Figure 1. Album cover of Arroyando by Joe Arroyo y la Verdad, 1981. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

Death and the dead are common themes in Afro-Caribbean carnival songs. The multiple layers of this macabre concern become evident in a wide variety of songs that ironically address death either as a character with whom we negotiate or one we try to fool. In some cases, death appears as a threat that prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of the flesh that carnival promises. For example, in the Colombian cumbia de gaitasFootnote ¹ entitled “Conmigo que nadie se meta” (Do not mess with me; 1998),Footnote ² the singers exclaim they are too young, only a hundred years old, to be taken away by death. Another example is Roaring Lion’s calypso reflecting on his own passing, “Lion’s Death” (1955). Similarly, Brazilian singer Beth Carvalho praises the eternal agony that makes carnival sambas so lively in “Agoniza mas não more” (It agonizes but never dies; 1978).

Carnival songs provide cues to the listener that insist on attention to death and the dead. A close look at Joe Arroyo’s compositional approach reveals two aspects: First, his music, contrary to the prevailing critical approaches to his work, rejects nationalist limitations; second, Arroyo’s understanding of carnival practice and performance depends on what he terms the musical mechanism (Fundación Ernesto McCausland 1989), which reactivates festive modes of solidarity that challenge colonial divisions between the living and the dead. Arroyo’s use of the instrument known as the Cuban clave, two wooden sticks that lay down a syncopated rhythmic structure, exemplifies the operation of his musical mechanism by exceeding the boundaries of mathematical enumeration. The 3x2 of the clave is a syncopated rhythmic pattern consisting of a two-measure phrase with a specific arrangement of beats and off-beats that structure a great number of songs that we call salsa.

Joe Arroyo (1955–2011) was a legendary black musician from Cartagena de Indias, a city that was one of the major slave ports in the Americas during the colonial period. Renowned for his innovative fusion of cumbia, salsa, and tropical music, he became a pivotal figure in Latin music. Arroyo’s career began in the 1970s, and he gained widespread acclaim for his powerful voice and captivating performances, which celebrate Afro-Colombian culture and heritage. Despite facing personal challenges, including health issues, Arroyo remained an influential force in music until his passing. His legacy continues to inspire artists and fans alike. Thanks to his music and compositions, he has been symbolically adopted by Barranquilla, another Colombian city 80 miles away from his native Cartagena de Indias, where he cultivated a devotional fan base that no other Colombian singer has enjoyed. The devotion of his followers became evident on 27 July 2011, the day after his passing, when the streets and main cathedral in Barranquilla filled with tens of thousands of fans fervently looking for a chance to bid farewell to their idol. The regular life of the city was disrupted in a way that only Arroyo, the undisputed king of carnival, could achieve. From his early live performances with Orquesta La Protesta in the 1970s, which were the reason why Arroyo moved

from Cartagena to Barranquilla during his teenage years (Silva Guzman Reference Guzman2008:35), his acclaimed studio recordings with Fruko y sus Tesos, The Latin Brothers, and Los Líderes; to his solo career in the 1990s and early 2000s, Arroyo marked the history of festivities throughout the nation and, above all, of carnival in Barranquilla, producing the distinctive sonic landscape of the city’s most popular event.

Figure 2. Album cover of El Campeón by Joe Arroyo y La Verdad, 1982. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

The source of his fame is hard to pin down. In one of the last interviews he gave, journalist Antonio Morales asked Arroyo why he was loved so much, but Arroyo, moved to tears by the question, failed to give a proper answer (Morales Reference Morales2011). Critics have misleadingly attributed his fame to a combination of musical genius and a tormented life, sometimes even describing him as a creole rock star (Díaz Reference Díaz2021). These attempts fall short of developing a critical framework that engages Arroyo’s work on its own terms. Another common misunderstanding put forward by Colombian critics simplifies his work to the genre of salsa. Although Arroyo defined himself as a salsero, this categorization had more to do with the legibility the genre provided both nationally and abroad than accuracy.

