No Gods Live Here

No Gods Live Here by Conceição Lima is a bilingual Portuguese–English edition of the poet’s work, with translation by Shook. Lima is a Santomean poet from São Tomé, one of the two islands in the nation of São Tomé and Príncipe where Portuguese explorers arrived in 1470, and to which a large number of West Africans were forcefully moved and enslaved on plantations. Her poem “Plantation” begins: “The dead ask: // Why do roots sprout from our feet?” The devastating, childlike naivete of the dead is brought home in Lima’s depiction of their supine position in the ground, which leaves them with a view of only their feet, the “kingdom” they planted growing around and over them.

Lima maps the legacy of slavery and violence onto the island, ever-attentive to what lay beneath its seemingly innocuous buildings, including her own home: “Atop the ruins of the dead city / I designed my house / silhouetted against the sea.” The island’s difficult history rises to the surface over and over again: “In Santana, night and day / The beach is a risen body, mid-mutiny.” “Heroes” begins: “At the base of the plaza / beneath the flagpole / visible bones, severe, throb.” The poem concludes as “[t]he dead who died without questions / return slowly with open eyes / asking for their crucified wings.”

For Lima, poetry can be a space of revolution. In “1975,” dedicated to the “J Generation” (the youth wing of the movement for liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe), she writes:

And when they ask you
you will answer that nothing happened here
except in the euphoria of the poem.

[…]

Oh, yes! We were young, terrible
but here—never forget it—everything happened
within the masts of the poem.

Lima’s knows that even a failed revolution lingers on in its inceptive spark, safe in the poem.