Customer Reviews

Song From The Forest

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The author will have no need of any defense from anyone, least of all myself, however I felt obliged to write something, especially as a retort to the reviewer attacking the author's 'demeaning western imperialism'. Anyone who has actually spent time in rural central africa will know that the items Mr Sarno offers to the villagers are an everday form of currency and in some cases a basic courtesy. Pygmies like to smoke. It may upset us to think so, but they also quite like to wear tee shirts, use machetes, and listen to radios. For the most part, they do not spend their days wrapped in bark cloth. Many no longer live in leaf huts. Pygmies everywhere in central africa are in direct contact with 'western' influences. In some cases, these influences can be seen as detrimental to their culture. In most cases, we are hardly in a position to decide which are or are not. Louis Sarno is a man who has spent many years of his life living the life of the pygmies and he understands the real threats to the most important aspects of their way of life. He is a man who recongnises the contradictions, the ugliness and the beauty of different ways of living, and he achieves this perspective through living out those contradictions in his daily life. His account is an honest one of the reality in which pygmies live their lives in this part of central africa. It is neither glorified nor demeaning. While we sit around listening to magical recordings of the pygmy's transcendant music and imagine ourselves immersed in a shimmering rainforest home, most of their forests are being logged, and their culture flattened with similar efficiency. Louis Sarno is not an agent of this destruction but someone with a deep personal attachement to these people who simply gives us a first hand account of his experience of village life in central africa. A real account, where people fall in love, and the great leveller that is human emotion and experience runs free despite the considerable cultural differences that exist.

Louis Sarno has been writing an extraordinary book, because he made extraordinary experiences. There are only a few people who spend a longer time with a primeval forest tribe. For Sarno it was at first the interest for the singing and the music of the pygmies in the heart of Africa which fascinated and enthralled him. Then he was enticed by something banal and at the same time mysterious: the looks, the dancing movements and promising gestures of a primeval forest girl.
The book describes the life of pygmies at the fringe of civilization very precisely. Sarno is becoming a member of the family, who lives same like the aboriginies and yet is not able to identify himself completely with them. Much remains mysterious and outlandish. The author sways between liking and admiration on one side and disappointment and annoyance on the other side. He is not a great exploring adventurer. Often he appears to be very naiv.

But the recurrent thread is the unusual love story. With stunning honesty the author describes how he is constantly led around by the nose. Everybody in the village knows, that the girl is only committed to cuff the relatively wealthy white man to the line (he supplies the pygmies with goodies like cigarettes, kitchen ware, clothes). Except himself!
He is niddling-noddling to an fro between doubts and hopes. He is regarded as married and he is imagining to be a husband, but they arrive to nothing more than an exchange of looks and scarce words. The chosen one even does not dwell with him and mostly he does not even get a sight of her, if so, she ignores him and gives him deliberately the cold shoulder. He is consoled till the next night, he is grudging, he is forgiving, he nurtures the seeds of hope until they are trodden upon and he falls even deeper in love with that same girl, the most beautiful in the village, on the next feast. This unlucky abeyance is persevering. It is touching, sometimes amusing how the author is made a fool or is making a fool out of himself and keeps to his foolishness. Even in his later writing the blinded man seems not to be ready to accept his error and deception. Somehow one recognizes oneself in him. Who did not as well give himself to vanity? The end of the story is let open. Sarno departs and returns. He departs again, always after months, and he returns.
Sarno also reports truly about spiritualist practises of the forest dwellers and describes the psychological and psychosomatic effects. Once he is taking part in such an event for which there is no natural scientific explanation. People disappear into nothingness to re-appear all of a sudden. Sarno is taking part himself in telepathic events, he believes. He does not succeed in teaching the savages civilization: disease avoiding hygienics, limitation of the use of narcotics like tobacco, alcohol, drugs - he uses them himself - protection against germs and carriers of diseases. His own life- style seems not to be exemplary, his admonishment is not pervading.
He likes the magic rituals and dances as much as he hates the hard circumstances of life. He lives between the two cultures. Many become sick or perish. Interestingly he is getting acknowledged with a settlement of a missionary couple, which apparently does not have all these problems. But he is not coming to any conclusions. Perhaps he is in the error that it should be sufficient to bring to the "primitive savages" sufficient alimentation and medicine and then all is right.
One is missing in this book the serious reflection about the experienced. Yet it is very informative. This is one of the "jungle-books" worth reading and authentic. And the story about Ngbali, the primeval forest beauty, is heart-rending. Apparently love does not know any social conventions and the characteristics of the soft gender are in the whole world not always soft! Woe betide a man who falls for a woman! Males, always activate your reason at the right time!

