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Memorialising war

Rethinking heritage and affect in the context of Pearl Harbor

Emma Waterton

Bright objects and the affective power of heritage

Places of war, along with their intangible meanings and the intensities of feeling they foster, often hold sway in the public imagination. Part of their evocative power lies in their ability to help visitors make conscious links between the physical spaces in which they stand and what is known to have happened there. The way such sites are officially framed and represented plays a significant role in the overall memorialisation process, hinting at the cultural, economic, and political agendas that sit behind them and signal at least part of the range of responses a visitor may have when reflecting on the horrors of war. But, in addition to those more cognitive tones, there are also other forces at work: registers of affect. Those registers are not always immediately expressible but are deeply felt, and bear down on us as we react to atmosphere, eye-witness accounts, memories, and, on occasion, a sense of haunting. In such moments, we, as visitors, are asked to grapple with both the anticipated meanings and narratives that places of war absorb and accumulate, as well as the involuntary and unexpected personal responses that are often physically felt there, and expressed as fear, sadness, foreboding, despair, anger, or pride.

This chapter attunes to the range of affective and emotional responses registered by people as they visit heritage that relates to, or represents, war. In using the term ‘heritage,’ I refer to those places, objects, and memories that have acquired shared meanings, beliefs, and values to the extent that people alter their behaviour in relation to them (Waterton & Watson 2014). In keeping with my interest in places of war, the example of ‘heritage’ I take as my focus is that associated with the attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War. Prior to 7 December 1941, Pearl Harbor might have been known for its pearl-producing oysters or its associations with the Hawaiian Shark God, and certainly as a naval base, at least from 1908. On 7 December 1941 all that changed. But it was not until 1962 that the first elements of the site – the USS Arizona – were opened to the public as a site of memory, thereby transforming the area, through post-conflict preservation and reconstruction, into a place of heritage.

Today, the heritage of Pearl Harbor encompasses a visitor centre, the USS Arizona Memorial, the Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park, the USS Missouri Memorial (affectionately named ‘the Mighty Mo’), and the Pacific Aviation Museum. In addition, the complex also includes the mooring quays that formed part of Battleship Row, plus six historic chief petty officer bungalows, the USS Utah Memorial and the USS Oklahoma Memorial, all of which are located on or near Ford Island, or Moku’ume’ume, on Oahu, Hawai’i¹ (Figure 22.1).

Figure 22.1Layout of the Pearl Harbor Memorial Complex.

In what follows, I explore the contours of intensity that define Pearl Harbor as a place of memory, as well as the meanings and identities that it evokes and attracts. My purpose is to point to the way that memories accumulate around it, which then act as vectors of intensities that pull in a range of emotions, identities, and feelings. Pearl Harbor thus contains strong peaks of intensity, though I have often struggled to name and describe them. Indeed, while some memories associated with Pearl Harbor have been packaged and displayed to the public for many years in literature, films, posters, TV shows, conspiracy theories, social media posts, and newspaper articles, others have been far more difficult to capture.

To understand the way such memories become legible in situ, I adopt the idea of ‘encounter.’ This is a theoretical construct I have developed and elaborated on elsewhere in collaboration with Steve Watson (see Waterton & Watson 2014, 2015; Watson and Waterton 2019), and it draws on the eloquent proposition put forward by Bull and Leyshon (2010: 126) that ‘individuals are always encountering their own lives, in places and in moments.’ Our sense of encounter, or that ‘momentary alignment between person and place’ as DeSilvey (2012: 47) describes it, homes in on the representational qualities that accrete around nations, cultures, and public memories as well as the felt, embodied, and emotional experiences that they engender (Waterton & Watson 2014; see also Waterton and Watson 2015; Waterton 2014; Watson & Waterton 2019). It is philosophically linked to the notion of ‘affect’ and the concomitant idea that bodily experiences, registered in feelings and emotions, are key to understanding the body’s power to act when interacting with other bodies, events, and places. This understanding emerges from the work of Spinoza, who defines such intensities as the capacity ‘to affect and be affected’ in a manner that is pre-discursive (see Massumi 2015: ix; see also Anderson 2006). Drawing from Spinoza, Massumi (1987: xvi) has also argued that affect is ‘a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.’ A key feature of both Spinoza’s and Massumi’s work is thus its prepersonal proposition, in which affect is understood as ‘something’ that happens. That ‘something’ is registered in the body, but it is not necessarily represented or expressed discursively, either to oneself or to others, nor is it necessarily confined to any one individual alone.

