‘I probably imagined myself discussing dense philosophical texts
over crepes or something…’
What’s your name?
Okey.
What do you do?
I work for Carcanet Press, which is a small poetry
publisher based in the centre of Manchester. It’s a lovely place to work and
I’m very fortunate to have encountered so many fascinating people and so much
writing I really admire, while also wearing skinny jeans and ‘chunky knits’ to
work.
The road to my current job was
actually pretty straightforward in some ways, but also long and windy. When I
was seventeen I saw an advert for a reading by Togara Muzanenhamo, one of
Carcanet’s poets, at the Central Library. I was just starting to get into
poetry, and I think I’d just read somewhere that attending cultural events
alone makes you seem mysterious, so I decided to go, and I actually really
enjoyed it. It also occurred to me how cool it would be to do that as a job. My
concept of ‘cool’ is still very much a work in progress.
A couple of years later, when I
was home from university one holiday, I asked if I could do some work
experience with them, which I did and also loved. I came back again one summer
to do some office work for them (less fun, but paid this time) but then I later
decided I might want to be a lawyer. After graduation I did admin work in a
Manchester law firm while I started my novel and interned at other law firms.
Just when I was deciding that law might not be right for me after all, a job
came up with Carcanet, which I was lucky enough to get.
I also do a little bit of freelance
writing on the side (poetry, drama, reviews) and I’m (still) working on the
inexorable post-English degree novel. I should be free of it any day now.
Tell us the story of how you
ended up in Manchester.
My parents came to the UK from
Nigeria in the 1980s as part of the Brain
Drain. We went back to Nigeria a few times for holidays but we always lived
in the UK. I was actually born in Withington and raised largely around the
Greater Manchester area, but we moved according to wherever my dad was working
at the time. So I suppose you could say I grew up in various different places
including Bolton and Heaton Mersey, and we lived in Wales for a short time. We
eventually settled on Stockport. I didn’t mind moving – it was probably easier
because I have siblings – and in fact I think this might explain why I don’t
have a regional accent…
I went to university in
Cambridge, a very small city, and my college, Girton, was about five kilometres
from the city centre. As much as I loved it there, I think it made me
appreciate how nice it is to live in a city where the buses continue after 6pm.
I also remember one of my friends complaining that Cambridge isn’t really a
place where, as an undergraduate, you can just go somewhere and not be a
student: it’s too insular, you can’t help bumping into people you know. I
don’t think the same can be true of Manchester.
I came back to Manchester because
I thought it would be easier to find work but also because I was curious about
the city. I’d never really lived in Manchester itself, at least never for very long.
Now I think I’d like to live in London for a while, just at some point in the
future, not just yet, I’d like to live abroad first.
What’s great about this city?
The history, I think, is my
favourite thing – and how open that history is to the public; how public that
history is, as well as all the nooks and crannies. One of my favourite periods
of literature (and art, which I know less about) is the Victorian era: I did a
special paper on it at university in my final year, and so when I came back to
Manchester I started thinking more about Elizabeth Gaskell and going to see
Valette’s paintings in the City Art Gallery. Towards the end of my degree, when
I knew I was leaving Cambridge for good, whenever I was coming home from the
city centre I would alter my route slightly so that I got to cycle across
King’s Parade, past King’s College and the beautiful old lampposts under the
moon. Especially when nobody else was out, it really did feel like going back
in time – or rather, like being somewhere that, in some ways, hasn’t
dramatically changed in a long time. As though anything (or anything
historically consistent) could happen. I feel the same way walking across
Albert Square at night.
But then, the interesting bits of
the city’s history continue so much further back - and so much later. Last year
I did some writing on Alan Turing, which was really, really fascinating – as
part of my research I spoke to someone who went running with him when he was
alive. That was really wonderful.
What’s not so great?
I could roll off a pretty long
list, simply because I’ve lived in Manchester for so long. But I suppose my
absolute least favourite thing is true of any city but here it is: that,
despite the fact that some parts of Manchester are very diverse, it’s not
entirely comfortable with its diversity. I remember how sad and surprised I was when, coming back from university
with a shiny new degree, I realised that security guards still follow me round
shops to see what I would do.
Do you have a favourite
Manchester building?
This is probably controversial.
I’ve told this to a few people and have been roundly judged: the building which
was on the site of the new KPMG building in St Peter’s Square [Elisabeth House].
