14 ELIZABETH DAVIS

 their feast and the sun, they lay side by side under a sky thrilling in its
 brightness. (Cliff 130)

This passage seems to describe the same sort of deserted tropical
landscape that offers the promise of erotic consumption to tourists;
however, Cliff employs this well-worn imagery in order to reverse it.
Clare and Harry/Harriet are not tourists but Jamaicans, and the beach
is deserted because it belongs to an American absentee landlord. The
picnic is thus a revolutionary act in which Jamaicans reclaim land that
has been misappropriated by an American. Cliff highlights the
revolutionary aspect of the picnic in her description of Harry/Harriet,
who gathers weapons in order to shoot down and open the coconuts:
"[H]e came back with a rifle and a box of shells, and a clean cutlass,
loaded down with armaments like a 'fairy guerilla,' he said" (Cliff 130).
 The strategy of reclaiming the landscape by inhabiting it can best
be understood through Michel de Certeau's distinction between "place"
and "space." He suggests that "place" refers to a "distinct location"
and "implies an indication of stability," while "space" is "actuated by
the ensemble of movements deployed within it":

 ... [I]n relation to place, space is like a word when it is spoken, that is,
 when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed
 into a term dependent on many different conventions, situated as the
 act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformation
 caused by successive contexts, in contradistinction to the place, it
 has none of the univocity or stability of a "proper." In short, space is a
 practiced place. (117)

This distinction suggests a corresponding difference between the
brochures' depictions of the Caribbean and Marshall and Cliff's
depiction: tourist guides depict places while the two novelists depict
spaces. The places described in the tour guides must be empty and
stable so that they are available for the tourist to enact when he or she
disembarks from the cruise ship; this corresponds to Alexander's
explanation that tourist depictions rely on "symbols of unspoiled, virgin
territory, waiting to be transformed and possessed by imperial
(heterosexual) design" (Erotic 90). Marshall and Cliff, on the other hand,
depict inhabited and enacted spaces that are complete without the
tourist and are therefore not available to be appropriated for the
tourist's use. In light of this distinction, it comes as no surprise that
the strategy of inhabiting and using space is central to the revolutionary