TEXT, PRACTICE, PERFORMANCE VI (2005) 69 The Tense Present History of the Second Gulf War: Revelation and Repression in Memorialization Ken MacLeish Provocative questions about history and memory are both addressed and posed anew by two “live,” temporary memorials to the current war in Iraq: the American Friends Service Committee’s Eyes Wide Open and Veterans for Peace’s Arlington West. This article ana- lyzes the memorials themselves, along with the substantial and complex body of public re- sponse and media coverage they have generated. I draw on various details of the memori- als and their attendant discourses, including the marginal place of the civilian Iraqi dead, to speculate about the potentials and inevitable limitations of this sort of commemoration. I am not interested in the completeness or “correctness” of the Iraq war memorials’ repre- sentations of loss, but rather in the peculiar and perhaps inevitable aporias of historical and personal commemoration—heavily inflected by post-9-11 nationalism and militarism—that a critical engagement with these projects brings to light. Introduction How are we to remember the past when we cannot agree on its meaning or even its material facts? And how are we to make it into “history” when it is so recent that its affective traces are still powerfully present, or when it is the history of events that are playing out in the present on a daily basis. These are questions that are both addressed and posed anew by two memorials to the current war in Iraq: Eyes Wide Open, a traveling installation sponsored by the Quaker peace group American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) that includes one pair of combat boots for every American casualty in Iraq, and Arlington West, a tem- porary “cemetery” of white wooden crosses for American soldiers fallen in Iraq erected every weekend on a southern California beach by a local chapter of Vet- erans for Peace (VFP). These memorials have generated a substantial and com- plex body of public response and media coverage. While the responsible groups share an avowedly anti-war orientation, they also both claim that the primary purpose of the memorials is to publicly recognize the personal and individual consequences of war. Veterans, the families of the fallen, and other visitors come to the memorials to grieve their losses, to mark the cross or pair of boots rep- resenting a friend or relation with notes and mementos, to pay their respects to strangers, and to support one another. Like the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Eyes Wide Open and Arlington West attempt to respond to an event laden with political controversy and high personal and emotional stakes, as they address not just a war—an abstract historical event—but the absence and memory of the people whose labor and lives make war. These memorials, in their very presence and form, both answer and ask ques- tions about history. I say answer and ask, and in that order, because these memo- rials’ very self-conscious marking of history and loss is a necessarily ambivalent affair, on more than one front. They present the dead as anonymous masses of boots or crosses, but at the same time invite the individuation and personaliza- tion of the fallen. They evoke feelings of despair and sadness, but also provide a setting for the healing of emotional wounds. The straightforward, unitary sym-