Kano, and Elsewhere

But while we are intent upon one object we already feel the pull of another.

R. M. Rilke

Upon waking early on December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman signed his copy of The Catcher in the Rye to "Holden Caulfield" from, in his own hand, Holden Caulfield, and wrote underneath it, "This is my statement." Apparently he would give no interviews after the shooting. As planned, that afternoon Chapman, the antihero, took his infamous combat stance and fired several shots into John Lennon's back only to pace the sidewalk, gun in one hand, Catcher in the other.

A few months before, in September, my girl friend Wendy accepted a teaching position at Bayero University in Northern Nigeria. Since I've never liked being left behind, and she felt anxious without a man, off we went to Africa as though married, practically romantic. I too hoped to be hired as a lecturer in their English Department, but none of that would really work. Meanwhile, in that relentless sub-Saharan heat Wendy's blouses looked thrown against her body, sagging like damp bread, and I can remember my shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows, heavy as a marsh.

As Lennon was dying in the front doorway of the Dakota Apartments, we stood at a window trying to make out those sounds coming from the Old City. Sounded like gunfire. Later, we were told that outnumbered local police had set off smoke bombs in the attempt to disperse a Muslim gathering of the Maitatsine, a renegade group who were led by a self-declared prophet named Marwa. In response, near the emir's palace, Marwa's following had retaliated with machetes, arrows, and daggers. The police retaliated with their service revolvers. Within hours four Kano policemen were beaten to death and 13 government vehicles burned.

During a 1992 interview with Barbara Walters, Chapman cites The Catcher in the Rye with a reverence more commonly saved for religious texts—for example, the Diamond Sutra or the Koran. He identified with Salinger's work, in part, because the phoniness that Holden perceived applied to John Lennon's "sellout" to the ritzy world of limos and places like the Dakota Apartments. Chapman's idol had turned into a materialist, no longer on a lotus blossom, no longer true to his own lyrics: I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.

When we heard of Lennon's death on the BBC, it fit, oddly, with everything else going on within earshot, although the Kano riots triggered on December 8th continued for three weeks and would claim roughly 10,000 times the number of lives.

On December 9th, on the front page of the New York Times, below the photo of terrorized Yoko Ono outside the hospital where John Lennon has been pronounced dead, is an article on president-elect Reagan's fundraising for his expensive "transition team." To the right of Yoko Ono's face is a piece on the 13-month-long "hostage situation" in Tehran. We know now that John Hinckley, also a big reader of Catcher in the Rye, will soon try to murder the newly elected Reagan with a Saturday Night Special, a revolver commonly dissed by those in the arms business as "trash," so poorly made that it could give handguns a bad name. Hinckley's .22, although considered a lesser version of the .38 used on Lennon, has a compact two-inch barrel and a great reputation for never jamming. But few of us in the States knew that Muslims in the Middle East were not only having a say in Tehran, but that other messages would follow.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the prefix "dis" from the Latin, from the Greek, primarily means "twice" or "two ways," with "dis" the opposite of "con" : discord, concord; disjunction, conjunction. The mythological God of the Underworld was Dis, the one of separation, undoings, and we now have hundreds of forms, in print and elsewhere, including the slang verb "to dis," for "disrespecting" someone. It's no fluke that the word came into use between 1980 and 1985...