Animal Metaphor, Satire, and Political Resistance in Jack Mapanje's Poetry

Abstract

This article examines the use of animal metaphor, satire, and political ridicule in Jack Mapanje's poetry. Located within ecocritical and zoocritical concerns, the study reads animals not as decorative images alone but as charged figures through which Mapanje exposes tyranny, censorship, fear, and betrayal in postcolonial Malawi. In his poems, chickens, chameleons, wagtails, beasts, and other creatures become signs of vulnerability, cunning, violence, submission, and survival. These images enable the poet to criticise the authoritarian politics of Hastings Kamuzu Banda's regime and to show how ordinary citizens were reduced to a condition of fear under dictatorial power. The paper also recognises the ethical tension within such poetic practice. Mapanje's use of animals strengthens his satire, but it may at times repeat cultural assumptions that associate animal life with irrationality, cruelty, or moral decline. Even with this tension, animal imagery remains one of the poet's most effective instruments of political resistance. Through animal allegory, Mapanje turns poetry into a space of memory, protest, and moral judgement. The study argues that his animal metaphors connect ecology, culture, and politics, and that they offer a distinctive way of reading resistance poetry from Malawi.