Proof of this legibility is that his most popular composition, the one that allegedly defines the sounds of Colombian salsa, is “La Rebelión” (The Rebellion). Released on 14 August 1986 on the album Musa Original, the song made Arroyo a Colombian icon. Commonly described as a major contribution to the genre—for example, “the most sublime moment in Colombian salsa” (Lechner Reference Lechner2024)—the song’s most important breakthrough, a fact generally overlooked by critics, constitutes its capacity to confront major Colombian audiences with the usually overlooked history of slavery and black rebellion in his hometown. His compositional approach picks up and amplifies the cries of 17th-century enslaved people that still resonate through the architecture of the colonial city. A vibrant line of the lyrics has Joe Arroyo singing:

While the song seems to reference a distant historical past, Arroyo invokes a ghostly presence—an echo—that still today repeats a black man’s exclamation, “¡No le pegue a la negra!” (Do not beat the black woman!), in a manner that makes it explicit that this seemingly distant historical past still has claims upon the present.

Figure 3. Album cover of Fruko El Grande by Fruko y sus Tesos, 1975. The cover features a young Joe Arroyo on the left. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

The opening lines of the song, spoken by Arroyo in a manner reminiscent of a casual conversation that addresses the listener directly and almost personally, presents dancers with another subtle but effective compositional strategy that brings closer and makes addressable a historical narrative that black, indigenous, and poor mixed-race people could not address, question, or challenge: “Quiero contarle mi hermano un pedacito de la historia nuestra, de la historia negra, caballero” (I want to tell you, my brother, a tiny part of our history, of the black history, fellow).

Mark Q. Sawyer argues that this song deploys a critical strategy similar to W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness ([1903] 2004), in the way that the song disrupts a harmonious understanding of the nation by bringing up subnational and transnational racial projects and counternarratives (2005:90). Sawyer’s argument rightly points out the transnational qualities of salsa as a genre that mixes Afro-Latin musical traditions from multiple countries. However, in his take, the nation appears to be the only locus from which musicians can address audiences and, even more troubling, Sawyer seems to assume that black musicians fulfill their political task only by offering corrections to predominant historical narratives. In this sense, Arroyo’s song gets reduced to a claim of inclusion in an incomplete national narrative. While Arroyo’s attempt at challenging national historical narratives is clear in “La Rebelión,” reducing his compositional approach to correcting national historical narratives limits our understanding of the effects of his work upon his audiences. Unlike Sawyer’s focus on the nation as the primary site of musical engagement, Carlos Quintero Herencia, for instance, instead of defining salsa as an affirmation of a national ethos, has defined the genre as a “recurrent and multidirectional trip” that blurs both the destination and the departure point (2004:195).

Arroyo’s early recordings with the group Fruko y sus Tesos defined a unique type of sound that many have characterized as the origin of the distinctive sound of Colombian salsa. Fruko y sus Tesos successfully transformed the initial imitation of the sounds emanating from NYC and Puerto Rico into a dialog with local genres and sounds that focused on dance and dancers: “the reason for Fruko’s music was dance, and Colombia knows it” (Silva Guzman Reference Guzman2008:45). Thus, circumscribing this dialog to a purely national rather than local sonic identity is misleading. While his sound was foundational for the emergence of salsa in Colombia, the influence and musical elements at play were more diverse than just a national sound. After Arroyo left this ensemble, he began a quite unique exploration that gets ignored by international music critics and scholars who tend to confine it solely to salsa. While his time with Fruko y sus Tesos established him as a key figure in the development of Colombian salsa, reducing his unique compositional approach to salsa overlooks too many aspects. These aspects encompass the musical capacity to bridge national, linguistic, and geographical divides; and to produce a sense of unity that is at the basis of the devotion and admiration Colombians from the Caribbean region have for Arroyo.

Figure 4. Album cover of Musa Original by Joe Arroyo y la Verdad, 1986. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

Instead of a reaffirmation of national identity, a close listening to his musical arrangements and compositional approach reveals that Joe Arroyo’s music is concerned with the capacity of sound to offer a multidirectional journey that unites the Caribbean experience beyond the limitations of borders, geographical barriers, and even temporal restrictions. Jamaican anthropologist Charles V. Carnegie defined this mode of transnational dwelling, a major aspect rooted in the Caribbean historical experience, as “border violation” (2002:45). Border violations challenge the constitution of the discrete nation-state as natural or, as Deborah A. Thomas puts it, “the notion that the state was the legitimate container for the aspirations of its citizens” (2024:84).