I fully acknowledge that, especially in the increasingly economically tough
years before it was demolished, it was becoming emptier and emptier, and
looking more and more unloved. But I’ve always loved it and I was so sad when I
realised it was being replaced. I’m not sure why, exactly. I think it was
probably because, when I was much younger, I heard very cool sixth-formers talk
about how much they loved the Dutch Pancake House the building used to house;
and, being very impressionable, I began to see it as the epitome of some kind
of run-down urban romance. Ridiculous as it sounds, I really thought it was
unspeakably, breathlessly romantic. I probably imagined myself discussing dense
philosophical texts over crepes or something…
But, since that building no
longer exists… I think I’d have to say Central Library, as it was before the
renovations, anyway. I’ve no idea what it will look like when it reopens but I
really, really loved it before and even from the outside it’s just beautiful. I
remember going on school trips to the Library Theatre; being a teenager and
taking the bus to the library and feeling very grown up finding a copy of
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus in the Black History Month
display, borrowing it and racing through it, feeling for the first time (I read
Adichie before I read Achebe, the more famous Igbo writer) what it’s like to
read something by someone who comes from a very similar background to your own.
I remember reading about the
Henry Watson Music Library (top floor of the central library) in An Equal
Music by Vikram Seth and being so excited that it existed – and then
borrowing two or three times the number of pieces I was ever going to practise
just because I could. I think I probably imagined myself into his novel - in
fact I probably half expected to bump into a dashing violinist between the
stacks but even if I did, I would have been at my least captivating: wild-eyed
and clammy with delight, clutching Quantz’s treatise on flute-playing, two or
three recorder pieces by obscure German Baroque composers and the PVG scores to
some truly embarrassing pop music which I will take with me to my grave [Our readers need to know!].
Do you have a favourite
Mancunian?
A tough question but I think… I’d
have to say Alan Turing. He wasn’t born in Manchester and in fact he lived in
Wilmslow, but he worked at the University of Manchester after the war and
socialised in the city centre (to the extent that Turing really ‘socialised’ at
all).
He’s becoming more and more
widely admired and accepted, which is good: even aside from his code-breaking
work, I find him absolutely fascinating. I think it’s well known that some
people found him an odd man to work with (he could be quite socially awkward),
but then in my research I also found out what a deeply passionate person he
was, how fixated he was on the relationship between a machine and a human mind.
I read that when he was at school, his best friend, a boy he really
hero-worshipped died very young: it’s thought that, for the rest of his life,
Turing carried with him the idea – perhaps the hope – that something of his
friend, some part of this boy’s essence remained on earth, and that it might be
encountered again. This could well be the germ of his fascination with what we
now call artificial intelligence. I don’t know that I ‘admire’ Turing for this,
because you can’t really admire someone for something they didn’t choose – in
fact it seems like he was haunted, perhaps even dogged by it. I read he was
quite introspective and intense: once he’d fallen in love with someone he
idolised at such a young age, and who then died young, I don’t think he stood a
chance against the way he felt. But I do find it fascinating: the fact that he
could work so steadily, that he persevered in something so jugular-close to himself,
and that it might well have been love (although sadly a kind of stunted love,
maybe not even real love at all, after all those years) that could drive his
creativity so forcefully, I think is a really interesting notion.
What’s your favourite
pub/bar/club/restaurant/park/venue?
These aren’t very original,
really. There’s the John Rylands Library, especially the reading room. I love
the Cathedral and I want to go and see more evensongs and concerts there. I
love Platt Fields Park. I don’t really go clubbing all that much but pretty
much anywhere I’m unlikely to get stabbed will do me.
What do you think is missing from
Manchester?
It would be nice to live in a
city that really doesn’t sleep. To be able to get the train or the tram
or the bus or a doughnut at literally any hour of day or night would be
something. But that’s just a small thing, and I don’t think Manchester’s missing
all that much, to be honest. I quite like it the way it is, but I’ll be happy
to move elsewhere when I feel like it’s time.
If I was Mayor for a day I would
…
Make it a law for people to talk
to strangers more! I’m chronically shy myself but whenever I go to London I
notice how much friendlier and forthcoming people are up North; last time my
friend visited from London, a stranger said two words to her on public
transport and she almost had a stroke. But – and this could be my imagination –
I think as time passes, strangers seem to talk to each other less, here. (My
friends tell me Liverpool is way ahead of us in that respect.) I think it’s a
really good thing we’ve got, this degree of openness, I’d like more of it.
Manchester should be less… British.
Who else would you like to nominate
to answer this questionnaire?
Alan Garner. I loved his novel Elidor
when I was at school, the way it’s set in Manchester but encompasses the
surrounding countryside.
Okey reads
some of his poetry at The Poetry Society,
London, this evening (Saturday 25th January).
