| Sumario: | In Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus, silence is rendered sufficiently palpable to be differentiated. Kambili is keenly aware of "a different kind of silence, one that lets [her] breathe"; then there is "the other kind" associated with "things" she "cannot name." The author links silence of a markedly different variety to wilful ignorance and associates the latter with unspeakable atrocities in the next novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, focused on the Nigeria-Biafra War. Taking my cue from the previous novels, in this article I treat silence in the third novel, Americanah, as decipherable; I track the trace absence leaves behind in the novel; and I interpret what the novel renders (in) visible. To account for the manipulation of time (then - now) and space (here there) in Americanah, the article advances Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's globalectic method of reading as a preferred model for Adichie's multi-layered text with a tri-continental setting.
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