While theories of affect have clear potential for both Memory Studies and Heritage Studies, particularly given both fields’ interests in embodied performances and sense registers, I have space here only to skim the surface of this theoretical terrain (but see Waterton & Watson 2013 and Waterton 2014 for a more fulsome discussion). Suffice to say that my interest lies with how this approach can tailor our focus towards not only what heritage places, objects, and experiences mean but what they do. Here, Ahmed’s (2004) reflections on the cultural politics of emotions are instructive. Ahmed sees emotions and affects as ‘things’ that circulate among and between individuals, objects, and place, sticking to one or other and leaving traces in the present. The turn to affect thus opens a line of questioning about what a heritage object or place means, what feelings it evokes, and which emotions ‘stick’ to it over time as people interact with it. As a place of heritage, Pearl Harbor – as with many, if not all, heritage sites – works differently on different visitors; its capacity to ‘stick’ to people and their memories, and pull them into its orbit, depends on the affective power of the residues of war that are found there, and how they are encountered.

At Pearl Harbor, much of that power is traced to one moment in America’s past: the surprise Japanese attack on the US Pacific fleet at their moorings in 1941. Using the work of Gordillo (2014), who in turn draws on Bryant (2012), I understand this power as being at least in part a consequence of the way objects, things, and bodies relate to, or are networked with, other objects, things, and bodies. This notion of networking is important, as while Pearl Harbor is itself a significant site of memory, evidenced by the declaration of a National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day observed annually, it is also explicitly networked to September 11 (9/11) as the only other site of a surprise attack by outside forces on American soil. Both may be considered ‘bright objects,’ to use Byrant’s (2014) terms, by their many visitors, particularly those who come from far away. By adopting the phrase ‘bright objects,’ I mean to imply that both events – Pearl Harbor and 9/11 – are key hubs or nodes ‘in a network, exercising gravity that influences and defines the paths of most other objects in [their] vicinity’ (Byrant 2012: n.p.; see also Byrant 2014). But their brightness is not assured; instead, as Gordillo argues, it is ‘the result of the networks [they are] part of’ (2014: 22). For international visitors, Pearl Harbor might be more of a satellite object in Bryant’s scheme, in that the site is known to exist but perhaps only on the periphery of the gravitational network defined by the attraction of Hawai’i as a tourist destination.

To explore the relationships between heritage, memorialisation, and affect, examined through the lens of Pearl Harbor as a place of war, this chapter details the findings from a qualitative project undertaken in 2012. The study revolved around a discourse analysis of the site’s interpretive material, in-depth semi-structured interviews with key staff working across the site (n=6), semi-structured interviews with visitors (n=105), and a performative autoethnography. Over the course of a fortnight, I talked to 114 visitors and staff: 58 women and 66 men. Only 30% of them were international tourists; the rest self-identified as American citizens. However, before discussing material that emerged from the semi-structured interviews with visitors – the focus of this chapter – I will first introduce my own encounters with Pearl Harbor as well as the emotions that surfaced as I sat down to write this chapter. The inclusion of this immediacy of experience will, I hope, allow for a more fulsome understanding of what happens when people encounter heritage through corporeal proximity, and give insight into the experiences of heritage as places of memory.

Getting there

I first came upon Pearl Harbor on my second trip to Hawai’i, in July 2012. I was there for research, tasked with interviewing people visiting the memorial complex over the course of a fortnight. Each morning I would board Honolulu’s Route 20 bus as it inched its way from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor, slowed by the city’s infamous traffic. On the first morning of my fieldwork, I arrived onsite at 7.30am, when the air was still, fresh and dewy. A handful of cars were dotted around the car park and a small group of visitors loitered at the memorial’s entrance. Clutching my ticket for the 8am USS Arizona Memorial tour, I moved into the site – watchful and a little apprehensive. After a short wait I was ushered into the Pearl Harbor Memorial Theatre where I watched a National Park Service (NPS) film introducing the attack. From there, I was quietly herded onto a small, US Navy-operated shuttle boat and taken out to the Memorial (Figure 22.2).

