<\/p>\n
Oscar Wilde wrote, what for the English society of his day, was a \u2018wild\u2019 story. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em>, 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\u2019s \u2018assumed\u2019 immorality.<\/p>\n The connection of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the Bahamian Islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama recently, to that story is a tenuous one, indeed \u2013 if only because their correspondence is in the accidence of \u2018naming\u2019 only. In other words, \u2018Hurricane Dorian\u2019 invokes \u2018The Picture of Dorian Gray<\/em>.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n Wilde’s novel left the realm of fiction or the object<\/em> 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 \u2013 from respected and celebrated writer to a convict due to absurd laws \u2013 forced him into exile in France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Goal<\/em> in solidarity with \u201cthe criminal classes\u201d, 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<\/em> was Wilde\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n One could meditate on Hurricane Dorian with the same deep sense of irony that pervaded Wilde’s life and times. ‘Dorian’ \u2013 that malevolence \u2013 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<\/em> of Dorian Gray<\/em>, 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bruce Gilley and the Language of Stupid<\/strong>
\nAfrica has been in trouble since 1441 when the Portuguese sailors, Ant\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alves and Nuno Trist\u00e3o, “threw down rusted anchor” in Cabo Branco on the coast of modern Mauritania, went on land, collared 12 Africans like wild game, decked them down the rotten holes of a pirate ship\u00a0 and chain-ganged them into Portugal as chattel slaves. The captured men could have been specimen of some hibernating genus to be quickened into brutal medieval ‘new-world’\u00a0 life in a culturing of slaps, kicks, branding with hot iron like cattle, lashes from horsewhips; slave auctions and unpaid back-breaking donkey’s labour in inclement weather for 400 years.\u00a0In other words, those initial kidnapped 12 were articles of ‘the wicked trade.’ That was terrorism at its most bestial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editorial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3930,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/3930"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}