Cuban musicologist and novelist Alejo Carpentier understood Cuban son from the 1920s and 1930s to represent Cuba’s most significant musical innovation, due to the way it codified the African-inspired, asymmetric 3–2 or 2–3 rhythmic timeline known as the clave. Clave subsequently became a predominant theoretical framework for Caribbean or “Latin” musicking, shaping popular genres such as merengue and salsa and influencing musical practices as far away as Uruguay and Brazil. Around the same time of son’s peak in popularity, Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén scandalized literary circles by imitating tropes from son music and speech patterns associated with Afro-descendant, underprivileged communities in what he called “son poems.” Although Guillén’s son poems are commonly acknowledged for their incorporation of Afro-Cuban rhythm, little attention has been devoted to the way Guillén, despite having no musical training, developed a poetics of clave. This paper uses Guillén as a starting point to begin to theorize a broader literary practice in the Caribbean that I call “writing in clave.” Not only does writing in clave allow us to rethink the way writers disrupted distinctions between elite and popular culture and intervened in debates concerning race and nation. It also establishes a (sometimes reciprocal, sometimes nonreciprocal) dialogue with soneros, or son lyricists, and demonstrates the way literature and popular music in the Caribbean became spaces of mutual theorization.

Charlie Hankin, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Davis, specializes in music-literature relations in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean and Brazil. His research and teaching bring together sound studies and ethnomusicology, Afro-Latin American thought and poetics, hip-hop studies, and comparative literature. He has completed extensive ethnographic fieldwork and recording collaboration in Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti. In addition to Break and Flow, Hankin is editor of the dossier Words and Rhythm, Sound and Text (Latin American Literary Review, 2024). His current book project, “Writing in Clave,” proposes a rhythmic counterpoint between popular music and literature in the twentieth-century Caribbean. Hankin has also taught, performed, and recorded as a professional violinist. In 2017, he recorded violin tracks and co-produced with Malcoms “Justicia” the Cuban hip-hop album Sentimientos Desafinados, which was nominated for a CubaDisco award.