Unscrambling the "Grammar of Violence": Sexual Assault in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah (2013) features several episodes of violence against women. One such scene, involving a sexual assault on the Nigerian protagonist, Ifemelu, by a white man in the USA, has given rise to conflicting interpretations, due to critics' diverging opinions on whether Ifemelu – who is the main focalizer of the third-person narrative – consents to the sexual act. Some commentators have labelled the incident "prostitution," because the protagonist seemingly deliberately goes to the house of the man after he has advertised for a female personal assistant to perform a "massage" on him; other critics have taken a radically different view and highlighted the coercive nature of the episode.
This paper argues that such incompatible critical responses are prompted by the novel's subtle "grammar of violence," a textual elusiveness that need to be unscrambled. Using a combination of sociological and linguistic studies about rape (respectively by Sharon Marcus and by Susan Ehrlich), the paper proposes a stylistic reading of the assault scene, emphasizing how the assailant enacts a predictable "rape script" precisely by denying that it is at play. Examining linguistic features such as modality, the paper further argues that Ifemelu's seemingly "weak" opposition to the act is in fact congruent with real-life responses expressing absence of consent, which are often influenced by fear, social conditioning, gender imbalance and, in cases such as those presented in Americanah, power dynamics linked to race and citizenship status.