1. Laughing Dove in the Window
I see it, it sees me. Now, it sees you, the laughing dove in the window.
I broke the rules here by greatly editing this image. Not only did I apply a monochrome filter, I cropped it to the point of a pixelated exposure. This was a mild affordance; the initial plan was simply to make the bird’s eye the centre of the photograph, for I felt the image was lifeless in its original size.
I had just my phone camera and no lens to magnify the shot. So I had taken the image from a distance because I didn’t want to scare the dove off by going too close. But from this zoomed range I could say it saw me, nonetheless. But it hadn’t moved, as in the earlier days when it built its nest in my bathroom window and began laying eggs in early March 2024. Then, it’d fly off once it saw me.
Four things are caught in the image. The aluminium frame of the net, the metal bars of the window, the bird, and lastly, the palm fronds in the background. Without the sunlight washing in, I do not think this mess would be complete. It is, one could say, a definitive element of the image, evoking a celestial aspect.
2. Pyre Bike
A passage in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons has stayed with me. The Pope’s camerlengo sets himself on fire, believing his act as a sacrifice to save the Church from its sin of syncretism with science. I was an impressionable teenager when I read that novel, but even today I still find myself electrified reading passages in prose that capture such moments of euphoria, drawn in by the climactic, as my mind follows the language. I would be disappointed seeing the movie adaptation years later, that the scene I mostly looked forward to wasn’t written for screen. It goes—
In the Niche of the Palliums, the camerlengo had followed God’s will and anointed his body. His hair. His face. His linen robe. His flesh. He was soaking now with the sacred, vitreous oils from the lamps. They smelled sweet like his mother, but they burned. His would be a merciful ascension. . . . He slipped his hand into the pocket of his robe and fingered the small, golden lighter he had brought with him from the Pallium incendiario. He whispered a verse from Judgments. And when the flame went up toward heaven, the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame. . . . High above on the balcony, like a soul tearing free of its corporeal restrains, a luminous pyre of flame erupted from the camerlengo’s center. The fire shot upward . . . entirely shrouding his body in a column of light.
When I took this photograph and later studied it, my thoughts were immediately of this passage from Dan Brown’s novel. Not because it has any ecclesiastical energy, but because it felt religious. Like the work of burnt offering the image suggests. This was at Urban Village, a bar and lounge along George Akume Way, Makurdi; a place I’d go to some evenings to relax with a drink, and listen to loud music against my will. In its first days it used to be a small paradise, very homely, as the name implies. Raffia was used in place of a ceiling, to create a rural aspect; and palm wine was served in gourds. But the place gradually died out; not because it stopped giving optimal services, but because certain fraternity boys made it their second home, sometimes causing a ruckus over clearing bills, scaring customers, and piling debts that eventually ran the lounge aground.
The place still exists; I pass by it many evenings and witness its battle to survive, as it is always empty, unlike its old self. But this photograph, like a last piece of memory, somehow pronounces the spirit of its once-upon-a-time vitality. As Ivan Vladislavic noted, “A photograph is an odd little memorial . . .”
3. Slow Dancer
This is a dead oil palm tree. Its leaves are pinnate and the midribs are used in making brooms, when gathered into a bunch. I call this image a slow dancer because that’s what I see. Because the form of the dead palm tree appears like one of the many Tiv masquerades that looks like a caterpillar: its shape is usually hull-like, yet it dances with an agility that doesn’t agree with its morphology. But the masquerade in the photo has no moves.
We do not always experience the gradual death of a tree which was not caused by human activity but by the tree’s old age or maybe disease. This was what happened with this oil palm. I watched it in its first days as it began its gradual death. It must have lived very long; for context, an oil palm in the wild has up to 200 years; although this tree had seen a city encroach upon it, as the neighbourhood is still quite rural.
In the time I met it alive, I ate from its fruit, and even drank the wine tapped from it, in what nobody knew was the last time. I cannot be a kin to it more than I can in recognising our shared fate. It was here before; now it is gone. But what have I done by taking its photograph? This is where our kinship departs.
For humans, the photograph of the dead is mostly the work of photojournalism, or as we now have in the cruel world of today—Sontag can’t be so right in describing the camera as a gun—the photos that appear on our social media or online, of the dead. Dead people who, as is often the case, met death by human violence. But whether killed, or dead by natural causes, nobody wants to see the photo of the dead, unless you have an unnatural appetite; such images enforce a finality our little hearts cannot take. We’d rather look at old photos of our dead, as they remind us of life, even though this is an irony. A photograph is stasis. But we can look at the image of a dead tree, which may be even beautiful. Such dualities.
4. Hidden Artists
This image was taken in January 2024 at HotSpot Café, Makurdi, on Esther Acka Street, which is off Vandeikya Street. The lounge had done a renovation and plastered its walls with murals. I was still in my photography ecstatic phase, so I instinctively began searching for what to photograph, looking for something to speak to me. But what I sensed in every potential material that presented itself to me were all temptations to take easy images. Most of the mural job was easily pop culture images: either the portrait of an artist; some lady in stiletto and red gown; or King Kong’s face, a recent facile agitation of masculinity. So I kept looking. Then I saw these musicians, almost in hiding. Reading meaning into it or not, it gave itself up too willingly to interpretation, almost a nod to Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist.”
The perspective here fails to give a full picture of just how in a corner this mural is (or was; I believe the place has been renovated again). Perhaps my attempt to capture it well erases this. This was in a small part of the wall behind the dee jay’s platform, which could be easily missed. It was a small space that made it look as if the painter had first pondered what would fit into it and chose these live performers. I was immediately able to connect with the artists in the mural, in how interestingly their placement felt like an afterthought, reflecting a very philistine aspect of society. Even further is the melancholic aura: we can’t see a face but we know a sad or slow tune is being played. Given that live music never gets performed at this lounge (there are no musical sets in place), but rather the loud work of dee jays, the image felt so apt.♦
Carl Terver has been published in The Republic, Goethe-Insitut Nigeria, and The Stockholm Review, among others. He is the founding editor of Afapinen. 𝕏