Self Immolation in Toronto

A few days ago a man doused himself in gasoline, struck a match.

This was at 8:45am, on a busy downtown corner, near Toronto’s gay village. The man died of his injuries later that same day. And though I’ve read half a dozen news articles about the event, not a single one contained any meaningful information, no explanation for what the man intended to protest, what message he was trying to convey. Some articles note that police tasered the man, but there is nothing to clarify why a taser would be necessary to deal with a man who is literally burning alive.

Between 1810 and 1820 Goya produced a series of 82 prints, titled The Disasters of War, that document the horrors of the conflict between Napoleon’s French Empire and Spain. The images depict beheadings, rape, prisoners of war bound in chains, vultures gnawing on the dead, mutilated corpses hung from trees, … Goya inscribed captions beneath the images, explaining the scene at hand. Some of these are functional: “Cartloads for the cemetery”. With other captions Goya seems at a loss for words. “This happened,” reads one caption. An image of a monk being stabbed by French soldiers is captioned with the text: “This is bad”.

For Goya it was enough just to document the scenes, to illustrate the things that people do to one another. “This happened.” “This is bad.” “This is worse.” It’s fascinating how often the local news seems to operate under the same principle.

In downtown Toronto a man set himself on fire.

Police tasered him.

He died in hospital.

This happened.