In recent weeks, the media in Kenya and beyond have taken to referring to the attack upon Westgate Mall on September 21st, 2013, as “the tragic events at Westgate”. At time of writing, it is believed that 67 innocent people were killed by up to five gunmen, who also died.
As a writer, I believe that words should be used wisely. They should also be used correctly. And it is both unwise and incorrect to refer to Westgate as a “tragedy”.
In common usage, a tragedy is an event which is beyond human control. On an individual level, tragedies include car crashes and cancer. On a mass scale, tragedies can be things like earthquakes, fires, tsunamis.
Synonyms for tragedy gravitate around disaster, mishap, calamity, misfortune.
Westgate was none of these things. It was not a tragedy.
It was an atrocity.
Tragedy is passive: it removes the guilt from the perpetrators and rates the event alongside a natural disaster. Atrocity allows for no such ambiguity. It asserts causality. It points a finger of blame.
If Westgate is a mere tragedy, then we might as well call it an Act of God. Which is exactly what its sick perpetrators believed it was.
For writers, tragedy takes on an even more loaded definition. Because in literary terms, a tragedy is a very definite thing. It is the story of the enactment of justice upon someone who deserves it.
Which is also exactly what its sick perpetrators believed it was.
By calling Westgate—or any act of terrorism—a tragedy, we are playing into the warped, twisted narrative of the terrorists: people whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they live inside a semi-fictional world, where shooting families out shopping is a righteous vengeance, an Act of God, and that they, the tools of retribution, sacrifice themselves in a noble cause.
So please, can we stop calling Westgate a tragedy? Let’s call it what it was. An atrocity.
