Burnt Car
#nontransparentthings 019 (i)
On the evening of March 13, 2026, it was the first rain of the year in Makurdi. I took a walk the next morning to take in sights of the post-rain city, and since I didn’t write anything down after returning from that walk, I cannot recall much of what my thoughts were that morning, except this photograph which is now before us.
It was a curious phantom when I emerged on the main road of George Akume Way from my street, downwards to the traffic junction at New Otukpo Road, and saw the carcass of a burnt car in the distance. How was this strange occupant here by the roadside, burnt, after a rainfall?
Forgetting for a minute the misfortune of the owner, I confess I was a bit fascinated by the sight of it and myself happening upon it. It spoke to me in a way only such peripherally poetic things and ruins can speak to you. Here was a ruin that was photographable, meaning it was a ruin that ought to be photographed. Here was something in the early morning with a claim as one of the inanimate citizens of the city, a story behind it. Here was a ruin after the rain. It was its ruin I was fascinated by, a ruin that I felt was mine, was human, was all of us, a ruin so in contrast with the first rain of the year; such a sight in the early morning for me, which I sought to understand.
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I first thought about Soyinka’s poem, how fitting to the event: Death in the Dawn. There is so much to ponder in that poem, many quotables, my favourite being, “On this / Counterpane, it was — / Sudden winter at the death / Of dawn’s lone trumpeter. Cascades / Of white feather-flakes . . .” — such deeply distracting contemplation on the death of a cock by a car accident, which the whitish skeletal frame of the burnt car reminded me of. Even still, the sight of the burnt car also reminded me of Romeo Oriogun’s chapbook Burnt Men, which opens: “a preacher said gay men are dead men / i wake up to the smell of burnt men / in my veins”; which also made me think of Samuel A. Adeyemi’s poem, “Good Arsonist,” where he writes, “I know how much your God / despises my kind. You must do, too. / I see it circling your eyes, that / proneness to reduce my bones to ash.”
Transgression was what I was seeing in the ruin of the burnt car. The car itself had not transgressed; the sight of it was a transgression. That it burnt was a transgression. Me, finding it on my morning walk after the rain was a kind of transgression to my eyes; transgression to dawn, which I tried to make sense of. Life, as art, is transgression.++
You can now Google the unique hashtag #Nontransparentthings, a photography writing project which you just read, to find out all the posts, stories, and reviews of it. Catch up here with this link to entries 1–10. You can read the last entry no. 19 here, or the introductory essay here. Recommended reading for today is the poem “Cotonou” by Romeo Oriogun.
