Buildings as markers

From Kincaid, page 62:

“The Syrians and Lebanese own large amounts of commercial property in Antigua. They build large concrete buildings, and then the government of Antigua rents all the space in these buildings. Why can’t the government of Antigua build its own government buildings? What is the real interest paid on these loans made to the government? And are the loans made to the government or are they really made to persons in the government but charged to the government? What is the real rent paid to the Syrian and Lebanese landlords, for no one believes the sum quoted…”

From Friedman, page 3:

“No one ever gave me directions like this on a golf course before: “Aim at either Microsoft or IBM.” I was standing on the first tea at the KGA Golf Club in downtown Bangalore, in southern India, when my playing partner pointed at two shiny glass-and-steel buildings off in the distance, just behind the first green. The Goldman Sachs building wasn’t done yet; otherwise he could have made it a threesome. HP and Texas Instruments had their offices on the back nine, along the tenth hole. That wasn’t all. The tee markers were from Epson, the printer company, and one of our caddies was wearing a hat from 3M. Outside, some of the traffic signs were also sponsored by Texas Instruments, and the Pizza Hut billboard on the way over showed a steaming pizza, under the headline “Gigabites of Taste!””

Buildings are a quasi-permanent part of the landscape that surrounds us. Our own interpretations of their existences play an integral role in how we interpret our environments and our place in the world every day. The two passages above, along with the scene from Life and Debt which we focused on in class that showed McDonalds and Baskin Robbins, can reveal much about how the native and the tourist interpret their surroundings.

For the narrator in A Small Place, the buildings that surround her are a constant reminder of the corruption that permeates the government of Antigua. Many of the buildings that she sees are ugly to her not only in their appearance, but ugly in their histories. The passage is just one selection of many in A Small Place that shows the impact of globalization on the narrator’s psyche. While the narrator is a fictitious character, it is not difficult to imagine that these are the same thoughts that course through the minds of the elders in cultures such as Antigua, Jamaica and probably even Thomas Friedman’s wonderful India.

Wikipedia counts Friedman as a multi-millionaire. As this is likely true, we should expect him to view the buildings that he sees through very different eyes than the natives of India. Indeed, I would imagine that the buildings that he was describing serve as a (probably pleasant) reminder of home, whereas the buildings in A Small Place and Life and Debt serve as a painful reminder to the natives of what is wrong with their countries.