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.
