Thomas Möhlmann interviews Alfred Schaffer

17 mei 2007 TM: Alfred, it has been a while since you returned to Amsterdam. Previously, you lived in Capetown, South-Africa, for several years. How did you end up there and what were you doing?

AS: I studied Dutch Literature and Film & Theatre in the Netherlands and, around graduation, was looking for a subject for post-graduate studies; my PhD tutor, Eep Francken from Leiden University, had just returned from Capetown. He was very enthusiastic about the University of Capetown, particularly the Afrikaans & Dutch Language department, so we set out looking for a subject to do with Afrikaans and Dutch Language. We came up with the writer J. van Melle, a Dutch writer who emigrated to South-Africa and made a name there as a novelist. Looking back, I feel an affinity to that connection. I researched how his two books, Bart Nel and Verspeelde Lente, were translated to film, in order to bring my two areas of study together. As you can hear, it was all very interesting but clearly a bit contrived as well. It’s just the way it goes, you’re young and ready to travel the world . . .  I went over there with that subject, and they said to me: “Yes, it’s interesting, but there are so many more interesting things to research than that”. So I basically did the research in a rather short time, and quickly wrote my thesis. No doubt it was interesting, but then I came across some fascinating South-African poets and Afrikaans language poets like D.J. Opperman, Antje Krog, Wilma Stockenström, van Wyk Louw and decided to find out more by following some courses that particularly interested me. The department picked up on that and after I finished my year at the University of Capetown – it was already the beginning of 1997 - they invited me to return to South Africa to write a thesis over there, after I’d graduated in the Netherlands and got my degree. I didn’t think twice. I was in the Netherlands briefly between August and December ’97 and did some odd jobs in horticulture, in a biscuit factory and at Bril academic publishers, but that was kind of shelf-filling. Because you don’t easily get a job in such a short time I had to temp, which my father didn’t like of course. You’ve just graduated, back from South Africa, been at university there, and then you work in a biscuit factory, but that was to earn money and at the beginning of ’98 I returned to write my thesis there. That was about a poetry collection by D.J. Opperman whom you could compare to the Dutch poets Nijhoff or Achterberg, an older poet.

TM: And he writes in Afrikaans?

AS: He’s an Afrikaans poet . . .  I’d explored the father-son theme earlier, when I’d been there for the first six months, so I expanded on this and turned it into a thesis. I took in other Afrikaans literature, South African literature, and eventually also some world literature – TS Eliot, Mishima and James Baldwin, and some Dutch writers too, of course. In the end it took about four years and in 2002 I got my PhD. Then I spent two more years as a fellow, teaching at the university, and also teaching Akrikaans and Dutch and mainly Dutch language poetry in Stellenbosch. In 2005 I returned to the Netherlands.

TM: And that was probably, after a few years in South Africa and in quite an academic set up, rather a big step. Can you say what you found most different after returning to the Netherlands?

AS: There are more services and facilities in Europe and Holland than there are in South Africa, which makes things easier perhaps. It also makes things less urgent in one way or another. I found that things were more serious there. For example, when I stood in front of a class there, in front of kids who came from the rich areas as well as the townships who weren’t there because of what I had chosen for them to study (which was Arnon Grunberg) but because they wanted to be. The enthusiasm there was much stronger, I always found. If you go to university there it means something. Certainly for the poorer part of the population, it’s not a given. You see with the richer kids who’ve got their own cars, a kind of Beverly Hills-ish state of affairs, driving to the campus in their own cars, which they take for granted, loafing around. But when you look at the blacker underlayer, even in a university like the university of the Western Cape, then you see that those kids are really determined. I found that enormously inspiring and that’s something I miss here, that academic level.

Furthermore, the Netherlands changed a lot in the nine years I was away, with the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh and the changes that took place here after 9/11. I found it both tougher and more intolerant, but that was already noticeable during my visits home, and it’s something I’m fed up with. I’m not as happy here as I was before I went to South Africa. Of course there’s a difference between living in a big city and in a small community. Certainly in the larger towns I find it rather cold, people alive alongside each other without taking a mutual interest. These are all things which are quite different there, however strange that sounds, because of course South Africa has a very violent society with lots of murders, rapes, AIDS, poverty. Unemployment is enormously high, with forty percent of the population out of work. The situation is completely different here, but still, on a one-to-one basis, social contact, where there is any, is more sincere than here. And then just that street life, that street picture. I’m also partly Caribbean, my mother was from Aruba, I miss the sun here. I remember very well, the first day that I was there on the campus and you see students walking around barefoot, it is very strange and the same time a familiar sensation. You wouldn’t see that here in Amsterdam of course.

TM: Well, two days a year, in the middle of the summer perhaps, but not on a day like today. You’ve described the differences for an ordinary citizen or for a part of a community, but what kind of differences are there as a poet? Did you feel like you were in a different sort of poetry scene there than in the Netherlands?

AS: Well, here there is a poetry scene that you’re automatically drawn into if you use the same language. There’s naturally a really big difference between schools of poetry but for me that's not linked to place. I’m interested in Canadian poetry and American poetry, so where you’re based . . .  it depends on what you read.