Salsa, as Arroyo’s initial approach to music, offered an aural landscape from abroad that, nonetheless, presented an uncanny familiarity that opened up the possibility to explore, within a different sound frame, local rhythms in a fashion legible to international audiences. With the first salsa band he was part of, La Protesta, for example, Arroyo witnessed the capacity of music to put forward claims to social justice closely linked to a transnational black experience that transcended his experience as a Colombian national. Salsa’s explicit referencing of folkloric rhythms, such as Afro-Cuban rumba and Puerto Rican bomba and plena, paved an exploratory path that Joe Arroyo undertook like no other musician of his times.

Although Arroyo’s folkloric explorations are less legible, and consequently less popular outside of the confines of the Caribbean Colombian coast, they ultimately shaped the modes in which Arroyo engaged salsa compositions as he found connections that evaded the evident lineages present in salsa. These alternative lineages evidenced the interconnected modes of Afro-Colombian folklore dialogs, with less explicit latitudes of the Caribbean, that transcend national borders (Glissant [1990] 2010:171).

The adoration Colombian fans along the Caribbean coast profess for Arroyo connects directly to the effects his music produced on the dance floor. Instead of an affirmation of a fragmented and hyperlocal national identity, Arroyo performs the Caribbean relational potential that Antonio Benítez-Rojo defined as the “rhizome of the Caribbean psyche” ([1992] 1996:255) and Kamau Brathwaite described when he observed that “unity is submarine”—a hidden, interconnected network beneath the surface, connecting diverse islands, territories, and cultures (1974:64). Despite the attempts to prescribe the national in Arroyo’s music, the corporeal reactions and intra-actions that his music arouses in listeners/dancers connect them to that larger Caribbean that cannot be delimited by nationalist understandings of music, genre, and culture.

Figure 5. Album cover of Con Gusto y Gana by Joe Arroyo y la Verdad, 1981. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

Take, for example, the song that many consider the unofficial anthem of his adoptive city, “En Barranquilla me Quedo,” released on the album Fuego en Mi Mente in 1988, where he describes Barranquilla as part of the Antilles islands. Geographically, Barranquilla does not belong to the Antilles. Nonetheless, Arroyo declares Barranquilla is “la mejor tierra Antillana” (the best Antillean land). It is not that Arroyo’s geographical knowledge lacks rigor. On the contrary, his rigorous approach to redefining Barranquilla’s identity reveals that in his domain the salsa song becomes that which Quintero Herencia describes as a “a module for the excitement of the multiple temporalities and materialities that traverse the Caribbean” (2004:201).

Arroyo’s capacity to connect to listening and dancing experiences that are rooted in local traditions and to those of other Caribbean locations is key to understanding the enduring fervor audiences have for Arroyo’s musical work. Writing about the origins and developments in 20th-century Congolese music, from rumba to highlife, Achille Mbembe describes the corporeal effects provoked by the confluence of internal (folkloric) and external (Latin music and jazz) influences in musical performance. He refers to these as a confusion of the corporeal and the fleshly that seeks to reorganize the colonial limitations imposed upon native notions and ways of experiencing time and space. Mbembe describes the experience: “cultural artifacts local and foreign rubbed shoulders, juxtaposing places near and far” (2005:76).

In one particular song—a carnival salsa—Arroyo enacts this entanglement of near and far through the capaciousness of the syncopated beat of the Cuban clave, both temporally and spatially. In articulating this entanglement, he enables a radical understanding of his work—a redemptive quality—that challenges and alters the colonially produced divisions of time and space, reanimating carnival performance’s capacity to become a place of gathering among the living and the dead.

In his song “Carnaval,” originally released on his first solo album Arroyando in 1981 and rereleased in 1997 on the LP El Rey del Carnaval (The Carnival King), Arroyo moves within the temporal conditions of carnival and the dead.Footnote ³ Taking the normative experience of linear time as a departure point, he generates an alternative temporal experience that challenges linearity.