Composed of an entry room, the Assembly Hall, and a Shrine, the Memorial straddles the bruised and sunken hull of the USS Arizona. I remember vividly the sound of water lapping against its concrete footings as we approached, so silent was our group. The water’s surface shimmered with the flighty, rainbow-slick of oil still leaking from the ship below, which was covered by hundreds of barnacles fused to its rust-crusted surface. With the introductory film still fresh in my mind I could just about make out the dark outline of 183 fighters and torpedo bombers filling the sky, followed by strafing, shooting, fire, and panic: 185 vessels of the US Navy were moored at Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning, including eight battleships clustered together in an area that has since become known as ‘Battleship Row.’ Two of those battleships never returned to service: the Oklahoma capsized and the Arizona exploded, sinking in just nine minutes.

Pearl Harbor, like many places of war, rubs up against a range of other presences. It drifts into politics, the media, the imagination, and everyday life, so much so that when we visit such places we find ourselves on the cusp of what Stewart (2003: n.p.) calls the ‘charged border between public and private.’ I have been to similar places, of course: Port Arthur, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Derry. These are all places where forces gather to a point of impact (after Stewart 2003: n.p.). The benches, trees, restrooms, flowers, fences, voices, signs, and posters housed within them – perfectly ordinary things – resonate with something profoundly unordinary. They become potent, unsettling, laying claim to a sort of agency, and they are alive not so much in our minds but in our bodies. Unsurprisingly, over the course of my time at Pearl Harbor I watched people eventually settle into prosaic tourist practices: strolling, eating, reading, talking, and posing. But those practices were enlivened not so much by grins and chatter but by a watchful, precarious tension. Posing for a photo, for example, seemed to matter more at Pearl Harbor: was it insensitive, inappropriate, inadequate? Such questions composed and recomposed the memorial; as visitors, we recognised its sombreness because we had already felt it and let it influence our behaviour. Now, thinking back, it is hard to say which one was complicit to the other.

Figure 22.2 The USS Arizona Memorial.

Source: Photo taken by the author.

Being there

As Wachtel (1986: 216) pointed out some 30 years ago, ‘the preservation of recollections rests on their anchorage in space.’ Thus, before engaging with my data it is useful to provide a quick overview and chronology of the memorial site itself. The USS Arizona Memorial was first opened to the public in 1962. Initially operated by the US Navy, this early iteration of the memorial site revolved around water transportation to and from the shoreline and the Arizona Memorial. The first visitor centre came in 1980, at which time the Navy handed over management and organisation of the site to the NPS, though it retained control over transportation to and from the Arizona (and still does). Shortly thereafter, in 1981, the USS Bowfin submarine arrived, effectively developing into the Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park by 1987. Just over a decade later, in 1998, the USS Missouri, recently decommissioned and struck from the Naval Vessel Register, was donated to the museum complex. In 2006, a final historic site was added with the Pacific Aviation Museum, which includes two of the original aeroplane hangars and the Ford Island Control Tower, all three of which were in operation in 1941. At Pearl Harbor, then, there is no shortage of material remains left in place that might serve as reminders of trauma. Collectively, the sites attract over 1.8 million visitors a year. The boat tour alone, which operates out of the visitor centre and visits the Arizona Memorial, is almost always sold out. Indeed, it is not unusual for all tickets to sell out by 8.00am on any given day, especially in summer.

But ‘the constitutive relationship between memory and place,’ as Hoelsher and Alderman (2004: 350) remind us, ‘is also, and no less, performative.’ I therefore turned my attention to the residual affects that lingered in the landscapes of Pearl Harbor, and to the way visitors ‘performed’ or attuned themselves to those affects during my visit. From the outset, I should acknowledge that my responses were undoubtedly hypersensitive – I was there as a researcher, after all. But I was not the only one making something out my visit, nor was I the only one ready to feel something. It is nonetheless important to note that some visitors seemed barely to feel anything at all. If they did, it was more akin to boredom or a burst of irritation at some element of the site’s organisation: the expensive cafes, the waiting, or a lack of shade, perhaps. These were in the minority (4.76%), however, so in this chapter I will leave aside such responses and focus instead on those indicative of a willingness to feel. Quite often, those feelings were named by respondents. A steady list grew across the fortnight, a list which eventually settled into a fairly contained collection of feelings named as ‘humbled,’ ‘sad,’ ‘solemn,’ ‘proud,’ ‘in awe,’ ‘heartbroken,’ or ‘tearful,’ with well over 50% of participants nominating at least one (if not more) of those words when prompted to think about how they felt (Table 22.1).

