Is Tragedy the Universal Language?

Tragedy and trauma are things that we often talk about in hushed whispers, making sure we portray more of a positive side of ourselves rather than one that has been dragged down by X, Y, or Z. I’m not sure about you, but usually, when I hear tragedy, I think of two things: inexplicable horribleness or Shakespearean tragedies such as Romeo + Juliet. As we get deeper and deeper into the COVID-19 outbreak, something that has impacted you and me and everyone, I have noticed something about the impact that it has had on us outside of a medical perspective. Growing up, we have been taught very “pretty” ideas such as the idea that love is a universal language, that faith is a universal language or that music is a universal language. I think, as adults, it’s our responsibility to acknowledge the severity of some things that happen to us and to look at tragedy and trauma not as inconveniences, but rather as positions in our life that have required us to grow up and change. These last few weeks have really instilled in me a belief that perhaps the universal language isn’t as pretty as love or faith or music, but I think that it may be something a little darker. I think that tragedy is the universal language, it’s the thing that unites us and highlights the humanity we all possess in times of trouble. 

Right now, and I mean right now, I am looking at the Worldometer that pronounces that on planet Earth there are 710,950 coronavirus cases. This is accurate as of March 29, 2020, at 2:40pm, and of those cases, there have been 33,553 deaths. Every time we turn on the television, go on Twitter or any other social media platform, we are bombarded by articles or video clips about COVID-19. Sports have been canceled, the Olympics have been postponed, music festivals have either been canceled or postponed, concerts have been rescheduled for many artists. There is nothing else to watch but the impending “doom” of this virus. There is nothing else the nation’s leaders are thinking about besides this. There is nothing else that healthcare workers are thinking about besides this. We are now a nation living in a sense of crippling fear about what this virus could do to us, our family members, and our fellow citizens. If you’re like me, you had to literally flee a country at the age of 20 with the fear that you would not be let back in. We are now locked inside our houses, with the occasional trip outside to walk our dogs or grab essentials from the grocery store. Our lives have literally stopped in their tracks. What we took as normal, what we took for granted, is now gone. 

When I was informed that NYU was requiring us to leave Paris, I was heartbroken and due to my anger and sadness, I was incredibly selfish. I thought not in color, but in black and white about how this impacted me and what I lost from it. What I didn’t take into account until I was at JFK waiting for my connecting flight to Pittsburgh, when I saw a bunch of other college students waiting to go home too, was that I was not the only person who lost an experience. Thousands of other students were in the same boat as I was and for some reason, even without knowing a thing about these people, I couldn’t help but think that we were all in this together. We were all tired and we were all fallen fighters in this battle against a novel virus. It’s through this feeling that I firmly believe that tragedy that reaches a global scale, is the universal language and the universal unifier amongst people. These were people, again, that I knew nothing about yet felt like was a part of my imaginary team during this crisis. 

When I left France, the coronavirus was not necessarily prevalent in New York, but shortly after my arrival back to the States, that changed and it changed drastically. This brought about an even deeper connection amongst NYU students, I believe, as they were not only thrown out of housing (I said it, I said it and I meant it) by the university with 48 hours notice, but they were also losing the rest of their year and being required to go home and take classes through a webcam. As a student at NYU, I know the value of going to school physically in Manhattan. I know the importance of being amongst your peers. And as much as I hate to say it, I know the importance of suffering in Bobst hours on end. I miss it, actually. For the amount of jokes we make and the issues we may have with NYU, the campus is our home and the city is where we have chosen to live for these four years, if not more. To lose that is heart-wrenching in its own way. We as a collective, acknowledge and sympathize with each student’s suffering. Some students have to return back to abusive homes, some students have lost their own safe space, some students don’t have the necessary funds to move back under such short notice, some students had jobs that they relied on in the city, some students may have just started really getting into the groove of things. Whatever the situation, we sympathize. This brought us together not only as a student body, but as a team. If one can not fight for themselves, we fight for them, and we listen to their plight. 

Tragedy doesn’t speak a language. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, put it best: this virus doesn’t have a passport. It has a mission and that is something we as a whole must fight together, not divided. We don’t hear tragedy, for it doesn’t speak. We may ‘see’ tragedy, but what we really do is feel it and the aftermath of its daily marathon. As global citizens, we don’t listen to the same music or practice the same faith or have the same beliefs on love. As global citizens, we are impacted by tragedy in extremely similar ways, and tragedy is the one thing that we all understand and we all sympathize with. Tragedy doesn’t speak a language, but we do, and when it comes to tragedy, we all have the same thought: together, we will overcome this.