A Brown Girl Dead Literary Elements

The speaker of the poem is an anonymous external narrator who brings a perspective of ironic commentary on the events and actions of the narrative.

The poem has no specific meter and conforms to no particular form, but it does engage a specific rhyme pattern: abab cdcd.

The title character is identified through metaphor as “Dark Madonna.”

Repetition of “S” words and sounds: “She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing / To see herself tonight.”

The controlling irony of the poem is that the mother of the dead girl is making such an effort to introduce whiteness at the funeral service of her daughter with the subtext of systemic American racism in which white society completely ignores the death of anonymous young brown girls who die young.

African American Poetry/Harlem Renaissance Literature

The time is not specified, but the setting is a ritualistic funeral ceremony.

The poem gains meaning through its ironic narrative tone which subverts the straightforward description of the text.

Protagonist: Perhaps surprisingly, the protagonist of the poem is actually the anonymous narrator because it is through his ironic perspective that the textual description is subtly inverted and ironically interpreted. Antagonist: internalized racism represented by the mother’s unwitting subjugation of herself and daughter to the myth of white superiority.

The conflict at the heart of the poem is in the tension created by the straightforward surface description within the text and the subversion created by the ironic subtext of the speaker’s commentary.

The poem reaches its climax with the final imagery of the poem that presents two separate and opposing possible interpretations. If the imagined imagery of the young girl happily dancing at the sight of all the whiteness marking her funeral preparations stems from her mother, it confirms that she has successfully passed along her own internalized racism. If it is the narrator imagining this image of dancing, the description of the daughter’s alleged sense of pride becomes ironic and calls into question whether the young girl’s innocence extended to accepting her mother’s failure to recognize the inherent racism in the propaganda of white superiority.

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“Lord Death has found her sweet” is an understated means of suggesting the girl’s state of innocence unbefouled by terrible experiences.

“Dark Madonna” is an allusion to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, and is used as another symbol representing the innocence of the dead girl.

The references to whiteness throughout the poem serve through repetition to become a metonymic motif in which their presence becomes a code for the mother’s striving to better herself and her daughter by trying to replicate white society. The whiteness of the roses and candles and the implication of being attired in a white dress all use the power of metonymic association to subtly suggest that the mother’s internalized racism takes the form of an appeal to whiteness as a mark of superiority.

“Lord Death” personifies the abstract concept of dying into a figure similar in concept to the Grim Reaper bringing death with his arrival.

The final imagery of the poem presents the dead daughter being “so proud she’d dance and sing” at seeing the way her mother has prepared her daughter for ritualistic funeral or burial ceremony. Textually, this imagery seems to stem from the mother’s imagination as a description of how her daughter would react to her extensive funeral preparations. At the same time, however, it can be interpreted as hyperbolically cynical by the speaker who is the one actually imagining the daughter’s response ironically. The phrase “so proud” would read straightforwardly if this imagery springs from the mother, but the very same phrase would be heavily accented with sarcasm if the imagery springs from the speaker.

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