While an acknowledgement of feeling was frequent, I was struck by their cajoling into fairly distinct affective registers, mobilised by attempts to attend to processes of memorialisation. Two such registers will be the focus of this chapter: 1) attuning to unimaginable atmospheres; and 2) responding to the affective intensities of being in place.

Unimaginable atmospheres

In starting with the theme, ‘unimaginable atmospheres,’, I point to some of the more obvious configurations between memory and affect in my data, configurations that take us beyond (or add to) the myriad representational qualities of place. In other words, while Pearl Harbor is clearly presented and represented as a place of war, my merging of memory and affect is an attempt to underscore the fact that it is also felt, remembered, and lived in the multi-dimensional complexities of the experiences it creates (Waterton & Watson 2015). To understand these experiences, I draw on Sumartojo’s (2016) work on atmosphere (see Sumartojo’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 23; see also Waterton & Dittmer 2014; Edensor & Sumartojo 2015), which she argues are ‘accounted for as aspects of space that are more-than-representational, part of the “feel” and experience of events, encounters and places’ (2016: 544). They surround and envelope, she goes on to suggest, and emanate from ‘a dynamic combination of the built environment, place and people’ (p. 544). But while they ‘exist’ – in that they are perceived and apprehended by subjects as they rise out of events, encounters, and places – they are also always approximate, precarious, and indistinct (Anderson 2014). Atmospheres are thus akin to things like tones, moods, or ambiance, all of which heritage places like Pearl Harbor exude or generate in ways that change individual and collective experiences of it: they are part of the material and more-than-representational qualities of place that prompt feelings, actions, and emotions. They are therefore at once personal yet collective; contained yet diffuse; conditioned yet conditioning; material yet ethereal (Lorimer et al. 2017).

Table 22.1How does it make you feel?

How does it make you feel as you are making your way around the site?
Response		Frequency	Total	Percentage
1	Moved, emotionally but a general sensation	7	105	6.67%
2	Moved, specifically naming feelings of pride	5	105	4.76%
3	Moved, specifically naming feelings of patriotism	9	105	8.57%
4	Moved, specifically naming a feeling of being humbled	2	105	1.90%
5	Honoured/privileged to be able to visit	6	105	5.71%
6	Nominates sad, sombre, or solemn feelings at a general level	29	105	27.61%
7	Nominates sad, sombre, or solemn feelings due to family connections and/or links	10	105	9.52%
8	Nominates feelings of awe	17	105	16.19%
9	Nominates a feeling of nostalgia	3	105	2.86%
10	Mixed feelings of sadness and pride	5	105	4.76%
11	Impressed by the materiality of the site (e.g. the ship, submarine)	4	105	3.81%
12	Indicates a critical engagement with the site's history/contemporary times	3	105	2.86%
13	No strong feelings	5	105	4.76%
	Total	105		99.98%

There is a burgeoning of work on atmosphere in the literature that deals with theories of affect, each taking up a particular element such as light, air, weather, architecture, sound, and so on. The focus of Sumartojo’s work centres on her alignment of atmosphere with memory, the latter of which works to trigger, tint, and sustain atmospheres in heritage settings. The nexus between the two is thus a central dimension that shapes a visitor’s receptivity to a site, its narratives, and its intensities. At Pearl Harbor, it is easy to see this in the way that the site has been deliberately harnessed to produce atmospheric feelings of presence and unfathomable absence. Such apprehensions were rife at Pearl Harbor, and worked to intensify (and render personal) the extent to which visitors were ‘touched by the past,’ to borrow from Trigg (2012: xviii):

The feeling you get here … it was worth coming.

(male, plant operator, aged 45–54)

When I was walking around the submarines, the list of people that were lost at sea, I felt a little something. I can’t really explain it. I felt a little something.

(male, student, aged 25–34)

I … got goose-bumps going on the Arizona … it even makes me a little angry or makes me glad that I’m doing something about it … the Arizona’s very powerful, definitely. For me, it was a big deal. I just really … I want to honour the people that were here. We should never forget the guys that were here and the men and women that died.