Figure 6. Album cover of Fuego en mi Mente by Joe Arroyo y la Verdad, 1988. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

The first part of the song makes evident that the realm of carnival is dominated by a constant tension between longing for carnivals long gone and the desire for more in the future, a tension that underscores the possibilities for social renewal enabled by festive promises. “Carnaval” opens with a flash of memory: “Imaginé el bombo azul turquí, cuando llegué al carnaval en mi primera vez” (I imagined the turquoise blue bass drum/when I arrived to carnival for the very first time) (Arroyo Reference Arroyo1997). A Cuban tres, a stringed instrument that emerged in the late 19th century and is associated with genres such as nengón and changüí, and more widely known for son cubano, accompanies the opening lines of the song in the background. Immediately after, the rest of the instruments come in with the contrabass, piano, and congas marking up the tempo of the music and announcing the clave pattern that will provide the rhythmic structure on which dancers will ride until the end of the song.

“Carnaval” expresses a devotion for carnival that speaks of the networks of care and sustenance that have made carnivals possible throughout the Americas. The interplay between musical instruments and lyrics deserves close attention capable of decrypting the messages, meanings, and genealogies submerged and safeguarded in the corporeality interanimated through dancing bodies. “Carnaval del Congo de oro, cómo me eriza la piel” (The golden Congo’s carnival makes my skin crawl), sings Arroyo in the final lines of the first section of the song. The reference to the skin crawl speaks of a modality of remembrance well-known in carnival circles and widely mentioned in Brazilian carnival music, particularly in samba songs. One of these sambas, “Vai Passar” by Chico Buarque, alerts and reminds carnival revelers that the very act of parading and marching through the streets forces us to re-member. Carnival always serves as a reenactment in this sense. Chico Buarque’s lyrics imply that the very purpose of celebrating carnival is to get these chills—to feel your skin crawl.Footnote ⁴

From a carnivalesque perspective, these chills leave a mark on our bodies’ very fleshFootnote ⁵—and I say this not simply as a carnival scholar but mainly as a carnival practitioner myself—the act of remembering historically meaningful but understudied issues, particularly the history of slavery, racism, and the joyful modes we have been using to resist brutality and social loss.

Figure 7. Album cover of El Rey del Carnaval by Joe Arroyo, Reference Arroyo1997. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

The etymology of “carnival,” linked to the Latin term carne levare or “farewell to the flesh,” provides a fascinating, if contradictory, reference to the resignification of carnival. This is especially relevant if we understand slavery, following carnival theorist Claire Tancons’s suggestion, as “a circum-Atlantic commerce of human flesh” (2015:16). Although Tancons dismisses this etymology in favor of the apocryphal carrus navalis, a reference to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, she reaffirms that the aesthetics of Caribbean carnival constantly bring up the history of slavery as a history of the flesh. Flesh, in contraposition to bones, manifests that which evades the archive, in a binary understanding of performance studies that opposes the archive and the repertoire and fails to recognize how performance bridges the two. Rebecca Schneider argues that the archive is defined by its disregard for flesh. She writes, “in the archive, flesh is given to be that which slips away. According to archive logic, flesh can house no memory of bone. In the archive, only bone speaks memory of flesh” (2011:100). The presence of flesh in carnival, however, and the way that carnival is codified in the flesh, in the attention songs pay to so-called aesthetic chills or how dances are transmitted intergenerationally, challenges settler-colonial binarized notions of memory and history and proposes an interstitial opening that animates and is animated by carnival performance.

Following the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye refuses to place the flesh within the domain of objects apprehended in ethnographic categories of observation, thus opening up the promise of radical domains of knowledge that the field of Black studies pursues. Rather than seeing the flesh as readily knowable or easily categorized, he considers its ensconced quality—hiding both within and beyond conventional understanding—and defines the enfleshment of the human as a category that “designates those dimensions of human life cleaved by the working together of depravation and deprivation” (2014:39). Paradoxically, even in the face of such depravation and deprivation, what persists is the flesh itself. In carnival’s insistence on the flesh, then, lies a potential to not merely bridge, but to overwhelm the binary of archive and performance that the repertoire seems to contain.

The first section in Arroyo’s song acknowledges a split in carnival that functions as a double tension between memory and death. The exclamation “No quiero morir sin bailarte otra vez” (I do not want to die without dancing you again) positions the singer among the memories of previous carnivals and the yearning for carnivals yet to come. The exclamation gives way to another section that the Cuban tres leads again. The tres does not simply mark the transition from sections of the song but transports the listener/dancer into interstitial temporalities.

