my brother's keeper (poem from here)

Girls when translation is always an act of violence, but it can also be an act of love

"The Undergrad Cohort"

I finished Babel in about 2 weeks and it's left a gaping hole in my heart I need to patch with fanart.

Uncleaned scanned sketch below.

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The Fallen Angel of Babel 📜✒️🪽

LOVE BABEL BY RF KUANG!! I drew Robin Swift as the fallen angel painting!!

brothers in crime

some ramys

Griffin's similarities with Lovell make me sick. He sounds like his father more often than not. It's almost like he looked upto his father at some point of his life. But that's the point right? The world needed both their qualities at the end. The world needed both Lovell's self centred, logical mind and Griffin's violence and Robin had to carry both their qualities in his softer heart to carry on. The process of Lovell leaving a mark on Griffin and then Griffin leaving a mark on Robin is almost prophetic. Robin almost transformed info Griffin in his last days. It's a complete cycle.

"The days had not yet come when Ramy wore Victoire's sloppily knitted scarves with pride, when Robin learned exactly how long Ramy liked his tea steeped so he could have it ready when he inevitably came to the Buttery late from his Arabic tutorial"

Ramy has my whole heart I love him sm🥹🫶

I finished Babel last week and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. So, here’s an animatic about Griffin. MAJOR SPOILERS HERE!!

Babel Spoilers!!!

Been thinking a lot about Letty Price and her inability to comprehend how the act of Robin, Victoire and Ramy standing up and joining a resistance against Babel was so integral to their identities and experiences as POC and scholars in Britain.

How could they hate and do this to a nation that gave them so much? That gave them literature and translation, education and funding and the ability to expand their minds. How could they turn their backs on that?

She could not conceive that they had been given these opportunities, but at every turn they were disrespected and mistreated for who they were. Given rewards and treats and opportunities with the consolation that yes “you are lesser than” but don’t worry we can beat the ethnic out of you. And to hang that over you, it is only natural to form a twisted sense of self-worth contingent on the whily and abusive whims of their oppressor. The constant need to prove that they were worthy of acknowledgment, of this position. The anger and twisted gratuity for the opportunity, but injustice in being used for their minds and their abilities by an empire refusing to acknowledge them as humans, let alone equals. Stolen bodies and stolen lands.

And Letty, her only framework of suffering was the coddling of a girl in an upperclass white family and the restrictions of conservative social constructs. That while hindering and discouraging, were not a question of life and death or of humanity, but of simple opportunity and intelligence. And looking through these eyes, how could she comprehend such a thing?

“Words tell stories. Specifically, the history of those words - how they came into use, and how their meaning morphed into what they mean today - tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact.”

― R.F. Kuang, Babel: An Arcane History

Inst @mchernovart

my favorite thing about babel is how nerdy the characters are,,,schoolwork is so fundamental to their existence that literally everything is homework to them. being a spy? covering up a murder?? overthrowing an imperialist empire??? haha yeah man its just like doing a big assignment

Can I mention the brilliance the RF Kuang did with Robin Swift’s name? No, not “Robin Swift,” but his original one. We’ll never know what his original name was. I was waiting, all 500+ pages, and on the last one with Robin’s POV, we get nothing.

But he gets his name back. After all his suffering, I’m inclined to believe that he deserves it.

哥哥

babel annotations - pt. 1