ELIZABETH DAVIS


 Sasabonsam is not the only figure that melts into the landscape.
Clare, who has been painfully fragmented throughout the novel, finally
becomes whole when, through her death, she is reclaimed by the
Jamaican landscape. As Cliff herself points out, "In her death she has
complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be
indistinguishable from the ground" (Clare Savage 265). Reuniting Clare
with the landscape here functions both as the sort of revolutionary
reinhabiting found in Daughters and as a strategy of appropriating the
feminization of the landscape as a revolutionary act. Cliff explains that
her writing is inspired by the work of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta
who "represents this homeland, this landscape of her identity, as female,
as womb, the contours of a woman's body":

 Both Mendieta and I understand the landscape of our islands as female.
 ...I try in [this novel] to show the power, particularly the spiritual
 authority of the grandmother, as well as her victimization. ...At her
 most powerful, the grandmother is the source of knowledge, magic,
 ancestors, stories, healing practices, and food. ...She may be informed
 with ashe, the power to make things happen, the responsibility to
 mete justice. (Clare Savage 265-7)

Cliff seeks to reclaim the feminized landscape so that it is no longer
"unspoiled, virgin territory, waiting to be transformed and possessed
by imperial (heterosexual) design" (Erotic 90) but rather an emblem of
power, struggle, and the right of the Caribbean people to control the
uses and depictions of their space; the feminization of the landscape
becomes associated not with availability for foreign misappropriation
but with a revolution led by women. As one critic notes, a similar
feminization of revolution is at work in Daughters: "Resistance against
oppression in its various guises.. .may have fallen primarily upon the
shoulders of women" (Pettis 96).
 This is the point at which the characters' defense of place and the
authors' depiction of landscape come together to counter touristic
misappropriation. Ursa and Clare, Marshall and Cliff are able to take
on the strategies of the tourist guides and use them in defense of the
landscape. Belinda Edmondson argues that "in the Caribbean historical
script the silent [black female] body becomes metonymy for quiescent
land, ripe for exploitation" (72). In Daughters and No Telephone To
Heaven, the protagonists are anything but silent bodies, and they claim
voices for their lands to counter those of the tourist guides. In Ursa's
case, this voice is the voice of the people; she helps Beaufils get elected,