How to Build a House
Amatesiro Dore
For my brothers: Tosan and Nnamdi
I: How to Build a House
How did my brother build his house? Exactly the way he built his body: using the iron bars in our parent’s home to sculpture his arms like the bars he wrote to wake us up from the cage of our colonised ancestors.
With his muse, Mary of the House of Merry, we smoked our way out of captivity.
How did my brother build his house?
He used his arms of creativity and consistency.
He found a spouse and partner of dreams to believe in him as he believed in her.
How will I build my house?
The way he did.
II: Crackers
I threw a birthday party for my favourite friend, Crackers: a name he acquired from his late mum when she accused his expensive-looking girlfriend of eating his vast inheritance like crackers.
I paid my mother to buy and sew curtains that would match the black marbles and brown furniture of his bedroom. Then I asked my father for cash to take care of some business and used the money to rebuild the broken fence of my best friend’s compound as one of his birthday gifts.
Before I invited my sister to eat crackers and keep his money within our family.
About the author: Amatesiro Dore studied law at the Igbinedion University Okada and the Nigerian Law School. He is a 2019 writer-in-resident and fellow of the Wole Soyinka Foundation, 2009 alumnus of the Farafina Trust Creative Writers Workshop, and 2015 fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency. In 2016, he was awarded the Reimagined Folktale Contest and the Saraba Manuscript (Nonfiction) Prize. And his short story, For Men Who Care, was shortlisted for the 2017 Gerald Kraak Award. Recently, his works have appeared in the Johannesburg Review of Books, London’s Litro, and Harvard’s Transition magazine.
