Hugo Claus, in about 1951 | Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis, tg:lhph:537
The Oostakker Poems by Hugo Claus
Artistic Renewal after 1945
The collection The Oostakker Poems by Hugo Claus was acclaimed in 1955 as a high point in Dutch-language literature. The 26-year-old author grew into an internationally-known artist who influenced many artistic domains.
In The Oostakker Poems Claus investigates his relationship with his parents, his lover and his country of origin. In that process the poet combines Biblical and mythological themes with violent eroticism and oppressive scenes. His poems do not follow a fixed rhyming pattern, but strike the reader through their rich imagery, contradictions and ambiguities.
‘Oostakker’ refers to a Catholic place of pilgrimage near Ghent, but Claus also alludes to heathen rituals that plead for the fertility of the earth. In his collection soldiers, flags and mutilated men pass by and there is mention of grenades and ruins. So that in this Oostakker, besides the old popular devotionpopular religious practices and traditions. , the Second World War is also very present. Claus was to investigate the motivations and effects of that war further in the novels De verwondering (Wonder) and Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium).
Antwerp, Collectie Stad Antwerpen, Letterenhuis, Yvette Bosteels
Hugo Claus was admired as a reader of his own poetry and performed regularly. Here he is taking part in Poetry Night in 1980. Numerous records and CDs were made of Claus reading his own poetry.
Artistic Renewal after 1945
A new artistic generation stepped forward across the rubble of the Second World War. Even more than writers like August Vermeylen, Paul van Ostaijen and Gerard Walschap before the war, they demanded autonomy for the arts and rubbed readers up the wrong way. Reader-friendly popular education in the manner of Hendrik Conscience was not to be found at all in the artistic avant-garde.
With his criticism of the bourgeois belief in progress, the novel-renewer Louis Paul Boon actually revealed himself as a true anti-Conscience. In the 1950s he published the double novel De Kapellekensbaan (Chapel Road) and Zomer te Ter-Muren (Summer in Termuren). The book describes the life of the 19th-century working-class girl Ondineke against the rise and fall of Socialism. However, the author, who appears in the book as Boontje, constantly interrupts his story in order to comment on his own time with humour, venom and pity. In old age Boon published a novel about the social struggle of the Aalst priest Adolf Daens. That was the inspiration for the film Daens (1992), and later for an equally popular musical.
Hugo Claus was the most versatile member of the post-1945 artistic generation. He excelled in poetry and prose, worked as a visual artist and was to make an important contribution to theatre and film.
Focal points
Antwerp, Gazet van Antwerpen, Philippe Lebeau
Actress, teacher and director Dora van der Groen (1927-2015).
The Professionalisation of Theatre and Film
Like literature, theatre in Flanders since the 19th century had been in the service of popular elevation. A flourishing theatre grew up that familiarised audiences with the classic repertoire (from Shakespeare to Vondel). Via plays like Gudrun (1878) by Albrecht Rodenbach and Het gezin Van Paemel (The Family Van Paemel, 1903) by Cyriel Buysse, the Flemish theatre profited to some extent from the artistic developments Europe was going through. However, a thoroughgoing professionalisation of the sector had to wait until the author and director Herman Teirlinck founded the first drama school in Flanders in 1946. Dora van der Groen, one of the first graduates, was later to train many actors on her own theatre course.
Hugo Claus continued the renewal as a theatre-maker. Plays like Een bruid in de morgen (A Bride in the Morning) and Vrijdag (Friday) won prestigious prizes. More controversial were Het leven en de werken van Leopold II (The Life and Works of Leopold II), on the colonial rule of the Belgian king, and Tand om Tand (Tooth and Nail) an adaptation of Tijl Uilenspiegel, which attacks a narrow-minded Flemish nationalism.
Claus was also active in the film world. He provided the screenplay for the film Mira (1971) and several times collaborated with the director Roland Verhavert. A variety of theatre and film-makers remain indebted to him.
Ghent, Archief Gent, SCMS_PBK_1775
The Lourdes grotto in Oostakker.
Oostakker, the Flemish Lourdes
Today Oostakker, as a district of Ghent, is wedged in between the city and a modern port. However, when Hugo Claus wrote The Oostakker Poems, the village was still a symbol of rural, pious Flanders.
In 1873 a Lourdes grotto was built in Oostakker: a reconstruction of the spot in the French Pyrenees where it was claimed the Virgin Mary had appeared. When two years later the news spread that a man had been miraculously cured of a broken leg, the place grew into one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Belgium. Soon over 100,000 people annually visited the Lourdes grotto to pray and ask the mother of Jesus to be healed.
In The Oostakker Poems Claus criticises the cult of the Virgin Mary at the Lourdes grotto, and dissociates himself from Christian Flanders. Still, he cannot simply cut the links with the past and with his community just like that. He admits this symbolically in the poem De Moeder (The Mother). It begins with the much-quoted lines that evoke birth:
I am not, I am not except in your earth.
When you screamed and your skin trembled
My bones caught fire.
And the poem ends with this confession:
In me your life fades twirling, you don’t
Return to me, I don’t recover from you.
Discover more on this topic
Journaal
Bron: VRT archief – 1 mei 2015
Journaal
Bron: VRT archief – 5 apr 2004
Claus leest voor
Bron: VRT archief – 31 maa 2004
Meer vrouw op straat – Antwerpen
Bron: VRT archief, De chinezen – 3 maa 2020
In de voetsporen van Louis Paul Boon
Bron: VRT archief – 20 feb 1977
Non-fiction
De plicht van de dichter. Hugo Claus en de politiek
De Bezige Bij, 2013.
Het teken van de hamster: een close reading van Hugo Claus
Vantilt, 2018.
Hugo Claus: een hommage
De Bezige Bij, 2013.
Onder de giftige rook van Chipka: Louis Paul Boon en de fabrieksstad Aalst
Ludion, 1999.
Over Het verdriet van België
De Bezige Bij, 2010.
De wereld van Cyriel Buysse
Atlas, 2009.
Hugo Claus: de jonge jaren
Polis, 2015.
Hugo Claus: familie album
Polis, 2018.
Fiction
Mijn kleine oorlog
Borgerhoff & Lamberigts, 2019.
De Kapellekensbaan
Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep, 2018.
Menuet
De Arbeiderspers, 2018.
Zomer te Ter-Muren
De Arbeiderspers, 1995.
Mieke Maaike’s obscene jeugd: een pornografisch verhaal voorafgegaan door een proefschrift in en om het kutodelisch verschijnsel waarmee de student Steivekleut promoveerde
De Arbeiderspers, 2018.
De Paradijsvogel: relaas van een amorele tijd
De Arbeiderspers, 1999.
Daens, of hoe in de negentiende eeuw de arbeiders van Aalst vochten tegen armoede en onrecht
De Arbeiderspers, 2020.
De Oostakkerse gedichten
De Bezige Bij, 2003.
Het verdriet van België
De Bezige Bij, 2018.
De verwondering
De Bezige Bij, 2018.
Toneel
De Bezige Bij, 1999.
Mira
(1971)
De Leeuw van Vlaanderen
(1984)
Daens
(1992)
Het verdriet van België
(1995)