By the early 2010s, a number of Malawian poets in their twenties had begun to substitute the elliptical expression of earlier generations with a language that resonated with popular idioms. As poetry directed at ‘the people’, its medium is spoken word rather than print, performed to live audiences and distributed through CDs, radio programmes and the internet. Crafted predominantly in Chichewa, the poems also address topics of popular interest. The selection of poetry presented here comes from a female and a male poet, who, unbeknown to each other, prepared poems sharply critical of homosexuality and what they regarded as its foreign and local advocacy. The same poets have also gained success for their love poems, which have depicted intimate desires in remarkably compatible ways for both women and men. The poets who performed ‘homophobic’ verse went against popular gender stereotypes in their depictions of romantic love and female and male desires. This introductory essay, as a contribution to Africa's Local Intellectuals series, discusses the aesthetic challenges that the new poets have launched in the context of Malawi's modern poetry. With regard to gender relations in their love poems, the introduction also considers the poets’ possible countercultural contribution despite their avowed commitment to perform for ‘the people’.

到2010年代初，二十多岁的马拉维诗人开始用流行成语引起共鸣的语言来代替前几代人的椭圆表达。作为针对“人民”的诗歌，其媒介是口头文字，而不是印刷文字，是向现场观众表演的，并通过CD，广播节目和互联网进行分发。这首诗主要是在奇切瓦（Chichewa）制作的，也谈到了人们感兴趣的话题。这里展示的诗选来自一位女性和一位男性诗人，他们彼此不为人知，他们编写的诗歌对同性恋及其对外国和地方的拥护提出了严厉的批评。同一位诗人的爱情诗也获得了成功，爱情诗以对男女都极为兼容的方式描绘了内心的渴望。表演“同性恋”诗句的诗人在描写浪漫爱情以及男女欲望时都违反了普遍的性别刻板印象。这篇介绍性文章，是对《非洲的地方知识分子》系列讨论了新诗人在马拉维现代诗歌背景下提出的美学挑战。关于爱情诗中的性别关系，引言中也考虑了诗人尽管承诺为“人民”表演，但仍可能在反文化方面做出贡献。