Slowslowzo

Reading Wildly: Ben Okri and his book The Freedom Artist

Finding freedom isn’t easy. Getting locked up is surprisingly easy, if you take your eye off the ball and don’t follow the said, and unsaid rules of the game. 

Finding freedom is something that Okri’s anonymous freedom artists strive for. The ‘freedom artists’ daub on walls the question ‘Who is the prisoner?’, provoking the spark of resistance to whatever regime is dominating them. Okri opens the book stating that we are all prisoners, and in Chapter 6 the nature of one such prison is explained.

‘It is written, in a lesser legend, that in a prison the size of a country there are prisoners who had been there for generations. Their original crimes had been forgotten in the fog of time. Families gave rise to families and were scattered through the length and breadth of the vast prison. There were whole tribes of eternal prisoners.

At first the prison was modest. Then the accumulation of acts designated crimes led to astronomical multiplication of prisoners. Anything could be a crime: deviation from normal thought, unusualness in dress, questions about the nature of time, speculations about the nature of the soul, paintings that distort reality, writings that cause unease, the inclination to think too much. The most serious crimes were those that questioned the nature of reality.

At some time or other most people found themselves on the wrong side of the law. It became necessary to extend the prison till it took on the proportions of a country. Then it was proposed that an entire continent be devoted to containing the exploded criminal population that was humanity. Soon there were more people in prison than outside it. The prison became the world.’