Keon Francis
About the Author
Keon Francis is a Cultural Administrator, and Arts Practitioner dedicated to the unique culture and arts of Trinidad and Tobago. He has represented Trinidad and Tobago as an actor at CARIFESTAs X and XIV, written and directed plays for ‘Best Village’ and has reprised a lead role in the country’s annual Kambule production, an enactment recounting the beginnings of Trinidad’s Carnival. He is an Alumni of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop, completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine and author of the Caribbean Epic Fantasy novel, Children of the Eternal Mother.
Motivation
This book has been very long in coming. From the beginning, my goal was to write a book that not only has merit as a literary work, but one that will provide for the next generation a new lens to appreciate our culture that I never had. When the seeds of what would become this novel was conceptualized in 2006, I was nearly 22 years old. Yet, as a regular patron of the San Fernando library from the age of 12, I had never come across a single fantasy novel that explored worlds and cultures of people like me. I did not see myself. Instead, I grew up on Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Animorphs and many, many others.
While there is nothing wrong with consumption of world culture, I have found that this lack of Caribbean fantasy has resulted in my ‘imagining white’. I realised that, even when a writer explicitly states that a character is black, in my mind they somehow revert to blond hair, blue eyes and chiselled features with a sharp nose. This lack, fuelled by the knowledge I gained through participating in the annual Canboulay Re-enactment, is what motivated me to utilize our folk and carnival characters in a world of their own. To weave this fantasy using the culture of Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean so that my people and children like me can dream dreams of themselves.