The second section of “Carnaval” takes us to carnival itself. Costumed dancers have already overwhelmed the city in waves, which the lyrics describe as murga, designating both a type of festive ensemble or party and a riot or fight. At this point, the improvisational section of the song bursts in. The piano picks up the tempo while the rest of the instruments are quiet for a few seconds. This compositional silence foregrounds the percussive piano that helps the dancer to identify the improvisatory structure that will drive the song until the conclusion. The clave is the first instrument to rejoin the piano with the trumpets, sax, and trombone joining right after. The call and response that enables and constrains the singer’s performance desperately and joyously tells us about someone who needs to be saved: “¡Sálvenlo ahora, Joselito Carnaval!” (Save him now, Joselito Carnaval!).

Joselito Carnaval belongs to Barranquilla’s festive imagination, a character who makes a particular appearance that marks the end of the carnival season. On the last day of carnival, he is presented as a corpse that is paraded throughout the streets in a funeral ceremony that marks the end of the festivities and mocks the seriousness that characterizes the Lent period and the preparation for Christ’s death. Colombian folklorist Guillermo Abadía Morales tells us:

Carnival season in Barranquilla opens with the garabato dance; a dance/fight between a dancer and death. The victory of the dancer over death opens the carnival season, which starts right after Christmas and closes several weeks later, on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, when the streets are filled with multiple funeral processions that bid farewell to Joselito Carnaval. The cause of his passing is unclear and, indeed, there is not much attention paid to it. On that final day, carnival revelers dress in black and parade through the streets carrying Joselito’s corpse inside an open coffin. The mourners dance, drink alcohol, and loudly complain about the miseries that Joselito’s passing will bring to their lives. The mourners’ open display of pain weirdly mixes with joyous cries. Death does not appear in the streets as the end of a journey. Instead, it appears as the promise and certainty of more life.

Colombian carnival researcher Edgar Rey Sinning argues that the origin of this tradition dates to the early 20th century when a former guerilla member named Nicolás Ariza performed the Joselito ritual for the first time. Rey Sinning, whose book argues that carnival performance requires an understanding of political protest, proposes that the origin of Joselito Carnaval is linked to the tradition of political protest the festive calendar allows. While the funeral parade has the passing of Joselito at the center of the performance, his widow and mourners take advantage of such an opportunity to chant lyrics against the local and national government and denounce social problems they think lack proper official attention: “it is those protest voices of the workers that truly allow us to view folklore in political terms” (1992:99).

Figure 8. Joselito Carnaval parade, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Carnaval de Barranquilla S.A.S.)

However, Rey Sinning’s argument does not reduce the political potential of carnival performance to the message that revelers deliver. Instead, the political emerges in participants’ capacity to engage in solidarity with strangers. He beautifully summarizes this capacity:

This moving account of the festive solidarity carnival generates contrasts with the individualistic experience the author denounces throughout his book. Capitalism, Rey Sinning argues, has been eroding the traditional double spectator-actor condition (where participants are both observers and active performers) and producing “mere” spectators who cannot experience the overwhelming sense of solidarity that he describes as the ultimate political potential of carnival practice. Rey Sinning’s anticapitalist sense of solidarity, a “consent not to be a single being” to use Glissant’s formulation (in Diawara Reference Diawara2011:5), resonates with current understandings of community-based support networks. These types of networks were essential to the formation of carnival in the Americas. Cabildos de Nación, for example, often described as mutual aid societies because of the solace they gave to enslaved people recently arrived to the new world and the support they offered to both freed and enslaved populations during the colonial period, fostered multiple carnival groups, krewes, collectives, comparsas, and a wide array of carnival ensembles throughout the Americas (Childs Reference Childs2006; Barcia Zequeira et al. Reference Barcia Zequeira, Rodríguez Reyes and Niebla Delgado2012). Mutual aid is a form of organized solidarity, writes Dean Spade, that “exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative. It builds faith in people power and fights the demobilizing impacts of individualism and hopelessness-induced apathy” (2020:137).

Figure 9. Death of the Garabato dance, 2022. (Photo courtesy of Carnaval de Barranquilla S.A.S.)

Figure 10. Joselito Carnaval parade, 2022. (Photo courtesy of the Carnaval de Barranquilla S.A.S.)

