Everything Man

enforced quietude, motivating creation, narrative, and possibility.Neruda organizes recurrent scenes of Robeson as and in relation to earth, fire, water, and air, stimulating our reception of Robeson as organic and fundamental.He is portrayed as "the song of germinating earth, the river and the movement of nature," "the potent voice of the water over the fire," and the "voice of the earth" whose "river of a heart was deeper, was wider than the silence."Allusions to water -"you were a subterranean river" -reflect and extend his proximity and relationship to the Show Boat role that made him a star as well as to the laboring peoples on the Mississippi and Niger who taught him his history through the languages and cultures of African peoples. 8 Narrative and lyrical representations of Robeson frequently document sound as the authentic revelation of his beliefs, materiality, and transit across and beneath the oceans.Through music, his character and contributions are uniquely congealed, forming a spectacular and complex substance of body, meaning, and air: the Voice.Once he did not exist But his voice was there, waiting.Light parted from darkness, day from night, earth from the primal waters.And the voice of Paul Robeson was divided from the silence. 9"Once he did not exist but his voice was there, waiting" is as illustrative, as fundamental as "in the beginning was the word."Paul Robeson's Voice -powerful in its mastery and message -carried its own time; coeval with the earth and water, it existed well before he entered the earthly realm and would continue well beyond his departure.The origin story that Neruda tells begins with sound, rather than body, suggesting that Robeson's gift is unique and eternal, unbound by the anxieties of the earth that crumbles and the water that inevitably runs dry.Even as it announces its form, sound dislocates the fixation with the body, freeing us from a focus on the ocular and instead demanding a new vocabulary and experience of blackness and liberation.Neruda orchestrates that extension by listening closely to the vibrations of a quotidian and revolutionary diaspora.As his "Ode" also demonstrates elsewhere, he xvi | a preface stretches the narrative of Robeson's vocal power to various moments of deafness and silence broken only by his song.From the devastation of Hiroshima, darkness and trembling sun, "all people lifted their blood to the light in your voice, and earth and sky, fire and darkness and water rose up with your song."Robeson's Voice -an otherworldly phenomenon -was that which coalesced all else: the speculated fifth element, ether.With roots in Greek lore, this form of extraterrestrial clear sky was mythologized as the air of the gods.Known also as quintessence, ether is beyond our tangible reach but nonetheless is used to explain natural phenomena that we experience daily, such as light and gravity.Yet ether is that which fills spaces that we cannot account for, between definable bodies and ideas.Robeson's Voice is indicative of both that which we experience and that which we struggle to know.His musicology, which listened closely to the interned, imprisoned, dead and dying, was studied and experiential, producing a program of songs that became his signature intervention in a world that called out for new methods, new texts.Neruda provides the language for Robeson's algorithmic song, which was so dense, so compelling, and so powerful in its problem solving that it was capable of organizing collectives beyond his immediate reach.His studied attention to and investment in the style and use of his musics signal his stature as the most important singer of the twentieth century.Yet it is not by his works alone that this claim is true.It is his return to public conversation, representation, and debate during periods of isolation and many decades after his death that assists in proving his stature as global troubadour.Though less iconic than the younger Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Nelson Mandela, Robeson is nonetheless a featured player in our political times, even if his reappearance is as sound rather than image.In the contemporary moment of coordinated Black eruption in the U.S., South Africa, Palestine, England, Canada, and elsewhere, one must believe that Robeson's presence among us is intentional, purposeful.The question then is why.Why is he back?What are the conditions and stakes that make for his reappearance?What are his forms, and what function does he serve?This is the work that I undertake in the chapters that follow.Through engaging the work and labors of artists, musicians, politicians, and activists his role as a world freedom fighter is heard, seen, and felt.Thinking of Robeson as indicative of the five elements is one foundation for the ways in which Everything Man calls him back, again, into Most days I love the work that I do; Everything Man put me in touch with that feeling over and over and over again.It is in large part due to the people who assisted in my thinking that this is true.Strangers and intimates showed incredible generosity and sincerity toward me, even as I speculated about holograms and told of Welsh fancies.There was a kindness and care that this project revealed through these people that I intend to carry with me as a model for engagement.Here I offer my thanks for having influenced me and this project in ways unanticipated but most appreciated.

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