Alfred Schaffer has been described as one of the most talented Dutch poets of his generation. Born to an Aruban mother and a Dutch father in the early seventies, he dreamed of a being a musician or a football star, never a poet. Today he lives in South Africa where he lectures at the University of Stellenbosch. ArtsTalk Magazine’s Souwie Buis caught up with him recently in Rotterdam at the Poetry International Festival.
Why poetry?
For Schaffer, poetry “was never a tough choice”. He describes his poetry as “a blessing” which has allowed him to travel all over the world, including visits from Cape Town to the Hague, to see his father – “just because I wrote some poems”.
“My fate doesn’t belong to me but to a hardboiled language with a surplus of synonyms.” – Nos Tata
Schaffer is disarmingly modest about his achievements as a poet. He credits his teachers in both the Netherlands and Aruba where he attended school, for nurturing his initial interest in what he describes as “this wonderous form of playing with language”. He would go on to study Dutch literature and describes himself as “always busy writing some poems, very bad ones, but still writing”. Yet he never dreamed of being a poet. He longed, he admits, to be a musician or a football star.
South Africa
A short stay in South Africa as a student became a lot longer after he decided to accept an offer to do a PhD at the University of Cape Town, mainly in order to extend his visa for the woman with whom he’d fallen in love. Schaffer mentions John Ashbury, Wallace Steven’s and Harold Bloom’s ‘Anxiety of Influence’ as seminal in both the writing of his PhD and his own development as a poet. His own poems would soon be noticed by a publisher back in the Netherlands and the rest, as they say, is history.
Shaka Zulu
Schaffer still writes in Dutch and publishes mostly in the Netherlands, but agrees that his inspiration is typically drawn from his roots in the Caribbean and South Africa, where he has now lived for over twenty years. One of his most acclaimed collections, ‘Man Animal Thing’ (2014) draws on Thomas Mofolo’s novel, ‘Chaka’ (1925) in what he describes as a “Monty-Python take” on the infamous Zulu king and warrior – Shaka Zulu. Schaffer uses humour, history and tweets to depict a modern-day Shaka as an asylum seeker in an unnamed country living in the age of social media, speed dating and UFO’s.
“Daily life is a mousetrap – am I the chunk of cheese?” – Nos Tata
Humour, often in the form of rye irony or the unexpected juxtaposition of tragic absurdity in Schaffer’s work, is “a coping mechanism”. The poet agrees that humour is something of a hallmark of “young poets of colour”, both in Africa and the Caribbean. They, “don’t dwell on their victimhood” he explains, but rather “they laugh about it or they fight about it” and this is “such a refreshing take, because then you see a way out.”
“ Will everything be alright? Like in the Disney films?”- Investigation
Poetry, says Schaffer is “a deeply personal space”. In a world in which technology is ever more ubiquitous, the voice of poetry will, he suggests, become ever more vital as it embodies the very essence of our humanity. Souwie BUIS July 2024