Joe Arroyo’s compositional approach in “Carnaval” is predicated upon this intercorporeal and crosstemporal solidarity, which resonates with Fred Moten’s reformulation of Glissant’s formulation of anticapitalist solidarity (2018:243) as the aesthesis that perpetually moves in and as sociality. Arroyo’s sense of carnival solidarity seeks to rescue Joselito from the timelessness of death, or at least that type of timelessness that surfaces with strict divisions between life and death.

Arroyo momentarily revives Joselito as he reminds us that carnival opens up the possibility of salvation. He urges us to do something more than simply accept Joselito’s senseless passing: “sálvenlo ahora!” (save him now!) commands the chorus, exhorting the listeners/dancers to do something more than to passively accept Joselito’s death. Arroyo responds to the chorus: “Ay! Joselito no te vaya’ ahora, escucha Joselito, mira Joselito” (Ay! Joselito do not leave, listen to me Joselito, look at me Joselito), as if trying to convince him to stay among the party of the living, to linger a bit longer. Arroyo’s musical performance refuses the inevitability of death as much as it appeals to the symbolic Joselito. This refusal, however transient, bridges the gap separating the living and the dead.

In After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (2018), Joshua Chambers-Letson provides useful insights into the functioning of the festive and its intrinsic relationship with death and performance. Chambers-Letson takes up the relationship of the field of performance studies and the theme of the Derridian “hauntology of performance” in the work of Diana Taylor (Reference Taylor2003:142), to think about how performance allows us not only to remember the dead but also to continue meeting the dead in performance. The specter, which Chambers-Letson defines as “an utterance from the past with a claim upon the present” (2018:195), defies the radical divide between the living and the dead. In this sense, performance emerges as “a means of sharing this burden [of death] and of keeping the dead alive” (31).

Therefore, performance enables a continuum of life and death in modes that activate and illuminate how carnival challenges traditional memorials and memorialization, prompting a critical examination of the redemptive qualities inherent in carnival performance. Joe Arroyo’s interpretation of the performative possibilities that Joselito embodies implies recognition of the redemptive potential of music.

What does “redemptive” mean in regard to Arroyo’s appeal to save Joselito? Wilson Harris, the Guyanese novelist, theorist, and carnival devotee offers his concept of “redemptive love,” which refers to the capacity to connect with the potential for renewal that music and sound embody. He introduced this possibility of love in The Infinite Rehearsal, the second novel of his Carnival Trilogy. Time, suggests one of its spectral characters, is a partial and stained measure of events, particularly of colonialism, that imposes a limitation on the redemptive qualities of love that carnival embraces and enacts: “Time is not love. Divine love. Time is a character of universality incorrigibly stained by partial, biased, and cruel forces” (1993:225). For Harris, carnival carries the redemptive potential to “break a one-track commitment to history” (325). Sound and music, according to Harris, disrupt the unidirectionality of linear time imposed through colonial violence.

There are many aspects that connect Arroyo and Harris, even though their works have never been placed in dialog. To highlight just two salient points, both are South Americans with a deep connection to the Caribbean, and carnival plays a significant role in their artistic concerns. Harris’s focus on the redemptive qualities of carnival illuminates Arroyo’s compositional emphasis on solidarity as a central feature of carnival performance.

Harris understands redemption beyond the confines of Christian theology. In this sense, Dominique Dubois tells us that redemption entails an “imaginative revision of the past” (2002:196), which resonates with Nathaniel Mackey’s exploration of Harris’s “arts of imagination” (1999:246). Mackey describes this as a form of fabulation that restores the past’s potential to remain open to both revision and its “yet-to-be-inhabitedness” (1993:164). Thus, the past is viewed not as a privileged site for truth-telling but as an interstitial opening we can imaginatively inhabit, allowing us to break the cycle of colonial repetition by envisioning the infinite unrealized potential cruelly denied to colonized collectives.

Jürgen Habermas recognized, in an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy that he describes as a form of visionary “redemptive criticism,” a liberatory potential in breaking historical cycles; however, Habermas also identified a significant limitation: while such redemptive visions of history can disrupt the development of history as a “cursed cycle” that condemns humanity—and the dead—to repeated barbarism, the impact of these visions remains confined to the very particular forms of the individual, such as the shaman or mystic (1979:39). In contrast, Harris recognized in carnival, according to Mackey, the potential to transform a limited individual vision into a “birthing ground for the revelation of original and authentic rhythms” (Mackey Reference Mackey1980:60). This transformation collectivizes that raptured experience, turning it into a practical rehearsal of festive solidarity in which musical performance enables the opening up of redemptive possibilities.

