CHAPTER 7 — LOUIS SARNO
←CHAPTER 6 — A LIFE UNDER THREAT
→CHAPTER 8 — CRISIS
In his more reflective moments, Louis Sarno says he wonders whether his presence among the Ba’aka has been of any lasting value. He even questions if his time in the forest may have had more negative effects than good on the people who have welcomed him to share their home.
“My life has been enriched,” Sarno says, “[but] for them has it ultimately been a good thing? I mean, it’s been a good thing for certain individuals. I’ve helped people out. My interventions have helped save people’s lives and stuff. But has it been good for the whole community in general? I don’t know.”
Closest to home, Sarno’s specific concerns centre on Samedi, his oldest son, who has been afforded the kind of opportunities almost no other boys in his position could expect. Samedi does not appear to have been overwhelmed by what he has seen of the western world — he rarely comments to his father about his travels and has never expressed any desire to leave Yandoumbé for good — but Sarno says he has also not pursued the development of hunting skills as keenly as other boys his age. Sarno worries that Samedi may develop unrealistic expectations, perhaps one day to live in the United States, which will leave him unfulfilled by his life in Africa.
The same fears run through Sarno’s preoccupations about his Ba’aka friends in a wider sense.
“Maybe I’ve damaged them in some way, that they’re unsatisfied with the traditional way of life,” he says. Sarno has typically not been able to resist disrupting what he considers to be imbalance between the various community groups in the area. He has, for instance, always demanded Ba’aka are paid for their work and had stood up for them in conflicts against the Bantu of Bayanga, going against the long-established status quo. He told me that in some ways, however, Ba’aka seem more comfortable in the victims’ role, when they are not burdened by the demands of economics and village life. They are much more vibrant and, specifically, musical when they are out in the forest, yet spend increasing amounts of time idling in Yandoumbé.
“I’ve been a big traditionalist but I don’t believe they should be owned by other people, things like that,” Sarno says. “I believe they should be considered fully human. But, you know, I like to see them retain their forest skills and pride in their music and all this kind of stuff. Somehow they still have their music, but it’s not as strong as it used to be. Is it my fault? I don’t know.”
During his early years in the rainforest, Sarno says he drew some criticism from anthropologists for his lack of academic qualifications and for methods of integration that do not conform with those expected in the discipline. I struggled to find concrete evidence of these criticisms, but Sarno still considers himself to be a pariah among academics, particularly in the United States. However, he also insists repeatedly that he is neither an anthropologist nor a musicologist, titles that suggest formal training, and is frequently bewildered by the interest shown in him, academic or otherwise. He has said he feels that his life in the Central African Republic is no more remarkable than anyone transferring east coast for west in the United States, or trading one European capital for another.
In the relatively short time I spent with him, he was in demand from countless organisations and seemed incapable of turning down an interview request. In London, after interrogation from CBS, he visited the BBC World Service to record an interview and also met with a reporter from Vice Media for a story on the CAR crisis. In Germany, in addition to three premieres and audience Q&A sessions, there was also a handful of media duties and one studio interview in particular that took him by surprise. (He had smoked a joint just before learning that he was to be filmed, much to his dismay.) By and large, Sarno answers questions from something of a prepared script, having grown aware of the kind of things most interviewers will ask. He is also accustomed to being portrayed as a kind of quaint eccentric. In Oxford, Noel Lobley and Sarno found great amusement in the 60 Minutes production crew’s discomfort with Sarno’s scratchy moustache, and they also jokingly mimicked the veteran anchor when he apparently strayed from his prepared questions to exhort, “You’re quite a specimen, aren’t you!”
To characterise Sarno in this manner is quite wrong, however. He is genial and patient, but can also be guarded and diffident, especially when a heap of everyday frustrations become overwhelming. He is also an intellectual heavyweight, whose high-brow tastes in art and literature have not been dumbed down by the remoteness of his location. He carried Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in his backpack (“He’s a great writer”) and on our trip across Cameroon, he polished off both copies of The New Yorker I had brought with me, plucking the magazine from a laptop bag whenever our driver was interrogated at checkpoints. We discussed Kafka in Bertoua (particularly his black comedy); Beethoven’s changing perspective on Napoleon while standing on a hotel porch in Yokadouma; and we watched long portions of Latcho Drom, a brilliant film directed by Tony Gatlif, which documents the Roma of the world through their music, on his laptop. Even when he was playing for laughs, Sarno quoted memorable scenes from The Big Lebowski to the delight of Samedi and Agati as the car lurched through the darkness of the final stretch towards Yandoumbé.
