This life so rich and so fragile

Stranger in the Village of the Sick

A Memoir of Cancer, Sorcery, and Healing

Paul Stoller

Beacon Press: 228 pp., $23

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“Harmonizing the bush” -- the phrase refers to a practice of the sorcerers of Songhay, a tribe in West Africa. The bush is the wilderness beyond the village, beyond the safe cluster of huts, that contains all the destructive forces (animal, elemental, supernatural) that can menace humans. The sorcerer’s spells, potions and rituals are directed at keeping these forces at bay before they become life-threatening. The key to facing these forces, anthropologist Paul Stoller learned, lay in an ancient chant called the genji how.

“The genji how is very powerful,” he was told by Adamu Jenitongo, a revered old sorcerer who became Stoller’s teacher as well as a second father. “It balances the forces of the bush. Use it before you engage in sorcery or whenever you feel threatened.”

This lesson and many others that Stoller learned during visits to Niger in the 1970s and 1980s returned to him when he was diagnosed in 2001 with cancer. A mass in Stoller’s abdomen, found during a routine checkup, turned out to be non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The menace of cancer, he writes in “Stranger in the Village of the Sick,” didn’t seem all that different from the menace of the bush.

“Confronting cancer unexpectedly transported me back in time,” he explains. “Somehow, cancer enhanced my perception and deepened my sensibilities. This disruptive new presence in my life made it possible for me to understand more fully that sorcery is first and foremost a set of prescriptions about how to cope with the vicissitudes of life.”

Author of numerous books (“Embodying Colonial Memories,” “Money Has No Smell”) and a professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, Stoller skillfully weaves together the stories of his cancer treatment and his sorcery training into a single narrative that is, well, harmonized.

Much of the material treads familiar ground found in most cancer memoirs, especially how patients turn to organized religion or some other philosophy to cope with shock and grief. But for the 50-year-old Stoller, who was born into a Jewish family, the mystical world that helped him was far different.

Upon first arriving among the Songhay, several omens (one of which was getting hit by bird droppings) were read as signs that sorcery was Stoller’s calling. Living among them, he entered “the path to power” as an apprentice to Jenitongo, and this immersion in a worldview completely separate from the West’s later would help him face his illness.

There is much here that a Hollywood producer might try to exploit with special effects -- Stoller’s duel with a sorceress who tried to paralyze him, the dreams in which his teacher, who died before Stoller’s diagnosis, has visited and counseled him. But Stoller describes these experiences with great care and reserve so that they don’t overwhelm the less exotic, more important message of his story: that all sick people have the power to cultivate courage, humility and patience to see their way through. One evening, for instance, Jenitongo found a viper curled under his sleeping mat. He told Stoller that it was sent by another sorcerer.

“ ‘What will you do?’

“ ‘He’s sent many snakes, my son. He’ll send others....’

“I couldn’t comprehend his nonchalance. ‘But shouldn’t this person be punished?’

“ ‘I have chosen to ignore his efforts.’ He paused a moment. ‘A true sorcerer must not waste energy on needless battles. You must avoid conflict as often as possible. When you do fight a battle, make sure it is an important one.’ ”

Now there’s an attitude helpful to anyone, sorcerer or not. So are Stoller’s thoughts on the difference between Songhay and Western concepts of sickness and medicine, which Stoller pondered during the five-hour chemotherapy sessions that eventually led to his remission:

“Feeling confident about the outcomes of our choices gives us a sense of control over our lives -- something that most Americans strive for,” he writes. “Most Songhay people see the world quite differently.... Many of them follow a fatalistic path in which uncertainty, rather than certainty, governs their journey through life.... Many people I got to know in Niger, in fact, exhibit ... negative capability -- the rare quality of being able to live with ambiguous uncertainty.”

One wonders what the Songhay would think of all our purple pills, hair-growth ointments and capsules guaranteeing good sexual performance. Even when it comes to their belief in seeing the future, they shrink from attempting to impose control. Stoller says that the practice of throwing shells and studying their patterns to divine the future is not about avoiding misfortune; for the Songhay, it can merely show that a misfortune is coming, no matter what, and that they must be prepared for it.

Stoller seems more fortunate than others facing cancer: His lymphoma is slow-growing, his caregivers are fairly sensitive to his needs, he has loving friends and family and the long-term prognosis is good. He’s also unmarried and without children, which has given him the luxury -- if you can call it that -- to absorb himself completely in his trials without worrying about what will happen to offspring or spouse if treatment fails. Many cancer patients don’t have such time for rumination; the progress of their cancers is more chaotic, more unpredictable, so that “harmonizing the bush” doesn’t seem possible.

Still, “Stranger in the Village of the Sick” is a book to be read and appreciated. It speaks to our common fears, even as Western medical science attempts to catch up in the cancer arena.

Today one finds a variety of cancer drugs under trial or approved for use: Velcade for myeloma, Rituxan for lymphomas like Stoller’s, Zarnestra for forms of leukemia, Phortress for breast cancer and so on. But there is still a gap between what medicine can do now and what it will do in the future. And Stoller’s book is a bridge over that gap because it reminds all patients that, in the face of illness, their lives are rich in meaning and still worth living.