(male, US Army, aged 18–24)

For some visitors, this translation from ‘absence’ to ‘atmosphere’ to ‘affect’ culminated in a complex mix of feelings that were transitory yet vivid:

Mixed feelings… . Very impressed with the sailors of the time that had to go through this, but also very remorseful. I mean, there were a lot of tragic events obviously involved. But a lot of pride, a lot of pride comes through it. I know now where my forefathers walked in order for me to get where I am.

(male, US Navy, aged 35–44)

Captivating, because in some sense you can’t really feel the pain that was felt here. There was pain, there was joy, there’s a whole mix of emotions that I feel.

(female, research engineer, aged 25–34)

Thus, while Pearl Harbor is in many ways overdetermined by its representational qualities, it remains at the same time strangely unfathomable. Unfathomable, yet personal. It is this sense of the unfathomable or unimaginable, as a distinct atmosphere, that seemed to fill at least part, if not all, of the memorial complex, acting as a catalyst for personal reflections for many visitors. To borrow from Landsberg’s (2018) argument, it was the atmosphere that helped visitors bridge the chasm between themselves and past events:

God knows I don’t know how I’d feel if I was going through it too … I couldn’t imagine myself doing that … and being under attack here as well, not knowing what’s going on. Crazy.

(male, US military, aged 25–34)

It’s unbelievable that something like that could have happened and it’s hard to imagine that that can happen and what those people have gone through, families and survivors. Devastating.

(female, retired, over 65)

This atmospheric catalyst was particularly active near Battleship Row, where visitors, already articulate about their perceptions of atmosphere, were prompted to connect with a specific array of terrifying conditions described at the time of the attack. In the following quote, for example, the experiences of one visitor were instigated by an atmospheric quality conjured by prosthetic memories of sailors trapped in the capsized hull of the USS Oklahoma. The visitor, in trying to imagine the unimaginable or assemble that which is absent, registers first disbelief, which soon flickers into an expression of empathy before flittering into something akin to helplessness:

Yeah, to think about the loss that some people have gone through, to hear your friend that you’re trying to rescue out of the USS Oklahoma and they’re beating on the hull and you can’t get to them and you, as a sailor, know that that means … So, the man on the outside trying to rescue and the man on the inside trying to get rescued … both of them knowing that drowning is imminent … it’s pretty touching.

(male, teacher, aged 35–44)

Using Landsberg’s terminology I would term this a prosthetic memory, which she describes as memories that are ‘worn on the body’ and enable a ‘sensuous engagement with the past’ (2018: 149–150). This is so even though they are not ‘natural’ or possessed by a single individual but are borne from engagements with mediated representations (Landsberg 2018). Prosthetic memories emerged at other times and in other parts of the site, too, where visitors seemed to be enveloped by unimaginable atmospheres. Sometimes, such atmospheres were created simply by the blissful sunny weather, natural light conditions, or the beauty of the harbour in the present day, which acted as a vector into an affective experience so contrary to that which must have been part of the place in 1941. Others, still, were moved to make profound and emotive reflections on the nature of humankind today, expressing regret that with the passing of time so little had changed.

In her discussions of affective atmospheres, Sumartojo (2016) is particularly keen to explore the way some atmospheres give way to the more cognitive categories of identity, especially national identity. At Pearl Harbor, a ‘flickering presence of nation-ness’ (Merriman & Jones 2017: 600), visible within the folds of memory, people, and place that the site brings together, points to different scales of intensity: personal, local, regional, and national. I am therefore interested not only in the ability of its atmospheres to gather and attract people and affects, but to gather and attract intensities. This draws back to my introductory comments about ‘bright objects’ and their ability to attract because of their relations to other places and events. Pearl Harbor offers a clear illustration of the way a place of war can, and does, become a ‘bright object,’ not only because there is a certain resilience to its own gravitational pull but because of its atmospheric affects, which seem to pulse and intensify when encountered in relation to objects and events visible at the level of the nation. Indeed, there is no doubt that Pearl Harbor’s brightness as a prosthetic memory would have diminished or reduced in intensity were it not for the occurrence of 9/11, which brought renewed focus to American wartime history and memories. Significantly, these two events represent the only times America has been attacked on her own soil, with some 25% of visitors referring to correlations between Pearl Harbor and 9/11:

I keep thinking about 9/11 because that’s something that I experienced in my life and I’m sure somebody will come here in 50 years – or there – and kind of feel the same thing that we feel today.

