"AND YOU CAN DRINK THE WATER"


to Heaven and Daughters. In Cliff's novel, two filmmakers discuss the
need to get the Jamaicans off the beach:

 "I found a location looks just like the fucking South of France, except
 for all the black bums on the beach."
 "They'll stay away for a per diem."
 "Right. We have an island. Landscape. Extras up the ass." (203)

The producers successfully convert both the beach and its inhabitants
into commodities; they can take full possession of the beach in question
("We have an island. Landscape."), and the people they intend to
displace from the beach can be re-purchased in order to function as
silent additions to the ambiance ("extras") if necessary. Marshall's
text more explicitly connects the desire to erase unsightly inhabitants
from the landscape with the tourist industry. Astral Forde, who
manages a small hotel, is disgusted that tourists will have to see the
shantytown on Armory Hill:

 The noise worse than Babylon, the kerosene lamps flickering in the
 jumble of scrap houses, the stink of the open drains and the WC's
 that's nothing but holes cover over in the ground. Right on the main
 road now! The tourists have to drive past it on their way from the
 airport and then back again when they're leaving. It's a wonder the
 government ain't shame.. .(217)

For Astral Forde, and others connected with tourism, the tragedy of a
place like Armory Hill is not its inhabitants' poverty and poor living
conditions, but the fact that such shantytowns detract from the pristine
natural beauty that tourists come to consume.
 The descriptions of Triunion and Jamaica in Marshall and Cliff's
novels are careful to debunk the myths about the Caribbean people
and landscape found in tourist literature. The two works reveal that
tourist dollars do not improve the lives of the Caribbean people and
that the people certainly do not enthusiastically welcome tourism. In
No Telephone to Heaven, Cliff critiques the notion that tourist money
is good for Jamaica in a scene in which tourists toss coins from the
decks of cruise ships and watch delightedly as young boys dive into
the "bottle-green scummed-over water" to retrieve them. Here the
tourists are quite literally exchanging pennies for a degrading and
dangerous performance by the Jamaican children: "Some boys emerged
almost immediately, with coins grasped between their teeth or stuck