Miriam Waters' poem Not Your Man responds to a pair of archive photographs in the collection of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
The studio photographs were taken in the 1870s in colonial Samoa, and speak of complex colonial histories and different understandings of race, gender and gender fluidity. We don't know the name of the subject of the photographs: the labels simply say "man from Tutulia with hair bound [and] unbound".
Miriam writes,
"I thought it was fascinating to see how other cultures have been overlooked/oversimplified by anthropologists in the past and I wondered what this Samoan would say, if they could talk to us, and how that might be relevant to our own identity struggles today."
This track is part of the Museum Remix: Unheard project. Find out more: www.museums.cam.ac.uk/museumremix
You can find out more about the photographs at https://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/magic/man-tutuila-hair-bound-and-unbound
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