Sarno is rarely happy with the way he has been depicted in print or film throughout the years. The demands of publishers and movie directors to squeeze him into a neat narrative has, in his opinion, often exaggerated extremes of personality or circumstances to present a caricature of what he insists is just a man trying to find his place in the world. Sarno includes his own memoir Song From The Forest in the group of representations that got it wrong. In it, he details the early days of his life among the Ba’aka and, at his publisher’s insistence, fills the role of unlikely romantic lead in a kind of man-displaced rom-com, grappling with the rules of attraction in the jungle so as to secure a pygmy wife. Sarno did indeed fall in love not long after arriving to the Central African Republic (the “real” object of those early affections now lives in a different village), but says now that he invented details and played up the aspects that led one reader-critic to describe the relationship as a “pathetic, platonic love affair” and a “disturbing obsession”. The book is now one of the few subjects Sarno is reluctant to discuss, preferring to leave its contents in the distant past. “I don’t really want to think about it anymore,” Sarno says. “A lot of time has passed since then, I’ve learned a lot more. I don’t really want to dwell on that book.”
OKA!, the 2010 film, purports to be a dramatisation of Sarno’s second, unpublished memoir, Last Thoughts Before Vanishing From the Face of the Earth, which Jim Jarmusch told me represents some of Sarno’s very best writing. The film, directed by Lavinia Currier, stars the British actor Kris Marshall as “Larry Whitman”, an American musicologist beset by liver disease, who is nonetheless desperate to complete an exhaustive collection of music recordings. He returns to the rainforest against doctors orders seeking to find players of the elusive trumpet/flute known as molimo. The quest is set against the arrival to the region of a Chinese logging firm, and the scheming of a corrupt mayor to force the Ba’aka from their land.
Shot almost entirely on location near Bayanga, Sarno says he greatly enjoyed working on the production, which also brought three months of employment to the Ba’aka and enough money to secure the new location of the village of Yandoumbé. But the film was a critical and commercial failure and featured a central character in whom Sarno could not recognise himself. “It has this superimposed plot with the logging, and also I didn’t like the way the guy played me,” Sarno says. “He was very arrogant and always angry…You wonder why did the Ba’aka like this guy so much? Everyone was crowding around, but there didn’t seem anything to like about him.”
More commonly, Sarno’s concerns are that portrayals veer too far in the opposite direction and flirt with hagiography. Michael Obert’s recent documentary, Song From The Forest, for instance, has a soundtrack that begins with an excerpt of a choir singing William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices, and Sarno says, “I feel uncomfortable that not only is it a rather saintly portrayal of me, but combined with that church music (regardless of how beautiful that William Byrd mass is) it is almost too much. Especially since I wonder whether…my presence among the Ba’aka for so many years has been a good thing or not. I think the jury of necessity is still out on that one.”
Sarno remains good friends with Obert and praises the film for its intimate portraits of the Ba’aka. But he also says he thinks the film did not capture the complexities of his life in the forest, and wonders about the central narrative thread: the trip to New York that he and Samedi undertook, which features several awkward meetings with the family he left behind. “I feel that the whole America part was really a sort of distraction, not really an integral part of the whole, but a kind of detour or diversion,” Sarno says. “Going to America was a totally forced situation. It wasn’t a natural situation in my life.”
In the interests of redressing the balance of the saintly portraits that Sarno dislikes, I can reveal that once or twice he helped himself to my stash of travel cookies without asking. I also have my suspicions that he immediately earmarked my 1,000 Francs to pay for the repair to his fence, even though I expected it to be given to the Ba’aka musicians. Worse still, I once watched him attempt to persuade Samedi, Yambi and Mosio that they would not enjoy the banoffee pie they had been served one night at dinner at Sangha Lodge, in a cynical ploy to secure extra helpings for himself. (The ploy failed.) I otherwise found Sarno’s company to be almost entirely a joy, and heard no shortage of tales of selflessness from his friends.
Jim Jarmusch told me about life in Sarno’s Rutgers college house, where he took under his wing two young children from next door, whose parents often left them abandoned at home. “They were like sort of hillbilly kids, and they would come across the wooden fire escape into his house, or even through the windows, which he would leave open for them, and then he would read to them or tell them fantastic stories from Jules Verne, or show them pictures from books, or make up wild stories about pirates and things,” Jarmusch said. “They were mesmerised by him.” Meanwhile Andrea Turkalo, an American who has lived near Bayanga for close to 30 years while studying the elephants of Dzangha Bai, related an anecdote in which Sarno came to the defence of three Ba’aka men sent to prison for witchcraft. They were erroneously accused of having killed a man through sorcery, who almost certainly died of alcohol abuse. Sarno travelled more than 100km to Nola to try to rescue them. Two died of starvation in the prison; Sarno secured the release of the third, but he also died later from his ordeal. Sarno was the only person to campaign against the injustice.