C.L.R. James, writing about Harris, noted his emphasis on “extreme boundary limit situations” that reveal the active ways in which the past, including the dead, inhabit the present and its potential futures (1965:12). Carnival offers collectives a repetitive extreme boundary situation, that is to say, an opportunity to exist outside of the ordinary. That extreme boundary situation safeguards the animative forms of the dismembered and massacred sociality by offering the collective opportunity to rescue endangered forms of their social life threatened by colonial and capitalist domination. Arroyo’s call to save Joselito revives these networks of solidarity among carnival participants that cannot merely be remembered or memorialized; they must instead be activated—or inhabited—through a multitude of embodied coactions that interanimate the richness generated in the interstices of music and dance. The generative capacity encoded in the syncopated rhythm of the clave and in Arroyo’s plea to save Joselito recuperates forms of sociality and temporal entanglements that colonialism severed.

The final section in Arroyo’s “Carnaval,” which is arranged musically as salsa and gives space for improvisation, recuperates Joselito from physical death to remind us of the fact that carnival celebrations create, in their unrepeatable repeatability, the space and time for renewed communication and communion among the living and the dead. And again, here we need to listen in detail to the improvisational qualities of this section and how it enables the emergence of an experience that challenges colonial time and space. Referring to Afro-Cuban musician Alfredo Rodriguez, Alexandra Vazquez calls this capacity the “mystical qualities” of music, which she describes as “tangible obscurities that cannot be grasped without recourse to some sort of spiritual means. They require leaps of faith, especially one’s familiar sense of sense” (2013:57).

In an interview with Ernesto McCausland in 1989, while recording his album En Acción, Arroyo declares that his musical arrangements obey the rules of the dance floor and, more precisely, the reactions of the dancers, which is also to say that he follows the particular modes in which dancers listen in detail. Arroyo played, composed, and arranged an impressive number of songs that could correspond to multiple musical genres. Instead of numbering and accounting for such a wide multiplicity of genres, he affirms in that same interview that he plays music for the dancer—something he calls “música bailable” (danceable music). When the interviewer asks him why it takes him so long to finish a composition, Arroyo answers that music is mathematics that responds to laws that go well beyond numbers but that nonetheless correspond to some numerical principles to which, however, he does not subject himself. For Arroyo, it seems, the mathematical qualities of music become evident in the improvisational relationality that he develops with the dancers—a form of relationality that redeems him from the burden of individualism. Unfortunately, McCausland can only register the apparent contradiction, so he continues to pressure Arroyo by asking “but why do you change so much?” to which Arroyo sharply replies:

No, no, no! I can’t think of myself but of the musical mechanism… Music is mathematics. I cannot be like… I must fill up the four beats with so many quarter notes and eighth notes. No, I think of the dancer…of the spectator. I think about the people. I come up with a theme now. The track is finished. And then in the hotel, I start to dance to it by myself. I pretend to be the spectators. I become the person who dances loose, the one who dances tight, the one who is in love. I must find the story of the son to each one so that number reaches everyone. That is my musical concept because I make danceable music. (Fundación Ernesto McCausland [1989] 2020:6:42–47:26)

Figure 11. Album cover of En Acción by Joe Arroyo y su Orquesta La Verdad, 1989. (Image courtesy of Discos Fuentes, Colombia)

Arroyo’s musical mechanism, as he defines it in this brief but revealing answer, requires him to avoid the limitations of his individuality. The mechanism’s autonomous functioning works within a mathematical framework that violates that same mathematical structure, despite its very dependence upon numbers. Arroyo’s musical mechanism cares for that which exceeds the numerical, as well as the individual and the national, and, in that excess, constitutes something more than a simple negation of the numerical. This is also to say that there is no contradiction in Arroyo’s argument as that is how he operates the musical mechanism he fervently describes.

