suggests that, through some twisted reasoning, Letty likely feels she was the one betrayed. Robin believes his life ended when Ramy and the others in the Old Library died, but Victoire disagrees; those who died believed there was life after the revolution.

Ibrahim begins a written history of the revolt because he wants to make sure their history appears in the archives that determine what counts as history. Robin admits that “Hermes had operated like the best of clandestine societies, erasing its history even as it changed Britain’s. No one would celebrate their achievements. No one would even know what they were” (504) unless someone wrote their history. Yusef, a student studying law, drafts a ceasefire agreement that outlines how the five of them in the tower might survive when the revolt ends and the empire falls.

This chapter is one sentence—“Westminster Bridge fell” (510)—and a footnote that is a facsimile of a newspaper clipping. The quotes in the newspaper article capture what it was like to witness and survive this epoch-making event. The Oxford Translators’ Revolution is now part of the historical archive.

The war in Oxford town escalates when the army kills a girl bringing food through the barricades. The townspeople turn on the army. Abel tells Robin that the uprising is effectively over. Although there are veterans among the strikers, the townspeople and workers combined are not an army. They don’t know how to engage in sustained battle, and the army will now move against civilians without restraint. Goodfellow plans to withdraw and can take the rebels in the tower to safety if they leave immediately. Abel makes Robin put the decision to leave to a vote. Before the rebels can talk, Letty arrives at the tower under a white flag of truce.

Robin is surprised that he wants to protect Letty instead of killing her, but he realizes that Letty’s identity—a beautiful, white, English woman—means that she will be seen as innocent when all this is over (unlike him and Victoire). When Letty explains that the British Empire will stop at nothing to regain Babel, Robin concedes that she is right. Victoire rejects Letty’s argument that colonized people can work within the system to change things. Letty warns them of a coming all-out assault at dawn. The rebels have until then to surrender.

Robin concludes that they should destroy the tower and themselves rather than surrender. He can use a match-pair for “translation” on the silver in the resonance rods, which will start a chain reaction that will spoil all of the silver in England and any goods, armies, and weapons powered by that silver. Any person doing the silversmithing will die, but that is the only way to win against the British.

Victoire understands why he thinks suicide is their only move: Oppressed people have to die before their oppressors can see them as noble and worthy of pity. The deaths of the colonized are “thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights [the] inhumanity” (524) of the British. The paradox is that revolutionaries fight for a future they cannot live to see if it takes dying to win.

Robin loves Victoire. He tells her to be both “selfish” and “brave” (526) by choosing life over martyrdom.

Victoire and Yusef escape with Abel Goodfellow. Robin, Professor Craft, Ibrahim, Meghana, and Juliana invoke the match-pair for “translate,” knowing that they will die. In his final moments, Robin’s life flashes before his eyes. He concludes that finding the Adamic language was impossible because “language was just difference” (535)—the difference between the self and every other person. Ramy once told him that Robin was a good translator because he was a good listener. Robin got that translating was really about hearing “the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone understands” (535). Robin’s last image is of his mother calling his name.

This chapter is from Victoire’s perspective. Victoire’s liberation was hard won. She was the child of a Haitian domestic worker in the house of Henri Christophe, a revolutionary turned self-proclaimed king in Haiti who died by suicide to avoid a coup. Christophe’s family and Victoire’s mother took refuge in France. When Victoire’s mother died, the family sold Victoire into slavery (although they had no legal right to enslave her). Despite her young age, Victoire did back-breaking labor for the large family. She also showed an aptitude for languages, so much so that her master, a language professor, wrote to the Babel Institute about her. Luck and grit gave her physical freedom; when the professor died, she found the reply from Babel and ran away to enroll.

Her “true liberation” (539) came when Anthony Ribben recruited her for the Hermes Society. Now she knows that revolution is hard because it is “always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential” and that “terrifies” colonizers (540). Victoire has the names of three members of the Hermes Society, and she intends to make her way to America.

The novel closes in uncertainty. Victoire doesn’t know what will happen next. She recalls telling Anthony as much, using a Kreyòl idiom that captures how much “I don’t know” means being comfortable with not knowing what happens next.