Flicking through photos on Facebook, I found images of Sarno at a refugee camp in eastern Cameroon, helping the aid relief for the displaced Muslim cattle farmers of the CAR crisis. Many years ago, he also secured new water pumps for Yandoumbé and persuaded the manufacturer to leave behind its shipping container, which he later used to store shipments of food from the World Food Program for schoolchildren. Anthropologists are divided on the benefits of schooling indigenous peoples, but Sarno tends to think that whatever opportunities are presented should be seized, and the food persuaded parents to allow their children to come to class year-round.
The balance of opinion I encountered weighed heavily in Sarno’s favour. There were few voices, at least these days, prepared to denounce him. Arguably the most persuasive observation on the subject was echoed by commentators in London and the Central African Republic, who said simply that the Ba’aka lived for thousands of years before Louis Sarno and they will survive when he is gone — an assessment that at once undermines some of his efforts yet should alleviate some of his fears. “It’s not as if he’s gone there to be lord of the Ba’aka,” Anna Feistner, who spent three years in Dzanga Sangha as Principal Technical Advisor for the WWF, says. “The Ba’aka are very resilient. They’ll miss Louis when he goes, but life will just go on.”
Turkalo says, “He will become part of the Bayaka oral culture, this man who lived here for years, recorded our music, went into the forest, slept in the forest with us. He’ll just become part of their oral history. If we spend a lot of time there, that’s what happens.”
Many of Sarno’s western friends consider his only real failing to be his apparent unwillingness to share his vast knowledge; his lack of interest in publishing what he has learnt from his time in the forest. Despite a lack of formal qualifications, he has done what amounts to the fieldwork of about ten anthropologists, and has insights into the lives of the pygmies of Yandoumbé that no one else has ever collated.
“He hasn’t documented, he hasn’t written,” Rod Cassidy said. “And I don’t like to criticise the guy — I love him to pieces — but I think he could have done a lot more…Even if some anthropologists can give him guidelines what to write; give him questionnaires to fill in. He’s talking with Noel, but he should be sitting there with six anthropologists, social anthropologists, human anthropologists, even public health people, musicologists. And everybody. Panels. They should be talking a couple of hours a day.”
Lobley has floated the idea of Sarno visiting Oxford more regularly, in some kind of visiting professor’s role, but the logistics of admission to academic institutions are notoriously difficult to arrange, particularly with Sarno himself often unwilling to jump through countless administrative hoops. Others have also talked about securing Sarno an honorary degree (“They bloody well should give him one,” John Dunbar, one of Sarno’s London friends, says) but arguably much of the unique value of Sarno’s work has depended on his freedom from institutional commitments.
Sara Driver, a film-maker who is Jim Jarmusch’s long-term partner and has known Sarno for several decades, is not alone in regarding Sarno as an artist. “You have to have a sense of art if you have the sensitivity to know how precious that music is and to have gone to all lengths to have it recorded and archived,” Driver says. “That takes a lot. And he’s a wonderful writer too.”
Despite his bad experience with his first memoir, Song From The Forest, Sarno has actually continued writing throughout the past 30 years. He has completed at least two other book-length memoirs while living in Yandoumbé, neither of which have been distributed beyond his circle of friends. Although Sarno’s first unpublished memoir, Last Thoughts Before Vanishing From the Face of the Earth, was the source for OKA!, the manuscript reportedly bears little resemblance to what appeared on screen. Sarno says the other book, which details a long excursion he took with two Ba’aka friends into northern Congo and is viewed through his companions’ eyes, did not impress his agent in the United States. Both are unpublished, and Sarno says he is not entirely sure where the manuscripts now reside.
Sarno has also written a couple of screenplays with Sara Driver, one named Gone With The Mind and based on the life of a scientist who has to go to live with his mother in a senior’s community. It was written when Sarno was forced to be in the US for a period but the Jarmusch residence, where he usually stays, was being renovated and he instead lived with his mother in New Jersey. “It was really funny,” Driver says. “It echoed very much his life. People have read it and it’s really, truly, very funny, but I haven’t sold it yet. I haven’t got it off the ground financially. I had it semi-cast and I’m hoping someone will still make it.”
Jarmusch is also a keen champion of Sarno’s writing, and said he too wishes that the unpublished memoirs will one day see the light of day. But Jarmush, who has never managed to visit his buddy in Africa, echoed some of Sarno’s ex-pat friends in Dzanga Sangha in identifying that there are often more pressing concerns in the jungle than the discussion with an editor in the United States about the placement of a semi-colon. “He has so many things that are immediate and he doesn’t make plans for his work very well,” Jarmusch says. “I wish he would. The one thing I tell him a lot, well, you should maybe edit your book. It’s better to get it published slightly changed than never have anybody read it. I don’t know. I wish more of his work would get out there, but there are people who need medicine.”
