"AND YOU CAN DRINK THE WATER" 15

strategy of both novels. As one critic notes in her discussion of No
Telephone to Heaven, "The land, community, culture, and self are
interrelated, and staying in or returning to the land is often resistance
to cultural oppression" (Toyosato 308).
 When Ursa returns to Triunion, it is to defeat her father's plan to
build a resort on Government Lands, which will include the beach Ursa
loves and will preclude other projects that would benefit the people of
Morlands. The novel makes it clear that Ursa's return to Triunion, her
reinhabiting her place of birth, is the first and most important step in
preventing Government Lands from being turned into a tourist site:

 Estelle said...in her letter. ". . .You have to come down here. .. .And
 you have to come right awayf'....Ursa had read and reread the brief
 letter any number of times, along with the page in the prospectus [for
 the tourist resort] that had the bookmark, and while seated in her
 darkened apartment on Tuesday she silently offered herself for
 whatever would be required of her...."I'm here," she says and turns
 her palms up and holds them out slightly as if waiting to receive her
 orders in a sealed envelope. (Marshall 363)

This passage casts the return home as a revolutionary act; Ursa offers
her services with the assertion "I'm here," and this statement of
presence, of inhabiting space, turns her into a revolutionary, a key figure
in a secret plot "waiting to receive her orders in a sealed envelope."
Once Ursa returns, her role in this small revolution is simply to deliver
a copy of her father's prospectus to his opponent in the parliamentary
election so that the idealistic young politician Justin Beaufils can defeat
her father and continue Ursa's work of inhabiting the landscape in order
to protect it from misappropriation by tourists:

 He and the wife was all the way down in Government Lands putting
 up a trash house. They say they gon live there till the P and D Board
 agrees to consult with the people in the district about the resort
 scheme....They're calling on everybody in Morlands to do like them.
 Mes amis, the resort scheme finish, oui, 'cause you know the white
 people are not gon put their money in anything where there's all this
 confusion. (Marshall 396)

The act of inhabiting the land, of enacting the space, is all that is
necessary to defeat the resort scheme. Beaufils and his wife are able
to claim Government Lands as a space for the people of Morlands and