Deborah A. Thomas has recently reminded us how Caribbean artists and intellectuals deploy this mathematical maneuvering as a “rejection of linearity and the embrace of dynamic unpredictable systems that have helped us to imagine nonteleological, non-property-based orientations to social and political thriving” (2024:86). This perspective resonates with Katherine McKittrick’s critique of the “mathematics of unlivingness,” which reproduces the archival numerical evidence of black objecthood and anti-blackness. McKittrick advocates for strategies in black studies that “allow us to read the archive not as a measure of what happened, but as indicators of what else happened” (2014:20). Engaging with the archive’s enumeration of violence—while resisting the logic that made this violence possible—requires attention to what exceeds the enumerable: “the unspeakable, the unwritten, the unbearable and unutterable, the unseeable and the invisible, the uncountable and unindexed […] that which cannot be seen or heard or read but is always there” (22).

The Cuban clave plays a major role in how Arroyo manifests the mathematical excess required for his musical mechanism to operate; in his music and lyrics there is a constant concern for that which overwhelms the mathematically discreet that manifests as separate, distinct, and countable. Musicians like Michi Sarmiento expressed their surprise when they discovered that Arroyo did not compose using standard sheet notation. Instead, he relied on the syncopated pattern of the clave, crediting it with all his compositional talent: “what I like is the clave. People see it as insignificant, but that is the key” (Audiovisuales 1966).

Alexandra Vazquez refers to clave rhythm as the “intuited pulse of Cuban music” (2022:88) and Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz, for example, calls it “the deepest and most emotive expression of the Cuban soul” only to immediately scold the clave for being “too promiscuous” ([1952] 1984:101). The accusation makes evident that the clave enjoys a type of musical autonomy that, despite its apparent simplicity, holds an autogenerative capaciousness that Arroyo’s compositional approach embraced.

Sylvia Wynter, for instance, recognized the autonomous tendency of Caribbean music, exemplified by the reggae beat, and attributed it the capacity to produce an altered experience of the now. This tendency generates what she terms the “now of the ritual self” (2022:486). It disrupts—or, more precisely, helps us disengage from—institutionally imposed structures and from “an existentially hegemonic quantified sense of time as labor time,” a transcendental religious experience that only those who partake can experience (488).

Arroyo’s musical mechanism, his access to this autonomous machinic entity, depends on what Fred Moten refers to as “liberatory individuation,” an individual force that negates the social dismemberment that imposed and normalized a brutal individuation that severed familial, kinship, and social structures (2022). The dismemberment inflicted upon individuals who were rendered “flesh” was also a dismemberment of various forms of sociality that demarcated the fact of total objectification (Spillers Reference Spillers1987:68). Moten goes on to observe that “every move towards an establishment of forms of black social solidarity were under constant duress and constant dismemberment and fragmentation” (2022).

The a-systematic system that makes Arroyo’s mechanism functional overwhelms both the musical and the mathematical insofar as its potential resides in its pure excess. Consequently, it requires us to conceive of Arroyo’s musical practice as a manifestation of solidarity that overflows notions of the virtuoso and illuminates creative entanglements that challenge theories of the artist as an individual genius. His constant reminder, as in the answer he gives to McCausland, that he composes in collaboration with a spectral dancer with whom he is in dialog and communion, speaks of the kind of committed dancer/listener with whom his music establishes a relation. This is the type of listener/dancer who is committed to the work that musical performance imposes and that Vazquez acknowledges when she writes of “the listener who does not expect music to merely serve, the listener who assumes effort as part of the experience” (2022:84). Vazquez recognized this laborious listener in the challenging and demanding structures, particularly through polyrhythm, through which musicians ask us to work harder. However, acknowledging such a listener/dancer makes evident the modes in which listening evades the passive position traditionally given to those who listen. The listener here, and in Arroyo’s compositional approach, appears with a force that actively shapes music’s potential to reanimate severed forms of solidarity.

Arroyo’s exhortation to save Joselito from this endless repetition of anonymous death becomes an invitation to dance an otherwise world into being and to take advantage of the unrepeatable repeatability of carnival performance. There is a clear invitation that Arroyo places in that final section of the song that manifests the need to disrupt homogenous repetition. Arroyo’s musical mechanism enables us to undertake the task of a redemptive dance capable of regenerating forms of solidarity that traffic among the realms of the living and the dead. Carnival’s repetitive extreme boundary situation enables an opening of the past, where music serves as the technological condition of possibility that allows us to enter this collective reinhabitation. Carnival’s redemptive potential resides in its irreducible and incalculable capacity—its capacious generativity—to have us come together in unexpected, problematic, and solidary collective ensembles.