Images of women: Prostitutes and bad/ unworthy women in Lughano Mwangwegho’s poetry

Abstract

The notion of prostitution in Malawian literature has been either avoided or misrepresented. The misrepresentation has mainly stemmed from conservative and patriarchal forces which have guided theory and practice in Malawi and many parts of Africa. Women have mostly been viewed in binary terms as either good or bad, constructive or destructive, civilised or backward. Only recently, there has been a change in approach to the subject of prostitution caused by the emergence of feminism and human rights bodies. Even though this change is moving towards recognition of the prostitute body as autonomous, there are still remnants of patriarchal forces that want to maintain or preserve the peripheral position of the prostitute body in Malawian literature. Apart from this prostitute body, another notion of a bad/unworthy woman has been rarely researched. It is mainly confused or included in the same bracket of prostitution. This paper dwells on these two bodies and how they have been (mis)represented in selected poems of Lughano Mwangwegho’s Echoes of a Whisper. The paper leans on sexuality by focusing on Josephine Donavan’s images of a woman in Beyond the Net: Feminist Criticism as a Moral Criticism. It also dwells on the notion of power relations expounded by Sylvia Tamale.