(female, market researcher, aged 18–24)

I was reading a book and the way we felt about 9/11, they felt here, only it was a much larger attack here. Then it just makes … I don’t know … I guess I just wondered, too, why did they have them all so concentrated together? My God, why would you put everything on this little, tiny island?

(female, retired, aged 55–64)

And so, this is no neutral space: indeed, there were undeniably times when the memorial spaces gathered together a world of intense ideology, into which some visitors placed themselves in relation to a strongly felt patriotism that they perceived to be signified by the site and its narratives. It is a theme that undoubtedly undergirds Pearl Harbor, where patriotism glides over every surface, though space precludes a more fulsome exploration here.

The affective intensities of being in place

The earlier discussion around unimaginable atmospheres foregrounds a capacity to be affected by place. Relatedly, it also points to the way that atmospheres, when encountered, allow heritage places to spill beyond the here-and-now. We might therefore argue that atmospheres are neither trans-historical (they are fleeting, after all) nor a-historical but something in between. At memorial sites like Pearl Harbor, visitors see and feel history in context, onsite, via stark material remains and artefacts that, once curated, become an important component of the affect/memory dyad (Figure 22.3).

Yet, as the previous section illustrated, even the curatorial choreography that occurs in such tightly managed places cannot smooth over all of the ‘cracks in the surface of the present where time can be otherwise,’ to borrow from Crang and Travlou (2001: 175). Thus, I want to draw attention to the ability of these memorial sites – situated as they are on the site where something happened – to conjure up feelings of ‘being there’ or, put another way, produce authentic feelings of ‘being in that moment.’ This is because of the affective intensities that lie behind the knowledge that elements of the site, and indeed the site itself, is authentic to that moment, as some respondents remarked:

Wow. Just to know what people really went through and experienced, and the – you get the emotion of it, the emotional side, instead of just a black and white reading about it. To actually walk on it is much more personal to me.

(female, student, aged 18–24)

Figure 22.3 Looking back at the Pearl Harbor memorial complex from the USS Bowfin.

Source: Photograph by the author.

Very sad. The stuff that you read and the stuff that you watch, and you actually get to see and touch too is two different things. It’s more real. When you hear, what is it, the voice, the dialogue, it makes it more real.

(male, engineer, aged 35–44)

Pearl Harbor, as a bright object, is contrived from its network of affects, meanings, and memories; their lodgement in place presents a further opportunity to intensify it as an experience. Indeed, at Pearl Harbor, the ability to enter the USS Bowfin submarine is vitally important, as is standing above the USS Arizona or gazing down on the Surrender Deck of the USS Missouri. All three give a sense of confinement, touch, silence, claustrophobia, and helplessness, and have been curated in ways that conjure up atmospheres that are contingent on historical context and that uncanny sense of presence yet absence (see Turner & Peters 2015). It is this sense that produces place at Pearl Harbor. Already we can see it as multi-temporal in its references to 9/11. But there are traces (a presence yet absence) of so many other times and versions of the past in play there, too, as many participants confirmed in their articulations of their movement between history and individual experience:

The first time I was at Pearl Harbor in 1984, my uncle was a chief of … a destroyer, and he took me out to the Arizona. We were all alone. Very powerful experience, that, just to watch the black tears, the diesel fuel coming out, it’s quiet, it’s early in the morning, and just reflect on what that means and what you’re really standing on.

(male, teacher, aged 35–44)

This site makes me feel sad. My grandfather was in World War II and it makes me think of him and his past, so it makes me feel sad.

(female, accountant, aged 25–34)

Tearful, kind of … I’m not sure how to phrase it. My father would have been here so it’s kind of hard to take.

(female, teacher, aged 45–54)

In addition to the visceral eruption of the past evident in these quotes, there is also a sense of being transported. What I mean here is that Pearl Harbor is made in multiple times, and regularly poaches the bodies and memories of others from other times and brings them into the present. There is never, then, a single point of contact between a past, a present, and a place; rather, there are multiple connections with multiple pasts in a place that is made over and again, ‘activated and energised by the affective and emotional motilities that the non-human site and its human event together engender’ (Waterton & Watson 2015: 100). Pearl Harbor, as a place, is thus produced out of ‘discordant moments,’ to borrow from Crang and Travlou (2001: 173), which do not ‘form a singular time flowing forwards, but instead offer multiple temporalities.’

