Narratives of History, Nature, and Death at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific

Abstract

Punchbowl is also a site for production of stories state tells about why young men die in war. There are two distinct kinds of spaces produced at Punchbowl: burial space, occupying most of 112.5 acres with neat symmetrical rows of graves; and space of memorial, with its texts, maps, inscriptions, illustrations, instructions, and prayers.1 On surface of things, second space appears to be full of words while first is starkly silent. But orderly march of soldiers' graves inhabits a dense historical text, where narratives are written directly onto material soil,2 while signifying practices of memorial are also riddled with silences. The two textual sites are mutually constitutive of one another, producing through their interactive imagery a set of stories that pacify death, sanitize war, and enable future wars to be thought. Both memorial and cemetery are tacitly gendered spaces, where inscriptions of masculinity and femininity are hidden in plain sight/site. Tracking the often silent and hidden operations of gender3 at Punchbowl leads into an implicitly masculine space, one that is planned, controlled, disciplined, orderly. The memorial tells a monoglossic, regulated story of external danger and national victory. (The Vietnam war is omitted from story, although dead soldiers from Vietnam occupy many of graves.) The site contains no disorder, no mystery,