Amatoritsero Ede

The Nasty picture of Hurricane Dorian

Oscar Wilde wrote, what for the English society of his day, was a ‘wild’ story. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is about a romantic and narcissistic protagonist of the same name. That character is a vain hedonist who makes a Faustian bargain to remain eternally handsome, ageless and without physical or moral blemish, while his portrait, his picture, ages and Gothically degenerates in his stead. Armed with eternal youth, he lives a life of debauchery and incidental cold-blooded murder as a social butterfly and dandy. While his sins, wickedness and sexually wayward life leave no physical or moral mark on him, his picture records every blemish; every personality deficit is automatically and grotesquely inked into and marked on the picture. It is nastily transformed by macabre ageing and ugliness. This story jumps into real-life, however, when it becomes one of the exhibits in the trial of its author for “indecency with other men.” Fiction merges with reality and the work becomes a piece of damning evidence, proving the writer’s ‘assumed’ immorality.

The connection of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamian Islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama recently, to that story is a tenuous one, indeed – if only because their correspondence is in the accidence of ‘naming’ only. In other words, ‘Hurricane Dorian’ invokes ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ Beyond this onomastic coincidence, however, it is possible to make a literary equivalence between both scenarios even though the one event was written by a human hand and the other by nature.

Wilde’s novel left the realm of fiction or the object world to invade and destroy the life of its writer in a gothic unimaginable manner. He was persecuted for being an openly gay man based on the ‘evidence’ of his work as exacerbated by a personal flamboyant lifestyle. It will shock the 21st-century imagination that homosexuality was a social crime in Victorian England. The overnight upending of Wilde’s social position – from respected and celebrated writer to a convict due to absurd laws – forced him into exile in France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal in solidarity with “the criminal classes”, of which he cynically and retrospectively considered himself to be a member.  While it is assumed that he died of meningitis on November 30 of 1900, it is not unimaginable that he actually died of heartbreak and disgrace in Paris. Meningitis would then only have been the final blow. The picture of Dorian Gray was Wilde’s wild personal Hurricane tearing through his life and ravaging the man and destroying a life built on intellection and cerebral activity. He would have contributed more profoundly to English society and Letters, were it not for that one book, which ironically brought him both fame and destruction and eventual death at a mere 46-years-young.

 One could meditate on Hurricane Dorian with the same deep sense of irony that pervaded Wilde’s life and times. ‘Dorian’ – that malevolence – left the natural world of the deep seas into the living rooms of the residents of Abaco and Grand Bahama, taking lives and destroying everything in its wake. It is ironic that what forms the attraction for the scenery, namely the deep blue sea, is what rose up, allied with monster winds and personified in the name, Dorian, to invade homes, tear down roofs, flood and waste the land and generally wreak havoc. The kind of novel nature writes in this instance, full of dangerous beauty like The Picture of Dorian Gray, is one that comes back to accuse humanity of environmental crimes. For our infractions, we are plagued by a plethora of all too frequent environmental disasters such as Hurricane Dorian or the 2004 Tsunami that swept across Asia and rippled across global waters, delivering debris from equator to equator. Such disasters have a global emotional and environmental, if not physical, impacts. This is not just about the Bahamas; it is about all of us because “for the far-removed, there is wailing”, as the poet, Christopher Okigbo, puts it.  Our environmental lapses plumb the earth deeply, make coral reefs groan and sea beds rise. Surely, this season of yet another mourning is a further wake-up call that it is about time that the environment is placed at the forefront of global policy discussions since human activity is increasingly distressing the planet.