AUTHOR PROFILE

Richardo Keens-Douglas (from February 1999 issue)

The dreamer

Granadian-born writer Richardo Keens-Douglas writes so kids will believe in themselves

by Bridget Donald

It’s a balmy 75 degrees in Grenada, the Caribbean Isle of Spice. A fragrant breeze wafts in through the open window as Richardo Keens-Douglas surveys the water in the distance. Or so I imagine as I sit at the other end of the phone, tuning out the sound of torrential rain on this winter morning in Vancouver. Keens-Douglas, an actor, broadcaster, and writer of plays, songs, and children’s stories, is, above all, a storyteller, and it is his description that has conjured up this island scene for me at the outset of our conversation.


Keens-Douglas, who has been a resident of Toronto for more than 15 years, was born in Grenada and spent much of his childhood there. He returns to Grenada every winter, but he has extended his visit to six months this time to work on a locally produced television series and to put the final touches on a stage musical, The Nutmeg Princess, which premieres at Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre on March 6. The play is an adaptation of Keens-Douglas’s first book for children, published by Annick Press in 1992. Keens-Douglas has written both the stage play and the music, which, with its Calypso rhythms, he hopes will buoy a Toronto audience during the last stretch of winter.

In the book, the Nutmeg Princess’s advice to the two main child characters, Aglo and Petal, establishes a theme that resonates throughout the four subsequent picture books that Keens-Douglas has written. “Follow your dreams,” the princess says, “and if you believe in yourselves, all things are possible.” This message also lies at the heart of the work Keens-Douglas does in schools across North America, where he gives lectures and workshops on building self-esteem through storytelling. It was on one of these school visits that the inspiration for The Nutmeg Princess came to him. “A little girl put up her hand,” he recalls, “and asked if I knew a story about a black princess. And at the time I didn’t. She knew of Cinderella and Snow White, but she wanted to open a book and see herself on the pages and let her friends know that there were black princesses, too. So that’s why I wrote The Nutmeg Princess, and from then I knew all my themes would be multicultural.”

Keens-Douglas had no trouble empathizing with the little girl. Growing up in Grenada in the 1950s, he recalls, there weren’t any books that featured people who looked like him. Since Grenada was a British colony at the time, the schoolchildren learned British but not Grenadian history. Outside of school, he read Dickens, English comic books, and the Hardy Boys series. School curriculums and popular media have changed since then to reflect Grenada’s cultural mix, he says, but the prevalence of American TV poses a new threat to kids’ sense of local tradition and identity.

Grenadian television accounts for only a tiny portion of the programming aired on the island, but one of Keens-Douglas’s current projects is aimed at making that portion count. He is writing and starring in a new show called “Cocoa Roots,” a family-oriented comedy drama to be broadcast over the whole Caribbean region. The show is set in a restaurant on a beach in a Caribbean community and deals with the intersection of local and foreign ways created by the tourist trade. “But the show also deals with our own stories,” he says, citing la diablesse, a local folklore figure, as an example. “Very few Grenadian kids know about the diablesse now,” he laments. His 1994 picture book, La Diablesse and the Baby, is his attempt to remedy that. The narrative describes the diablesse as a tall, beautiful, and impeccably groomed woman who always wears a long dress that covers her feet – an important detail since she has one hoof that, if seen, betrays her diabolical nature. The story is based on the diablesse’s legendary proclivity for kidnapping babies in the middle of the night and recounts her defeat on one occasion by a canny grandmother.

The importance of local and individual stories was impressed upon Keens-Douglas early on in his childhood. “Not formally,” he explains, “but we’d be sitting around the dinner table as a family, and someone would begin: ‘Oh I remember this,’ and then we’d get up and go outside on the verandah, especially on a full moon night, when it was so bright, and stories would just keep coming. So my imagination was fed from an early age – unintentionally. It was just part of life.”

Keens-Douglas first moved to Canada as a teen to attend Dawson College in Montreal. He excelled in acting, and moved on to the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Ontario for a season. But once he had left school, the search for good acting jobs became disheartening. He recalls this as a painful time, and sums it up with an anecdote about an audition in New York at which he performed two of his best pieces: one from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the other from Death of a Salesman. “Very nice,” he was told, but didn’t he have anything black? Refusing to be typecast by his skin colour, he decided to produce his own good roles by writing plays. He wrote and starred in The Obeah Man, which was produced in Toronto and won a Dora Mavor Moore award in 1985. Once Upon an Island debuted in Edmonton in 1991, and was a Sterling Award nominee for best touring production.

The experience of auditioning – and often being rejected for spurious reasons – brought home to him the need for a solid foundation of self-esteem. It also gave rise to one of the recurring figures in his books for children: the outsider who, because different from the crowd in some respect, is treated with suspicion but ends up triumphant. In his most recently published book, The Miss Meow Pageant, the outsider is a strikingly ugly cat who wins a beauty contest because of the way he struts his stuff to the music of his namesake, The Mighty Sparrow, Calypso King of the World. “In my stories the outsider always has something magical to give or teach us,” says Keens-Douglas. “I’m trying to say, ‘don’t block opportunities.’ Someone might come to you and you might push them away, but they’re the one that could change you or the world.”

Keens-Douglas’s latest picture book, soon to be published by Tradewind Books, is about creating the world. Mama God Papa God is his take on the creation story in the Book of Genesis, and it reflects his belief that both man and woman were created in God’s own image. Originally set in Toronto at the Caribbean festival held there each August, the book has been generalized for an international audience. What’s important about the story, he says, is not specific places or faiths, but people of all different races, colours, and creeds coming together. Other new projects include a second play to be produced at YPT, Caribbean Cindy, which was adapted from a radio play he wrote.

Will he return to any broadcasting work for Canadian radio or TV? He’d like to, he says, remarking on how much he misses “Cloud Nine,” the CBC national radio show he used to host. And he has submitted several ideas to CBC TV. With such a prolific output, surely he must be working all the time? “Well, it’s necessary for survival,” he admits, “but I don’t push myself too hard.” Something in his tone convinces me – he does come across as someone who values a good balance in life – and indeed, as we say our goodbyes, he announces his plan to go jump in the water.

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