Global Courant 2023-05-01 19:36:41
It’s just a two minute clip. But the intense reactions to the trailer for Netflix’s forthcoming Queen Cleopatra docudrama speak volumes about both Cleopatra’s lasting legacy and the power of identity politics.
The trailer immediately drew accusations of falsifying history. Social media hashtags and online petitions were followed by an Egyptian lawyer who filed a complaint with the prosecution against Netflix, which in turn reportedly closed comments on the clip’s YouTube page.
Mine is the only Egyptian voice on the program. My multigenerational Alexandrian background, on both sides, is key to my passion for Cleopatra. As a historian, I have spent endless days studying and contemplating the Queen, not least in completing my book, Alexandria: the city that changed the world.
Some things about Cleopatra are just facts. That she was of Macedonian-Greek background is beyond doubt. That the Ptolemies intermarried and largely retained their Hellenic bloodline cannot be denied. That almost all of her ancestors would have had fair skin is also true.
But the largely binary racial terms used today are anachronistic and can hardly be applied to Cleopatra’s context. With the exception of Jews, ethnicities were not really recorded in early Egyptian history. In Alexandria in particular, there was no normative race: the genetic makeup was varied because people from all over the region, from Europeans to Nubians, lived and intermarried on the land.
Claiming that Egypt had no dark-skinned people, or that the origins of Egyptian civilizations were essentially sub-Saharan African, are essentially both forms of erasure.
There are also some things we are not sure about. We do not know for certain the identities of Cleopatra’s mother and the queen’s grandmothers on either side. In fact, the Alexandrians at the time called her father “Nothos” or “the bastard”. All this is important because the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra’s grandfather and father, were known to have had Egyptian partners and mistresses. So there is a chance that several of Cleopatra’s ancestors may have been Egyptian.
It is this enigmatic nature of Cleopatra’s grandmothers and her mother that suggests that Cleopatra may have had a mixed heritage, which would have tanned her complexion. And since curly hair is a dominant gene, an Egyptian ancestor may have changed the Ptolemaic lineage in that way as well.
As I explain in my book, DNA samples recovered in Egypt from the New Kingdom to Roman times reveal that Egyptians had predominantly Southern European and Near Eastern ancestry; Sub-Saharan African ancestry amounted to no more than 15 percent in ancient times and today is no more than 21 percent in Egypt. So it’s safe to say that even with some Egyptian ancestry, she wouldn’t have been black in today’s terms, but biracial.
That Alexandria’s library was destroyed and that so much of the ancient city is under or underground means that limited material evidence exists. This lack of physical evidence of her life adds to the vacuum filled by myth and speculation.
We do know that Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, was born in Alexandria, where her family reigned for three centuries. It is an embodiment of Greco-Egyptian hybridity that allowed Cleopatra to become a powerful unifying figure: her mix of Greek and Egyptian clothing, her proficiency in the Egyptian language, and her position as the incarnation of the goddess Isis.
But to the Romans, she was a foreigner in the heart of their civil war and biased Roman sources had to present a worthy foe to justify how a woman could influence two of their most prominent men – Julius Caesar and Mark Antony.
Throughout history, Cleopatra has served as a conduit for people throughout history – and today is no different. Visual art tells us that too. During the Middle Ages she was represented as blond; during the neoclassical craze, stereotypically Hellenic; during colonialism, she passively needs a European to rescue or conquer her; during slavery, she is a servant who is examined by Julius Caesar.
It is no surprise that this continues to this day as she is portrayed at a time when systemic racism is being proclaimed like never before.
Even my own perception can be influenced by my Egyptian roots. But that perception also led me to make Cleopatra stronger by offering a different story from the one popular in Shakespeare and Hollywood. A few years ago I presented one BBC television documentary in which I tried to understand her true nature.
The rationale was that Cleopatra has been exoticized and sexualized for too long and that this is a far cry from the queen I learned about as an Egyptian child: to me, as in many ancient sources, she was always a powerful, educated and dynamic woman. .
I also curated one exhibition in Shakespeare’s birthplace showing how it has been presented in English literary records compared to Egyptian perspectives. In either case, reclaiming Cleopatra as an Egyptian queen was at the forefront of my mind. But her skin color wasn’t.
When Netflix asked me to contribute, I was eager to provide an Egyptian voice on the show – and it turned out to be the only one. Contributors were approached before the actors were confirmed, details about actors were embargoed for a long time, and contributors were not informed about the other guests. My interview was completed after the acting was filmed, so the drama couldn’t fully use my opinion to inform its artistic project. I remember describing her ship as a superyacht of sorts with its colors and musicians and dancers on board, only to be told that this explanation could not be recorded because that scene had already been filmed with a more humble boat.
Queen Cleopatra is a docudrama, not a full-fledged documentary. Although they are interspersed, we must separate the drama from the documentary side. How can we treat those parts as anything other than drama unless we expect every detail to be completely accurate in the acted segments?
Cleopatra may indeed be of mixed heritage, but whether or not that was the case, the fact that she’s being played by a biracial actor is a casting choice that shouldn’t upset us in this day and age. In the past, Cleopatra has been played by white actors (not to mention boy actors in Shakespeare’s day), and the final product has continued to be successful.
Am I disappointed that the casting has been since then politicized by the director (whom I have never spoken to)? I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. Besides, what right does she have to tell Egyptians how to see themselves?
As for the documentary segments, which make up less than half of the program, I expect these to present different, and I hope intellectual, perspectives and interpretations. These include mine on the importance of acknowledging Cleopatra’s Egyptianness.
Being obsessed with what a powerful woman looked like is ironically reductionist and objectifying in itself, so the documentary portion should shed light on her entire, fascinating life, not just what she might have looked like.
Nevertheless, the trailer shows me imagining Cleopatra as having curly hair and a similar skin tone to mine. It is not much different from how Christians around the world present the historical figure of Jesus in different ways. And in the fuller context, I say that the puzzling nature of her lineage and legacy—both of which I described in my history of Alexandria—has long encouraged people to visualize her in different ways.
Like art, history is nuanced; it has the ability to inspire and enrage. And the past is a mirror in our present. The heightened reactions to this two-minute trailer say more about the historic moment we live in. Here we see how being involved in history has helped us learn more about ourselves and what matters to us.
However, scientific research is based on weighing the available evidence, and that should not be controversial. Even Cleopatra’s foremost European biographer, Egyptology professor Joyce Tyldesley, writes that Cleopatra “may have had some Egyptian genes” and that she “most likely had dark hair and an olive or hazel complexion”.
So maybe what I’m imagining, as I say in the trailer, isn’t that far off – although of course we’ll never know.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.
