CHAPTER 2 — THE HEART OF AFRICA

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→ CHAPTER 3 — THE ROAD TO THE JUNGLE

Louis Sarno has described many times what led him to the rainforest, including a tight précis at the start of his 1993 memoir Song From The Forest — My Life Among The Ba-Benjellé Pygmies. “I was drawn to the heart of Africa by a song,” the book begins.

The author’s photograph of the first American edition shows Sarno inside a mud hut, headphones clamped over his ears and flanked by three athletic African men, two of whom are bare-chested. They are apparently intrigued sufficiently by the machinery Sarno is casually jockeying to loiter in his home. On the jacket of the European version, it is Sarno who has ditched the shirt: dressed only in a pair of pale shorts, and with a chunky tape-recorder hanging from a leather strap around his neck, he clutches a microphone in the manner of an eager cub reporter dispatched to the field.

Sarno has since disowned his only published memoir for the clichés it pedals about African adventure. He now simply says that the book’s young author, a fresh arrival to the rainforest, with black hair, bushy eyebrows and a keen glint in his eyes, knew almost nothing of the world he professed to describe. Sarno is equally dismissive these days of his life before the point that it swerved towards Africa. It followed an unremarkable path from suburban New Jersey, through unhappy college years and eventually to Europe, until the chance encounter with pygmy music prompted an epiphanic awakening and sent him even further from his childhood home.

Sarno was born to a second-generation Italian immigrant family in Newark in 1954 and enjoyed what he describes as a regular upbringing of “back yards and front lawns”. His father was a high school mathematics teacher, and Sarno has two brothers and one sister. “We could climb over fences and go in each other’s back yards,” he says. “We had a whole neighbourhood to play in. I used to think of these little patches of woods as ‘the jungle’. It probably inspired me. It partly inspired my liking the rainforest.”

After graduating from high school, Sarno spent a year at Northwestern University in Chicago, where he first became friends with a young journalism student, and future film-maker, named Jim Jarmusch. But as Jarmusch neglected his journalism studies in favour of poetry and Sarno grew disillusioned with life in the Midwest, the pair soon transferred back to the east coast and became immersed in the burgeoning avant garde art scene in Manhattan and beyond. Jarmusch found a home in the English department at Columbia, while Sarno enrolled at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey.

“Rutgers was just a fraternity, beer-drinking college,” Sarno says. “I didn’t really have any friends at Rutgers at all. I would go to New York and visit Jim and meet people through him.”

Jarmusch, who remains Sarno’s close friend, recalls a quiet but fiercely inquisitive buddy. “We were absorbing things,” Jarmusch says. “We didn’t have any paths carved out for ourselves back then, which is a good thing and a good thing for people of that age. We were in that period where we were discovering all kinds of literature and music and scientific thought, all kinds of things we didn’t know about yet.”

Sarno and Jarmusch also became friends with Luc Sante, the writer and chronicler of New York’s low life, and Phil Klein, now a composer of sound installations and film scores. Sarno also continued to grow a vast collection of classical music, which had been a passion since his youth, with a particular focus on the polyphonic singing of the Renaissance. Despite spending as much time in the city as he did on the college’s New Brunswick campus, Sarno eventually left Rutgers with a degree in English. He then spent three years in a post-graduate Comparative Literature program at the University of Iowa. Sarno met Wanda Boeke, a Dutch-American woman, who would become his first wife. The couple moved to Amsterdam, where Sarno worked a succession of odd jobs and he also accompanied Boeke on her regular trips to visit family and friends in Scotland.

“I got to know this group of eccentrics up in Scotland, who had done all these travels,” Sarno says. “They had gone to Afghanistan in 1960. It was a different world back then. Back then, I thought of Afghanistan as a place where they had the most amazing crafts…That’s what Afghanistan used to mean to me — and the music. I had a couple of records of traditional music from Afghanistan, wonderful music too.”

Having abandoned his collection of classical music in the United States, Sarno says he didn’t have the heart to start building another in Europe. Instead, he found himself listening to the radio one day and first encountered a song that originated in Africa. “It just shot me off in a different direction,” he says.

