Tadesse Did Not Merit Victimhood

As Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Joe Harper stood in the back of the church listening to their own funeral sermons, they heard the pastor draw "such pictures of the graces, the winning ways and the rare promise of the lost lads" that everyone present "felt a pang that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys."

There might be far fewer suicides if we did not, as a society, harbor the collective fantasy that Mark Twain plays out so effectively here: that we can attend our own funerals and bask in the sanitized images of ourselves that inevitably emerge after our deaths. If we could get it through our heads that death is the end, the final and irrevocable cessation of consciousness--that there is no grand curtain call where everyone will be sorry and we will be able to revel in having "showed them"--perhaps we would not be so quick to volunteer for it.

Two memorial services were conducted at Harvard last May. One was for Trang Ho, a 20-year old Dunster resident murdered in her dorm room as she slept. The other was for Sinedu Tadesse, the perpetrator of the bizarre murder-suicide which claimed Ho's life. Those of you who left Cambridge soon afterward may not be aware that the bill for Tadesse's memorial service (in addition to Ho's) was footed by none other than Harvard University. Let's immediately dismiss the financial issue--the cost was peanuts to Harvard and nothing or practically nothing to any student. But the fact of Harvard's having paid sends some very interesting messages.

There was a time when suicides were not permitted ceremonious burial--they were indeed dumped in shallow graves at crossroads, their names pronounced taboo. Surely this custom evolved in part out of a desire to dissuade potential suicides from believing they would be celebrated in death. Today, of course, we realize that there exist' legitimate reasons why an individual might wish to terminate his or her life; we also know that mental illness sometimes induces a person to self-destruct. So, for the most part, we afford the same respects to suicides as we do to anyone else who has died. We do so even realizing that we are in some respect rewarding them for devastating the lives of loved ones and providing an example to others that says, "All you need to do is die."

I am willing to go along with this sort of thing for the benefit of friends and family. I am even willing to help pay for it because I believe that we, as a society, have a need to bury and honor our dead. But my charity (ideological and financial) ends abruptly when the person in question has felt the need to deprive another human being of her life in the process. Let's not avoid the issue here--regardless of what Tadesse may have done to herself after the fact, she brutally murdered Ho. As a result of her decision and her actions, there is no longer a person named Trang Ho.

If Tadesse had not hanged herself, Middlesex county would right now be gearing itself up for its trial of the decade. There would be outrage at the death of a young woman who had achieved so much in the face of adversity and who looked forward to a life-time of service to the community as a physician. There would be demands that justice be served on the criminal who ended it all. Instead, Tadesse is spoken of with pity--a victim to be memorialized rather than a wrongdoer to be punished.

From the outset, Harvard treated the murder-suicide as a case of two victims, rather than a victim and a perpetrator. It seems as though Tadesse was never referred to using the active voice: signs, newspapers, and official statements all spoke of "the tragedy that occurred at Dunster" or "the two women who died at Harvard." It was as though a tornado had swept through Dunster killing two innocent victims.

The elevation of Tadesse to the status of official victim was continued efficiently by the national press, which came out with images of Tadesse as a culturally disenfranchised foreigner, overtaxed by the evils of Ivy-League stress and pre-med competition. Harvard's student presses churned out expository writing papers on these topics, along with attacks on the advising system which, they maintained, should somehow have seen this coming.

The fact is, victimhood is a very valuable status to hold these days. We seem to be more defined by what has happened or been done to us than by what we have achieved. Television talk-shows provide 15 minutes of fame to an endless parade of molestees, abusees, 12-steppers and indeed anyone else who can make us feel inadequate by virtue of having suffered more than we. As they share their pain and are applauded by the studio audience, we are bombarded with the message that victimhood = fame + recognition, and since we have also been taught that fame + recognition = importance we must conclude that the best way to become important is to become a victim of something.

So let's take another look at Tadesse's situation. She may well have felt unimportant--by most accounts she had few close friends and did not seem to fit well into campus life. So the only way to achieve importance was though becoming a victim, and unfortunately, Tadesse didn't have much going for her in that department. She was on a full scholarship to one of the world's most prestigious universities, en route to a career in medicine. She was a graduate of an international school in Ethiopia, and, let's face it, in one of the worlds' poorest countries only the wealthiest of families could possibly have afforded to send a daughter there.

So she had to achieve importance through more active means. It is possible she sought notoriety through her actions--some believe that, in an act of twisted vanity, she sent photos of herself to both The Crimson and The Globe more than a week before the attack occurred. Surely glamorizing one's own posthumous press photos is only a variation on the own-funeral fantasy. In any case, she no doubt hoped and expected that roommate-kills-roommate-at-Harvard would be big news. She was right: dead by eight AM, coast-to-coast on CNN by nine. Though I was not more than a few thousand feet down the river when the attack occurred, I heard about it first 45 minutes later from my roommate's cousin in California.

One cannot fault the national press too much for its coverage of the story. Murder sells magazines, as does negative coverage of Harvard; one need only look at the coverage of the Gina Grant fiasco to observe that. One cannot even wholly fault the public for the ease with which it played into Tadesse's scheme to go out as Cambridge's most celebrated victim--it is too much a part of our culture.

But I would have hoped that Harvard would be above it all. Like it or not, as the nation's best-known university, Harvard occupies the position of intellectual standard-bearer for millions of people. For the university whose professors appear everywhere from "Nova" to "Ann Landers" to provide the same honors to a murderer as to her victim is not only an insult to the family and friends of Trang Ho, it is downright irresponsible. It perpetuates the message that anything is forgivable, so long as you yourself are a victim.

To ship Tadesse's body back to her family was a charitable and practical gesture on Harvard's part. But to provide the memorial service that Tadesse doubtless envisioned with glee seems to give the seal of approval to self-glorifying murder-suicides. If "Hard Copy" or "Inside Edition" wants to give this approval, it is regrettable, but to be expected. What is inexcusable is that the seal reads veritas. Douglas R. Miller '96