Language of Oppression in Sterling A. Brown’s Poem “Ma Rainey”

Sterling A. Brown is an African American poet, best known for writing poetry distinctively rooted in folklore and authentic black dialect. He skilfully uses dialect and brings out the blues demonstrating his inventive genius. He was successful in drawing on rich folk expressions to vitalize the speech of his characters through the cadences of Southern speech. Generally, Brown wrote the narrative poems in a Southern dialect. He began writing just after the Negro poets had generally discarded conventionalized dialect, with its minstrel traditions of Negro life with its artificial and false sentiment, its exaggerated geniality and optimism. He infused his poetry with genuine characteristic flavour by adopting as his medium the common, racy living speech of the Negro in certain phases of life. Though his poems cannot simply be called dialect poetry, Brown does imitate Southern African American speech, using variant spellings and apostrophes to make dropped consonants. He uses grunts and onomatopoeic sounds to give a natural rhythm to the speech of his characters. One of the finest poems of Sterling A. Brown is “Ma Rainey,” which presents the major aspects of Black dialect exemplifies how Brown exploits black dialect as a device to reveal the sufferings and oppression of the blacks authentically.