"AND YOU CAN DRINK THE WATER"


 as extras. The national language is English, and you can drink the
 water. (Cliff 200)

This depiction repeats all the major elements of tourist books: the
friendly people willing to serve as extras, the exciting colonial past,
and the beautiful virgin landscape. Note, too, that the passage
successfully banishes the Jamaican people from the virgin landscape
by locating them in the paragraph that describes buildings, cities, and
amenities rather than in the paragraph that describes the natural
beauty of the place. This article, which describes Jamaica in reassuring,
domesticating terms ("an hour and a half south of Miami by jet," "a
little smaller than Connecticut") and stresses its amenities ("The
national language is English, and you can drink the water"), will certainly
have the effect of drawing tourists to Jamaica, and a blockbuster film
featuring the beauties of the Jamaican landscape will no doubt do the
same. The filmmakers, then, manage to exploit Jamaica twice: once in
their own use of the place as a welcoming tourist site during the
shooting, and once in their misrepresentation of the landscape in the
film, which will make them a great deal of money and draw flocks of
tourists to Jamaica. The revolutionaries' attack against the film shoot
thus becomes an important battle over who has the right to control
the use and representation of the Jamaican landscape.
 This guerrilla attack is a disaster-helicopters sweep in and massacre
the revolutionaries while the actors and technicians, who have been
warned, hide in their trailers-but it is also a victory of sorts. One of
the people killed is a mentally disturbed Jamaican man who has been
hired to play Sasabonsam, the Forest God. In this travesty of a film,
Sasabonsam is a wild, hair-covered figure who attacks a young and
highly sexualized Nanny (a maroon leader traditionally depicted as
"an old woman naked except for a necklace made from the teeth of
whitemen") so that an equally sexualized Will Cudjoe can rescue her
(Cliff 206-7). These three figures embody the touristic depictions of
the Jamaican landscape, eroticized and wild, but when the man playing
Sasabonsam is killed, he effectively melts back into the landscape:
"Sasabonsam fell, silent. Spraying across the bushes" (Cliff 208).
Essentially, this figure that the film-makers extract from Jamaican
tradition and alter to meet their own needs is reclaimed by the forest
that he is meant to represent. It is not clear what will happen next,
whether the film shoot will continue, but the revolutionaries at least
succeed in marking the set as a site of violence and reclaiming
Sasabonsam as a part of their landscape.