Song From The Forest: My Life Among the Ba-Benjelle' Pygmies - Hardcover

Sarno, Louis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395613310 ISBN 13: 9780395613313

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993

Synopsis

An expatriate living among Central Africa's Pygmies recounts how his visit to research Pygmy music turned into a permanent stay

About this title

From Library Journal

Sarno never gave any thought to the Pygmies of Africa until one night in Europe when he heard some of their haunting music on the radio. Entranced, he decided to seek them out and record their songs. The journey took him to the village of Bomandjombo in the Central African Republic, where he took up residence with a nearby Pygmy group. Over the next several years, he became a fixture in their lives, recording their music, supplying them with tobacco and machetes, taking part in hunts, and even becoming involved in an emotionally turbulent, unconsummated marriage to a Pygmy woman. Sarno admits that this very personal account lacks the sensibility of a trained anthropologist. Yet the naivete with which he approached an alien culture led him to experience the Pygmies' lives in a way that anthropologists seldom do. More travel literature than anthropology, this book would be at home in many large public library collections.
- Eric Hinsdale, Trinity Univ. Lib., San Antonio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

Obsessed by the music of the Pygmies, in the mid-1980s New Jerseyan Sarno ventured to the Central African Republic to live among a Pygmy clan and record its music. His engaging, detailed chronicle is full of wonder, beauty and irony, though it can also frustrate. Sarno's initial naivete soon crumbles; the Pygmies are interested in him only as a supplier of food, liquor and tobacco. But during his three-month visit he gradually grows closer to them, taping their music, observing their rituals and exploring the forest. He returns two years later to become more deeply involved in the society, eventually becoming "a sort of village scribe." However, Sarno--who now has settled among the Pygmies--falls in love with a young tribeswoman without ever speaking to her. His account of his infatuation, their cat-and-mouse courtship and their "so-called marriage" is exasperating because he has not revealed enough of himself to make his passionate attachment to the Pygmies comprehensible.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0395613310
• ISBN 13: 9780395613313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 301