Want to find out more about the Northern Slant team? Every week we put 10 questions to our community of contributors – about them, their interests and hopes for Northern Ireland’s future. This week’s interviewee is David Capener. You can follow David on Twitter @David_Capener.

 

1. Tell us about yourself, and why you got involved with Northern Slant.

I’ve done many things. They’ve mostly always orbited around my background in architecture, urban theory, and critical theory. But the one thing I always wanted to do was write — I think it took me so long to get around to doing it because during my education I was told I wasn’t very good at it so I didn’t have very much confidence. 

I later met a friend who works for the BBC. We got very drunk, so I don’t remember very much, but I recall him asking me what it was that I really wanted to do. I said, “Write.” His response was simple: “Well, write then.” It was a really important moment, it put a bit of extra ‘fight’ in me. I didn’t start the job at the supermarket, instead I began pitching to newspapers and the rest just happened… I now get paid to write!

I knew that I wanted to use my writing to give a voice to those who do not have a voice.  A lot of the stuff I do in the press doesn’t always do that but Northern Slant has become a place where, along with others, I can raise the kind of issues that might not get raised anywhere else.


2. Describe Northern Ireland in 5 words.

A long way from home.

 

3. What makes you proud to be from here?

I’m not from here — I’m just the ‘wee English fella’ — I feel (mostly) proud to be here though.

 

4. Are you hopeful for the future?

I think so / I don’t know. What do we mean by hopeful? Ask someone with a neoliberal economic outlook what hopeful means and it would probably look very different to mine. I hear a lot of infectious optimism about NI — there’s nothing wrong with that; there’s a lot to be optimistic about. But sometimes that optimism clouds the critical judgment and thought that we need to be able to ask some of the really difficult questions that need to be asked. 

Hope for NI also relies on us being able to learn to wrestle with the numerous different narratives that exist here. We only truly understand the power of the stories we live in when they collide with other stories; sparks fly, and the world that gave us sense and meaning is challenged. The power of stories runs deep — we are narrative creatures. Forgiveness plays an important part too. For to forgive is not to forget but to remember. To remember is an act of imagination; to imagine a future world that learns from its past mistakes and builds on its success. To remember is to be part way along the journey to understanding the stories of those we might oppose

I like to think about it this way — the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli says that “we don’t understand the world as made by stones — by things. We understand the world made by kisses, or things like kisses: happenings.” We live in a world of events and not static objects — the universes fizzes with happenings. Kisses are what makes the world interesting. So I try to have hope in the present, in the now, in life as it is unfolding all around us — immanence is all we have. I believe that the potentiality for all possible futures already exists in the present and that it is up to us to configure those in ways that are for the good of all society. 

 

5. If you could change one thing about Northern Ireland, what would it be? 

Ha! Only one thing! Here’s one — Full rights for the LGBTQ community. None of the major political parties in NI — apart from the DUP — oppose gay marriage (the UUP is more complicated). This means that politically there is a democratic mandate for the laws to be changed. It is just silly that we have a political system where one party and a conservative religious lobby can have so much sway over important issues like this. 

 

6. Favorite NI celebrity? 

Depends what you mean by celebrity I guess: someone who is well known? There are many people from here that I admire. Bernadette Devlin McAliskey would be one of them. Once the youngest woman to take a seat in Westminster. She was an agitator and activist who constantly fought for the rights of others even when it meant putting her own life at risk. 

 

7. Politician you most admire, from outside Northern Ireland? 

Tony Benn. I keep a quote of his in the back of my notebooks: “In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person–Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates–ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

That’s some advice that we need today I think. We need more politicians like him. 

 

8. Favourite place to bring a visitor?

Sunny day; pint’s outside at the Duke of York.

 

9. Potato bread or soda bread?

Neither. Although I’m partial to a slice of Wheaten. 

 

10. Snow Patrol or Van Morrison?

Neither. Unless I can have Van Morrison with The Band in Scorsese’s film The Last Waltz. Otherwise, I’ll trade them both for The Undertones or David Holmes.

 

Also published on Medium.