TM: I’m asking because for example when you were in South Africa, you put together with Antje Krog, that famous poet you were just talking about, a poetry anthology of new South African poetry. While now, in the Netherlands, you’re working together with Menno Wigman on the Daily Poetry Calendar. So as a reader and as a poet you turn your attention to the place you are at the time. I expect you can see differences between 2005 when you made that anthology and 2006-7, working on that calendar.

AS: Well, in terms of subject matter the poetry of the two countries is very different. Also their novels too, as a matter of fact. In terms of poetic form, I think that over there it is more based on performance, through the oral tradition. Here that’s all a bit new and seen as cool, that sort of slam happening. There it’s more usual – the oral tradition and that whole tradition of the imbongi, the prize poet. But content-wise you could say that it is more linked to the social side there. Sometimes that leads to pamphlet-like poems. If you’re talented and can write well you can do a lot of nice things there. A very famous example is Antje Krog, but another poet who became famous there is Ingrid Jonker, with a poem she wrote in the 60’s. For its time it was quite unusual, it was about a dead child near Nyanga, a township just outside of Capetown. You see social matters more in the poetry there, than here. Here it is possibly more narcissitic, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but it is a difference. Furthermore, there you’ve got academic and hermetic poets which you’ve got here too. Over there there are more popular rapper poets, like here, so in terms of form, there are very few differences.

TM: Interesting that you should mention the more explicitly social qualities of South African rather than Dutch poetry, because – although you might tell me I’m wrong – in your last collection, Foam (2006), social reality seems to have a more prominent place. It seems as if you have become a more engaged poet than in your earlier work.

AS: Perhaps it is more out in the open. I think that it has always been in my work. In my very first collection there was a poem about two men in a mountain pass. I can’t remember it exactly off the top of my head, but the image came from the talks with Bill Clinton at Camp David. At that time I was inspired by politics and what I read in the papers. The last collection came about partly by astonishment – part was written in South Africa and part in the Netherlands – at the contrast you get between a country with so many problems and a country where everything is well-organised and which has changed, which has become more cynical. That type of compare and contrast between the dangerous and yet sincere South Africa and here. Here, you might say, there’s an easy going-ness but there are also paranoid reactions to terrorism, for example. That’s the astonishment I mean, which makes you look outside of yourself and become perhaps more engaged, or more obviously engaged. But I don’t think there is much difference in the content of the poems I write.

TM: Well, one of the most obvious things is indeed the more or less ready-made that you put together from a brochure which was put through everyone’s doors about the dangers of terrorism and what to do. That is probably the most simple and concrete example of social reality in the Netherlands in your poetry. And, if I understand correctly, the manner in which you do that less explicitly in your new poems, in which a tsunami is featured for example, that is actually the way in which it has always been present in your work.

AS: Yes, because those poems are not simply based on the outside world. You take images from it of course, but language only becomes reality when it is transcribed into words. So you can’t really say, “It’s about...” That is what is so exciting about poetry. I think that the ready-made was really an exception. There’s nothing wrong with doing it once, but it unequivocally points to a certain vision of society which can be read into it. The other poems are, in that way, more diffuse and some people say, “But... why make it so difficult if you just want to say this and that?” But it is about what the poem wants to say and that's precisely what is so beautiful – bringing different influences together in one chunk of language. That’s why I never really want to discuss whether this poem is about this, that poem about that. But of course, a tsunami can play a part in a poem, only the poem isn’t about a tsunami.

TM: I think that in general much poetry, and in any case current Dutch poetry, is typically mindful of being too pamphlet-like or too explicitly meanful, since that would mean your poem wasn’t a poem anymore. That is what you’re saying, isn’t it?

AS: Yes, that is the dividing line. On the one hand you want to say something and you’ve got something to say, at least I believe I’ve got something to say. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up with only a single subject, with a one dimensional poem. That is the tension that you always find in writing, and I think it is a kind of driving engine or mainspring.

TM: As far as the mainspring is concerned, a few years ago you described the motivation of poet Alfred Schaffer in an interview in just four words. Those four words begin the text which Edwin Fagel wrote about you for Poetry International Web : “Unrest. Anxiety. Suspicion. Curiosity.” Are these still, given the facts, the motors of your work?

AS: Yes, and you might add anger and bitterness as well. I still remember that interview. That was an occasion when I thought, at the moment of answering, that it was right but before then it had never really occured to me. But it is, I think, a constant in my work. I hope that sometimes more gentle and nicer themes and motives come into it – love, as a mainspring, but that is perhaps just a bit too private, yes, no, that’s not true, because poetry is very private. At the moment it is very intense and when I look back to that interview and to past years, it is still all true. Only I hope that at a certain point you can make peace with it and find satisfaction. I think that that is a new stage. I wasn’t yet bothered with that then : these are my subjects, these things propel me. Now I notice that that’s still the case, but I look forward to things being different, because unrest wears you out at a certain point, so who knows?

TM: With these cautious and hopeful glances towards the future, I want to thank you for the answers you’ve given me over the past eighteen minutes. I won’t keep you from your writing any longer, goodbye and thanks. Audio file of the interview in Dutch
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