PositiveThe Hindu (IND)The silver lining of being part of such a complex historical and cultural landscape is that Okri’s writings are imbued with two vast ambitions...One, to salvage portions from the ocean-like vastness of African, and Nigerian, storytelling traditions. And second, to repurpose these findings for the world, not as a didactic bore or a moralising scold, but as an individual artist, a sculptor of worlds with porous boundaries between our all-too-real world and the many unseen ones human societies carry within ... a sombre allegory by an author in his 60s about a society quivering under the jackboot of authoritarianism ... strikes one as force-fitted, far-fetched and even indulgent in its loopiness. Yet, as I write this, we learn of popular uprisings in places like Sudan where military grade weapons spray death onto protests led by young women who seek to break free from encrustations of official truths ... This, of course, should not be surprising, for great artistic sensibilities are far-seeing, unbound by the heaviness of facts. Yet, one can’t escape feeling that Okri’s allegory is neither subversive nor unknown. In fact, there is a certain harmlessness to it — it speaks the truth, but it speaks softly and without bite ... The book has a gentleness of a poetic sensibility that other contemporary works that have resorted to allegories in order to critique don’t have ... precisely because Okri’s allegory is denuded of cultural specificity, it has a timelessness to it, no different from Kafka’s parables or Borges’ fiction ... As long as tyranny views the written word as potentially subversive, Okri’s The Freedom Artist will have offered us a sketch of how individuals and societies sometimes break free to bathe once again in the \'river of light\'.
