Federal Gods by Clare Saponia
Palewell Press
(112 pages of poetry)
Clare Saponia’s reputation for radically engaged poetry, characterised by a boldly provocative and satirical style, was already established with The Oranges of Revolution (Smokestack Books, 2015), which emerged in the wake of the Arab Spring, and offered a potent commentary on major contemporary themes – power, colonialism, financial turmoil, social upheaval. Federal Gods she sees as ‘a natural sequel’, her razor-sharp wit focussing on one aspect of ongoing global instability, namely the refugee crisis. And this sequel differs in being poetry of direct witness, with a personal involvement that adds greater nuance and power to the work.
A long sequence poem, predominantly written as punchy prose poetry, Federal Gods chronicles Saponia’s solidarity with refugees fleeing to Germany through the period 2015-17. Over several months she voluntarily taught German in a temporary sanctuary set up at the Berlin-Wilmersdorf townhall. Intended to house five hundred people, the place was soon packed with more than double that number, and the intensity of trying to support traumatised refugees fleeing war, persecution, famine, ecological collapse is reflected in the style and language of this book. Written in a compressed period during lockdown in 2021, with Saponia looking back through journals she kept (in German) at the time, the poetry effectively documents life inside the refuge – its makeshift set-up, lack of resources, boredom and rivalries, and the bureaucracy of the German state.
This is personified as the ‘Bundesgott’, translated as the ‘Federal Gods’, who have the power to decide on the refugees’ future, and every detail of their present lives, including that: ‘They have scheduled sleep.’ Ironically for Saponia, this is the same deity who forced her grandparents to flee their homelands eighty years previously: ‘The Bundesgott sent Oma packing with prerequisite recipes for Sachertorte, Pischinger and Rahmspinat, the good housekeeping guide to perpetual exodus, home always out there somewhere, simmering…’
Having found asylum in Britain – where at the time of Saponia’s work at the Berlin refuge, the anti-immigrant rhetoric of an imminent Brexit was ramping up – her grandparents’ experience of exile, and their fear of history repeating itself, clearly underpins Federal Gods. Like bookends for the whole work, their lives are evoked in the epilogue and referenced in the opening section, which vividly depicts the climate of media-hyped fear and othering of refugees through a stream of mythologising jargon:
‘You became disease. Overnight. Without knowing it. A flush of septic necessity. Feeding, sleeping, dreaming, seething. Streaming through the arteries of this land on national rail overdrive. No play for the fattening of gangly veins. The rot of history and contempt, as you nosedive through wounds, old and new, traumas tapered in at the heel. Boorish. Petulant. A viscid reminder of otherness and its tang of fear. Your fear. Your grandparents’ fear. Every parent’s fear.’
The grandmother’s recipes are just some of the particular and personal detail that characterises Federal Gods. Many of the numbered sections are titled with the names of refugees who are Saponia’s students. Hanin. Jayla. Najib. Having left everything behind, their worlds have become reduced to a few portable possessions and memories of the life and loved ones they’ve left behind: ‘Familiarity contained to a ring on your finger, a photo in your purse, that scarf round your neck; voices you’ve seared into your memory.’ At the same time, Saponia’s investment in their wellbeing is clear: ‘My conscience now bigger than the fuse of my ego’. And: ‘I hoped the shaky tatters of German grammar might just tear you from your past.’ As she navigates the challenges involved in teaching German in this context, including the subtleties of cultural differences, different alphabets and calendars, there is both the reminder of the blessings and relative privilege of her own life: ‘… you were hungrier for life than I have ever seen anyone. You made me hungrier for the life I wore like some invisible shroud I forgot I was wearing.’ And simultaneously the pressure of expectation from the growing numbers of students: ‘More faces. Eyes open as fishhooks. Expectation packed from wall to wall, swollen as sturgeon roe.’
Ambiguity is an ever-present reality within the Berlin refuge and in wider German society, and the poetry reflects this through the deployment of different perspectives, and the use of varying pronouns – most notably, a movement between the inclusive ‘we’ and the direct address of ‘you’. In this, Saponia is often pointing both to the similarities in her experiences with the refugees, and the ways that her life is different. Section 21, titled ‘in the flood’, is written in lyrical verse mainly as couplets, and shows the power of Saponia’s direct address:
‘brave is boarding a blow-up boat with your flesh
and blood bound for the belly of the sea…’‘it’s hiding in trucks and trains and time-
warped containers stuffed with poundshop shitno one really wants to buy’.
As the book unfolds, the toll of the poet’s solidarity work emerges, and from section 28 onwards, her struggle to get sufficient sleep and to attend to other aspects of her life is given attention, as is the weight of emotional responsibility:
‘I’m trying not to get attached. I’m trying to just teach. But don’t know how to just teach human beings who have run from harm and hypocrisies that keep them from their future.’
The book’s final irony comes with Saponia’s realisation that through the Brexit vote, she has herself effectively been ‘de-Britained’. With this comes awareness of the ongoing challenge for everyone to survive in a system where ‘those who hail difference and divide’ are ‘unpicking the stitches as fast we can thread the eye’. And yet, with the passionately activist spirit that Saponia brings to her poetry, accompanied by a deep wellspring of compassion, she closes the book with the image of us all as sand. ‘Run a finger through and we become one’ is both a powerful reminder of unity, and an act of defiance. Thank you, Clare Saponia, for this important book, and the many lives it champions.
Helen Moore is a British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, and Nature educator. She has published three ecopoetry collections, Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins (Shearsman Books, 2012), ECOZOA (Permanent Publications, 2015), and The Mother Country (Awen Publications, 2019) exploring aspects of British colonial history. She offers an online mentoring programme, Wild Ways to Writing, and works with students internationally. In 2021 Helen gave a keynote lecture on ecopoetry and landscape at PoesiaEuropa in Italy, and collaborated with Cape Farewell in Dorset on RiverRun, a cross arts-science project examining pollution in Poole Bay. She is currently working with University of Gloucestershire to create a global network of ecopoets and is writing a prose memoir about her more-than-human teachers. www.helenmoorepoet.com