No Gods Live Here
SynopsisPlot
A career-spanning collection from giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country's past alongside the poet's own childhood poems set against the tiny island nation's distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place.
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About this book
No Gods Live Here is a career-spanning poetry collection by Conceição Lima, described as a giant of Santomean literature. It is noted as the first book-length collection by a woman from São Tomé to be published in English. The poems move through the history of São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island nation in the Gulf of Guinea off the western coast of Central Africa, touching on slavery, colonialism, and the country's path to independence.
Lima's writing draws on the particular landscape and culture of the islands. Fishermen on beaches, local flora, and popular Santomean music appear throughout the collection alongside poems rooted in her own childhood. The work holds these personal and historical layers together without separating them, returning often to the ways memory, time, and place shape one another. Some poems catalogue specific cruelties of the colonial period, while others record moments of daily life or collective achievement.
São Tomé and Príncipe gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Lima's poems span both the colonial past and the postcolonial present, grounding broad historical forces in the concrete details of two small volcanic islands whose combined area is roughly a thousand square kilometres.