Sarno later discovered that the one piece of music that had captivated him in particular was a mourning song produced by a pygmy choir. “I got interested in, I guess you would call it ‘world music’,” he says. He joined the public library, quickly exhausting its collection of music from across the globe, copying from the library’s vinyl records on to cassette. “In the end it was the music of the pygmies that really attracted me, not just because of the music, but because of the environment,” he says. “I found over a couple of years I got every commercially available recording of pygmy music, even stuff that was out of print. I’ve always liked forests and I figured I had to go and make my own recordings. It became an obsession. I would go because I had all the music and I wanted more. It wasn’t enough for me.”

Sarno began a correspondence with the pioneering anthropologist Colin Turnbull, whose 1961 book The Forest People remains one of the most important studies of pygmy people ever made, and whose later book, The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation, Sarno had found profoundly affecting. Turnbull describes several years’ immersion among pygmy groups in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, focusing on their miraculous gift for music. Turnbull describes groups of pygmies living in small camps on the outskirts of the rainforests, who then take regular trips, lasting several weeks, deep into the jungle. They build temporary houses and spend long hours hunting, bringing back an abundance of jungle delights: duikers (a small antelope), porcupine, monkey, mushrooms and the sweetest honey. But both in preparation of the expeditions, and in order to celebrate the riches they find, they lay on extraordinary festivals of music and dance. Forest spirits, some of whom magically glow in the dark, are tempted from the undergrowth to perform intricate dances. Music lasts through the night, with the pygmies transformed into magnificent musicians. Song seems to bind the community together as upwards of 50 voices interlock.

“The pygmies were more than curiosities to be filmed and their music was more than a quaint sound to be put on record,” Turnbull writes. “They were a people who had found something in the forest that made their life more than just worth living, something that made it, with its full complement of hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care.” Sarno was sold.

When his friends from Scotland next visited Africa, Sarno accompanied them with the loose plan to navigate from Tangier to the central African rainforest, recording music along the way. He became distracted in Morocco — “I found this tea house where all these musicians would hang out, and all they thought about was music all the time” — and also spent some time with the Bedouin in Egypt, where he was invited to feasts and holy festivals, increasingly fascinated by the rituals — and the welcome shown to an outsider into the fabric of an alien society. “They were wonderful people, very noble people,” Sarno says of the tribes he encountered in northern Sinai. “Now that area where we were is a very dangerous area apparently. They kidnap African migrants that are on the way, trying to reach Europe. They’re torturing them and getting ransoms from their families.”

Sarno remembers a feast to toast the arrival of a Bedouin tribesman’s son. “They named him Saleem, which means ‘peace’. That was back in ’84. Now he’d be 30 and I wonder, is Saleem one of these Bedouin involved in kidnapping African migrants? I don’t know. Things have changed so much.” The diversions in northern Africa meant Sarno had not yet reached his intended destination. His first two attempts at finding the source of the pygmy music had failed, but Sarno remained committed to the task. “Eventually I just picked the capital that was closest to the rainforest, which was Bangui, and I flew there,” Sarno says. “Then it was, ‘Well, I’ll just record the music of the pygmies as that was my goal anyhow. So I just went directly to the rainforest.”

Other aspirations, including the desire to become a science fiction writer, were pushed to one side and the manuscripts he had been working on never touched again. He also separated from his wife. He says he had no expectations at the time that he would never return from the rainforest, but adds, “I did kind of have this vision of me living with the Ba’aka, with some group of pygmies. I did have a flash, when I first got a record out from the library and was listening to it, I had this kind of flash that I was going to be with them, living with them. It was a weird kind of thing, a quick flash and then it was gone. But I always remembered, so some part of me probably did think I’d be there.”

Jarmusch says, “He’s not someone who was going to find a job in an accounting firm or anything, and that was obvious from the first time that I met him.”

← CHAPTER 1 — HOUSE OF EARTH
→ CHAPTER 3 — THE ROAD TO THE JUNGLE