The enthralling story of Sarno's life among the pygmies. It leaves you with the burning desire to visit Africa and find your own peace.

To round out the experience of this auto biographical story, please buy some of the music from the forest recorded by Louis Sarno. You won't regret it.

New Jersey-born Sarno, drawn to Africa by the music of Pygmies, leaves his job and flies to Zaire on a one-way ticket, unable to afford the return.

The Ba-Benjelle Pygmies, living in a mosquito-infested camp on the edge of the rainforest, accept him as a paying guest, feed him on tadpoles and hound him for cigarettes and town-brewed liquor. In a month he's broke and disillusioned.

Then suddenly they draw the curtain a crack. He's given meat and forest spirits begin to appear at the dances. They take him on a hunt, a previously hidden activity. "Who in his right mind would want to trade such an invigorating day's work for the drudgery of life in the fields?...The women strolled through the forest as though they were in a vast grocery store - only here everything was free....No two days were the same."

Forced home by malaria he returns two years later with musical commissions and a book contract and follows the Ba-Benjelle on their seasonal move into the forest. The tribe is transformed. The most dissolute are now the most industrious. Everyone seems poised, graceful and relaxed.

Unfortunately he also falls in love. Sarno's obsession with a 16-year-old he has never spoken to becomes irritating. But only an obsessive could have endured the hardships and frustrations Sarno does to discover and communicate the mysterious beauty of the Ba-Benjelle's lives. An intriguing, moving, infuriating book.

York County Coast Star

Not so much a travelogue as a bizzare cross between "Heart of Darkness" and "Lolita".

One thing you can say for the author: he's astonishingly honest about every petty, self-aggrandizing, naive and delusional sensation that crosses his mind. If this had been a piece of fiction, the portrayal of a classic unreliable narrator would have been a masterpiece. I definitely give the guy credit for a vivid and direct writing style.

The bit about the music was nice, but I found the descent of Luis Sarno from clueless idealist into clueless Kurtz-style nutcase utterly absorbing. A fascinating and painful story of culture clash and the universality of human greed and weakness, with a cringe-making 'love' story that makes you feel awful for all concerned. I certainly enjoyed this book, though not for the reasons advertised!

As another reviewer mentioned, the first half of the book is an excellent account of the Ba-Benjelle Pygmies and their music. If you have been entranced by the music of Central Africa as the author and many people around the world have, this part of the book will feed your hunger for more information.

However, not only is the second half tediously devoted to a delusional one-way "love affair," but the author also reveals himself, unintentionally, to be the worst kind of corrupting influence. By buying the Pygmies cigarettes, English machetes, western clothing, coffee, radios, and liquor, he actively promotes the very destruction of their culture that he elsewhere decries. Only late in the book does he reveal that his integration into the Pygmy society is not so total as he would have you believe earlier on -- reserving mosquito nets and hot cocoa for himself, relying on the Pygmies to wait on him like royalty, bring him meals and built huts for him while he lays around contemplating the thatched roof. He seems to revel in the role of the "rich white patron" who can command the Pygmies to dance for him at will, but then is genuinely puzzled when his intended bride rebuffs his demeaning Western imperialism.

What's not said in the book is often more interesting that what was -- only after you finish it do you begin to see the true story behind the story.

I really enjoyed this book, from its beauty and innocence, to the sacrifices made by the author to be a part of a culture he believed in.

I really enjoyed this book, from its beauty and innocence, to the sacrifices made by the author to be a part of a culture he believed in.

Begins with a passionate, well-written story about Sarno's move to Africa. Incredible descriptions of Pygmy music. To capture/convey the sound of that music is an achievment. But all the fine qualities of this book become irrelevant about a 1/4 of the way into Song From the Forest when Sarno is smitten by a Pygmy woman. The main focus of the next 3/4 of the book is ridiculous high-school boy-in-love nonsense and drivel: she smiled at me, she didn't smile at me, I think she cares, I don't think she cares. Who cares? Can't believe Houghton Mifflin published this crap.