.

ISSN 2063-5346
For urgent queries please contact : +918130348310

Emergence of ‘Upwake’ towards Decolonizing Nigeria in Ben Okri’s The Freedom Artist

Main Article Content

V. Ajitha, Dr. Lizie Williams
» doi: 10.48047/ecb/2023.12.si4.1796

Abstract

Ben Okri, the well known eminent story teller and Booker prize winner produces the fiction The Freedom Artist (2019) with a deep and intense political thought. The fiction stands unique in the handling of two different narrations: one related to an African mythology and the other blended with an European style. The controversial issues that emerges in the usage of the terms ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ and ‘self’ in the conversations among the individuals express the inevitable supremacy that underlies in the postcolonial nations. Besides being a writer who integrates myth and fantasy in his fiction, Okri’s agony to exist in an imperialistic society is resonated in this fiction. He digresses from being a mere story teller and enters into a zone of seriousness in forecasting a hard reality of the postcolonial nations. This article centralizes the various forms of authoritative governance in a postcolonial nation and implies on the necessity for decolonization. Okri prompts to expose the dominance behind the political freedom and insists on an evolutionary change for further development. He exhibits the social manacles that seize people in a mentally anomalous condition. Having shown the different perceptions of the dominative strategies imposed by an invisible Hegemony, Okri instigates for an ‘Upwake’ and ‘Uprise’ from the spiritual sleep. The aim of this article is to project the immediate reality of a formerly colonized nation and expose the suggestive ways recommended by Ben Okri to form a regenerated society with a meaningful independence.

Article Details