The notion of multiple temporalities was evident in many participant responses, in some of which we can see the past erupting into the present in ways so unpredictable they must surely exceed the expectations of curatorial design. As Drozdzewski et al. (2016) argue, it was often the deeply personal, sensorial cues that triggered such moments of meaning-making:

Yeah, the fact I’m going to be a marine, so it really screams out when I saw one of the big old monuments over there that was talking about all marines and stuff and how many survived and how many were killed. That really screamed out to me and was like, you’ve got to do something.

(male, student, aged 18–24)

I think, for me, [it speaks to] my nursing side. I wonder about what it was for those nurses that were here. They were probably friends with all those guys and dating them. These were horrific wounds too. I mean swimming in water with oil on fire. I mean there’s being shot, loss of limbs, oh gosh. It would have been very hard to – I mean how did they control their pain?

(female, nurses, aged 45–54)

Well, for work, being in the Navy in a site like this… . it kind of revitalises my pride in my job. After a while, you kind of get the day-to-day routine and things become mundane and you go out to see sites like this and it kind of refuels that vigour that you had. Then, for home life, it reminds me of sacrifice. Being a submariner, we go out for months at a time and we come home – heck, I had a time when my daughter didn’t even recognise me. But it reminds me of why I do that.

(male, US Navy, aged 35–44)

In these intimate reflections, certain elements of the site are being subtly worked into how participants define not only themselves, but their relationships to others. In responding to such sensorial prompts, affective intensities leach between public spaces and our everyday lives, shaping how identities feel and how they are understood (see Drozdzewski et al. in press, my emphasis). In this, we can see a mingling of shock and wonder – the unfathomable – in a process of meaning-making that is emergent from the experience of the encounter itself. This is an affective encounter in which an engagement with the past, in place, is not fleeting, as some theories of affect might suggest. Rather, it is laced with histories and memories – personal or otherwise – that are folded together. Indeed, as Bergson (2007[1912]: 24) has so powerfully argued, ‘[t]here is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.’

Leaving there

On my third trip to Hawai’i, I did not make it to Pearl Harbor. I spent only a few hours in Honolulu, in transit from one island to another, but caught myself on several occasions watching the Route 20 bus rattle by, on route to Pearlridge. As I close this chapter now, sitting at my desk on a cool, winter’s day, it would be fair to say that I am still haunted by the place, just as I was as I stood on the Memorial in 2012. I remember feeling thoroughly drawn in by the silence – the atmosphere – emanating from the stark, white structure as it held together all that was left of the lives of over 1,000 crew members. I can almost feel the heat of the sun bearing down on my skin, the occasional stirring of air, and I struggle, as I did then, to decipher the bewitching juxtaposition between the beauty of the harbour and the trauma of its past. In some ways, I participated in the same personal processes of memory-making that I have tried to detail here, and found myself trapped within the folds of an impossibly large event. As a heritage site, and one that articulates the horrors of war, Pearl Harbor oscillates between the large and the personal, the representational and the more-than-representational, the extraordinary and the everyday, and memory plays a powerful role in drawing everything together to produce an understanding of place. Visitors, as I have tried to illustrate, are affected by and in Pearl Harbor in a process we might term the affective experience of place. They trace themselves through the memorial complex, with atmospheres and affects discharged by the confined spaces of the submarine, the kamikaze deck on the Mighty Mo, the bullet holes at the Pacific Aviation Museum, and the Arizona Memorial, which seems to hold onto atmospheres like it holds onto the remains of those who died there. Together, they form a bright object, intense and durable, energised by human engagements yet returning that energy in their relations with the people who visit them. This is the ‘work’ of heritage: constructing and maintaining memories, meanings, and identities though the interplay of the material and the affective. It is in these interactions, between bodies and place, and made up not only of representational practices but performative moments reconstituted in every visit, every encounter, that memories are accumulated and re/constituted.

Note

1 At the time of research, the NPS’s Pearl Harbor Virtual Reality Center had not yet opened.

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