Some of Sarno’s recent preoccupations about securing a legacy have been made sharper by an encroaching sense of his own mortality. Years of living in the jungle have taken their toll on Sarno’s physical well-being, culminating in an episode in Oxford in June that left him fighting for his life. In the past, Sarno’s medical record has been regarded as something of a standing joke: he has been diagnosed with leprosy, loa loa, typhus, malaria and hepatitis B and D, among countless other maladies. Doctors in New York have been known to treat him free of charge, simply grateful to have exposure to real-life examples of exotic illnesses they might otherwise never get the chance to see. But after feeling unwell for several nights in Oxford, and suspecting he may be losing blood, Sarno called an ambulance and was admitted to hospital having suffered a variceal haemorrhage. He knew that his hepatitis had led to cirrhosis of the liver, but it had now caused massive internal bleeding. Sarno told me that he accepts the health risks of the life he has chosen to lead — “Everyone else gets cancer from car exhaust in the city; each place you live has its own risks” — but also knows that had the episode taken place in Yandoumbé, he would almost certainly now be dead.
“I don’t feel that I have very long to live, so my time is valuable,” Sarno told me during our journey across Cameroon, explaining the frustrations of spending four miserable days in a car.
Sara Driver says, “I think he has so much to offer, in terms of educating the world about this incredible spot on the planet. And there’s a part of me that wishes he would come back and take care of himself and do a lecture tour for people to hear this wealth of information he has about this very particular world. But I also understand why he has to stay there. And I know he’s torn too. These are people he loves and he needs to be there…He really has a very, very important role to fulfil.”
It is difficult to identify immediately with the “richness” Sarno’s “blind luck” has helped him stumble upon. Most westerners would consider him to have volunteered for a life blighted by extreme hardship, for almost no discernible benefit — and one that will likely result in a premature death. But all of Sarno’s friends said they understood what had drawn him to the forest, and what kept him there, even though the reasons they presented differed greatly.
Rod Cassidy described Sarno in terms of a 60s hippy, who has found his nirvana: a house in the country, a “live for the day” outlook, great music and plentiful weed. Andrea Turkalo, meanwhile, says she relates to Sarno’s rejection of the predictability of “normal” life. “I never wanted to plug into the script,” Turkalo says. “And what I mean by the script is the ‘You grow up, you get married and you have kids. And then you wait for your life to basically end.’ I never thought that was interesting, and I think Louis is another one of those people.”
Richard Gayer, who was the first westerner to visit Sarno in the Central African Republic, says, “He has a more intense social life than anyone I know…It’s a REAL social life. He’s deeply involved in quite a large community. He knows hundreds of people. He knows dozens who have died and seen all these babies been born. He’s stitched in there, and that’s where he feels safe and happy.” Several other friends simply pointed to Sarno’s children and said that every decision he has made since he adopted Samedi more than ten years ago are those that any father would have taken.
Arguably the most persuasive argument of all came from Noel Lobley, Sarno’s collaborator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. I put it to Lobley that it was easy to understand, for instance, Turkalo’s presence in the rainforest — she was answering a call to protect one of the world’s most noble, yet endangered, animal species — but similar did not apply to Sarno. Lobley replied: “If anyone has had a musical epiphany, through whatever your music is, you don’t doubt for a second that that’s as important as elephant conservation.”
Lobley detailed his own moment of epiphany, which occurred during field work in Zimbabwe, and continued that the music produced by the Ba’aka, the polyphonic singing in the cathedral of the rainforest, is so powerful as to prompt the equivalent of religious devotion. “That’s what Louis has had,” Lobley said. “Maybe not as a performer, but he has had that as a member of the community and if you’ve had that, that’s the most important thing in the world. It’s physically real. It’s fundamental to the health of the human condition, and it does become completely compelling.”
Sarno confesses to having adopted some of the Ba’aka’s habits, in particular a live-for-the-moment attitude; they do not concern themselves with either the past or the future and Sarno speaks fondly of the outlook. “You’re more alive,” he says, describing the Ba’aka philosophy on life. “You’re living in the present; the past doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s good, otherwise you get hung up about problems in the past and grudges and all this kind of stuff. The past is finished. You’ve got to make the present as pleasant as possible. And the future, well it hasn’t happened yet, so why should you worry about it? It might not ever happen, so why worry about it. I think I have that a bit. I think it’s been a positive thing in my life. Sometimes it makes it hard to live in the modern world, not thinking about the future. The modern world, people are hardly living in the present at all, they’re always worrying about the future.”
In a recurring fantasy, Sarno says that he wants one day to go even further into the forest, and never come back. He knows of a small clearing, free of fresh growth, in which he envisions himself residing permanently.
“If I had really good money and when I ran out of darjeeling tea I could get some shipped out somehow and brought out, I could be very tempted to just stay in the forest, especially if they could make me some kind of chair that I could sit in and a table where I could write,” Sarno says. “I would be happy to stay out in the forest. It’s beautiful.”
