Hurricane Love and passion lampoon

Sep 17, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
Fictional romance is a diversion from reality, and comedy a cure for distress. These last few weeks

reality hit home, and distress turned to destruction, displacement and death. The cyclonic storms that blasted the Caribbean and south-eastern United States were serious – nothing to laugh about – unless of course there is some redeeming aspect to doing so.
There is if you believe, like American theologian/writer Conrad Hyers, that “Humor is not the opposite of seriousness; humor is the opposite of despair… a stubborn refusal to give tragedy the final say.”
There is now much despair- from Barbuda, across the northern Caribbean, to Florida and Texas, and I have no intention of trivializing the disaster. But you can’t beat Mother Nature (Why Mother and not Brother or Sister; maybe Mother-in-law?) and you certainly don’t want to join her, especially in such destructive mode.
We can’t do much to mitigate her wrath, and we don’t want to give her the satisfaction of rehashing the victim count, so what’s left? Romanticize her and her agents of animus? Why not!
There are many precedents for what can be called ‘dark’ humour amidst tragedy. In probably the most well-researched and documented atrocity – the Jewish Holocaust, John Morreall, an Emeritus Professor and founder of the International Society for Humor Studies, recalls that humor in the ghettos and death camps served as a survival mechanism and kept many from going insane.
For example, in one ghetto with rampant food shortage, victims made fun of themselves: “Before the war we ate ducks and walked like horses; now we eat horses and waddle like ducks”.
Closer to home there was Jamaican Lovindeer’s 1988 hit ‘Wild Gilbert’ which poked fun at the hurricane that slammed Jamaica that year? The singer told a Gleaner reporter that it was a feel-good song in the midst of disaster.
“After you go through that and survive, you want to celebrate; it’s not woe, woe.” he declared. This was after the storm, a Category 5 ogre, had wrought havoc in the Caribbean and Mexico, killed 318 people and caused over US$7 billion in damage. In Jamaica alone it killed over 200 people and left half a million homeless.
Though he didn’t fictionize it, Lovindeer looked at the ‘lighter’ side of its impact just days after it struck, when he sang of his satellite dish taking off ‘like a flying saucer’ and his roof migrating ‘without a visa.’ It was a huge hit (pun if you like) underscoring the mixture of humour and resilience that typify how many people have dealt with mind-numbing tragedies over time. Bad news can depress, and depression can kill. So here’s my sanitized version of what happened over the past three weeks.
Hurricanes are typically brainless one-eyed creatures with mostly emotions (or as they facetiously call them ‘sea-motions’) to guide their short, erratic lives. Their bodies range from small and compact to huge and ungainly, but most are deceptively powerful. With enormous appetites, they are full of themselves, gulping prodigious quantities of water and spewing great bellyfulls of hot air. Don’t cross their paths. They are beasts, whose life journey is a one-track trek by ocean and sea, but with their destination and inevitable demise usually over land. Nevertheless, we try to humanise them by giving them our names and gender. And that’s where the trouble starts.
They feel that they’re human; at least human enough to do what male and female humans do – have relationships. But they never seem to get close enough for real intimacy. Frustration is a necessary consequence, followed by anger, and they vent their feelings in sound and fury. Although there has been no precedent for such a relationship, they keep pursuing it. A brief, tempestuous affair, they argue, is better than none at all.
So there was this handsome guy named Harvey, big and strong. He had been born in the Atlantic Ocean (not that far from Guyana) and had grown rapidly. He knew that he had but a short time to show off his strength and hoped against hope that some admiring damsel would take notice.
As he composed himself and roared between the northern coast of South America and the Caribbean islands, he soaked up the warmth of the Caribbean Sea and set his sights on the equally embracing Gulf of Mexico. But had he looked back, and a little to the right, he would have seen hot on his trail the voluptuous Irma who just days before had been a slim Cape Verdean wench but had since grown to more robust and alluring stature. She’d heard of heartthrob Harvey and decided to ‘try a thing’ as we locals say.
It however quickly became evident that the chase would be a futile one; she was just too far behind. As frustration grew so too did she, sucking up tons of water; her sea-motions churning and burning with unrequited passion. But had she also looked behind she would probably have seen a more attainable alternative – a powerful but quirky youngster named Jose.
He’d had his eye on Irma’s big bouncy tail feathers for a while, but wondered if he was biting off more than he could chew. Soon he knew. As Irma struck Barbuda he was astonished at her ferocity and began to back off. By the time he reached that island and saw what she had done, he knew the chase was over, and began to loop disheartenedly.
Meanwhile, Harvey had swung across the Gulf and vented his rage in Texas, releasing an enormous deluge, the likes of which had never been seen before. And Irma, knowing she’d likely never reach Texas, released her pent-up fury on several Caribbean islands in walloping winds and surging surf.
Though Harvey had hardly even known of her existence, she felt a woman scorned and showed her gargantuan displeasure. Still fuming, she spotted Florida sticking out like a huge thumb, made a right turn, and a few days later let the Keys bear the fearsome brunt of her attack. Then on a whim, she decided to kayo the rest of the state.
Now unknown to the three of them, shy little Katia was watching all the action from her niche in a corner of the Gulf of Mexico. Like Irma, she’d had her eye on Harvey; however his size and power scared her, and after a while she threw a longing gaze in the direction of Jose whom she could barely make out in the distance. But her skittishness soon got the better of her and she decided to stay far from the turmoil to the north. Frustrated and sulky, she bolted into Mexico a day after it had been rocked by a strong earthquake, hoping that the people would have been too shaken to pay much attention to her. Some did however, finding even her watered-down assault a bit too intense for their comfort.
So where is this infatuated foursome right now – these romantic star-crossed Cyclops? All over the place, fizzing out their lives and decomposing in relative obscurity, having left in their wake swathes of rack and ruin, a paradise lost with nothing to their gain – that is except for Jose, who is still meandering aimlessly, wondering what might have been if that virago Irma had not made him so weak-kneed. But he is casting a languorous eye on Bermuda and The Bahamas, and with this guy, you never know … Hurricane or human, that’s how the play of love and passion goes sometimes, isn’t it?

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