Conceição Deus Lima (1961-2026), who has been called one of the most original voices in Portuguese-language African poetry, passed away unexpectedly on the morning of May 15. She was born in in 1961 in the small island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, “this fragment of Africa/ where, facing South, / a word dawns on high/ like a mournful flag” (my translation), to cite the evocative description of her homeland in “Afro-Insularity,” one of her best-known poems. The late Russell Hamilton, who was among the earliest North American scholars to study Afro-Portuguese literature, considered Lima not only one of the most significant poets writing in Portuguese, but in the wider world. Lima studied journalism in Portugal and attended graduate school in London, where she later worked as a producer for the BBC’s Portuguese Language Service.
She published four books of poetry: O útero da casa (The Home’s Womb, 2004), A dolorosa raiz do micondó (The Painful Root of Micondó, 2006), O país de Akendenguê (The Country of Akendenguê, 2011), and Quando florirem salambás no tecto do Pico (When the Velvet Tamarinds Flower Over Pico [de São Tomé], 2015). In 2023, she published O mundo visto do meio (The World Seen From the Middle, 2023), a book of essays, followed by a one-act play. Her last book, Quando os cães deixaram de falar eoutras fábulas universais (When the Dogs Stopped Talking and Other Universal Fables), a collection of children’s stories drawn from San Toméan oral tradition, appeared in 2025. the first book-length collection of her poetry in English (No Gods Live Here) came out in 2024.
In the closing stanzas of one of her most beautiful poems, “Obscure Song to the Roots,” Lima “identifies” herself as follows: “I who carry God engraved on my forehead/ Who was born on the8th of December/ And bear the name of a Christian Madonna./ The granddaughter of Manuel de Madre Deus dos Santos Lima/ Who discarded the Saints and the Mother of God…/ And challenged the regents intuiting the nation […]/ I and my table of slow conjugations,/ I, this miserly and unconstructed “now,”/ I, the constant in conclusion of my becoming […]/ I, who swallowed the voice of my first grandfather […]/ I, the one who now speaks within me […]/ I, the pilgrim who did not find the route to Juffure/ I, the nomad who shall always return to Juffure” (my translation).
Luís Madureira
University of Wisconsin, Madison