un-anchoring.
In which I transfer some (edited) thoughts from my tumblr on the nature of Robin Swift's amorphous (yet clearly demarcated) identity in R.F. Kuang’s ‘Babel’ to my audience on Substack! Mild spoilers ahead.
Robin's fate is sealed the moment he chooses his name.
When Robin's mother dies, she says his name - his real name - one last time. It's only two syllables, but he'll never hear it again; Professor Lovell decides it's not worth keeping because the English tongue cannot pronounce it. It's in this portion of the book that Kuang establishes one of the first instances of language as a means of wielding power: namely, the power to erase.
The scene in which Robin chooses his 'English' name encapsulates his relationship to identity for the rest of the book: he is simultaneously disconnected (or "un-anchored", as Kuang puts it on page 15) from his culture and 'othered' by it while living in English society, no matter how hard he tries to assimilate. Lovell makes Robin drop his own family's surname on page 12 (a name that even we cannot know), effectively cutting him off from ever re-tracing his own ancestry and lineage. Interestingly, part of why Lovell doesn't value Robin's surname is because to the English, a name that isn't linked to status and capital in the Western world means nothing. It is not worth uttering.
Even more interesting: Lovell doesn't let Robin take his last name either, even after Robin realizes that he's his biological father. Instead, he forces Robin to choose a random English name from a fiction novel, his ‘English-ness’ a performance through and through. He lies on page 10 that Robin has no family, and that his father is "unknown". Lovell wants Robin to remove all markers of his Asian identity from his name (aside from his language, useful and ripe for exploitation) while simultaneously never claiming his son as his own despite his dependency on him.
Robin is subsequently plunged into this odd liminal space in which he’s only allowed to participate in English society conditionally—floating on the shaky raft of an elite education—while also severed from his roots in Canton. His identity as a result morphs into this ambiguous thing that is constantly in flux relative to how serviceable he is to whiteness. The choice to make him literally half white and half Asian as opposed to, say, a fully Chinese man trying to assimilate makes this especially poignant; at no point does he have the ability to opt out of this constant state of limbo that the imposed construct of racial identity puts him in. You cannot change the face that your parents gave you. Robin—and perhaps Kuang did this intentionally—exists during a time when diasporic and mixed identities are likely still being formed and conceptualized, which means he wouldn't have much access to communities of people in similar situations except by happenstance. With the exception of Griffin, he's basically alone here.
It's during the scene where Robin first sets off on that ship to England that I'm reminded of what happened to the identity of enslaved Africans once they got through the Middle Passage: they and their descendants would never be able to fully re-integrate into their cultures of origin, but would also be permanently 'other' in the eyes of American society, relegating them to a constant state of place-lessness. An un-anchoring, if you will.
(Obviously these are not the same, but a similar thing is happening in terms of cultural belonging and space.)
Circling back to the footnote on page 11 that quotes the book Robin took his name from, its placement within the book turns it into a question asked of the very narrative itself: "I killed Cock Robin. Who saw him die?”
For the entirety of 'Babel', we see Robin struggle for the rest of his short life against the implications of his name and the circumstances that brought him to it, none of them his choice. I think the most tragic part of Robin's story is that Lovell decided what he was going to be long before the book even begins. Can you imagine being shoved onto a subway train or some other moving vehicle by invisible hands, with no knowledge of your destination or power to make it stop? Robin's decision to stray from that pre-determined path leaves him with (at least in his eyes) no other viable way to exist in this world. Once he decides to stop participating in the imperialist machine, by the time he commits patricide and crosses the point of no return, neither England nor Canton has a place for him.
Long before he chooses to opt out of living in a constant state of subjection at the end of the book, Lovell subjects Robin to what I think can be interpreted as its own kind of death. No one realizes that he's done it until it's too late. Robin's become a ship permanently lost at sea with nothing left to anchor him and with no destination in sight. The other characters never really seem to fully understand the extent of the loss he has experienced because he is the only character other than Griffin who has been 'un-anchored' in such a specific way. Re-reading the book knowing what his fate will be, then, turns what initially feels like an epic fantasy adventure into the lovely tragedy that it is.
Who saw him die?
[Here is the much less polished original post, if you'd like to read it!]