A BLACK CLEOPATRA ON NETFLIX

IS IT REWRITE HISTORY ?

This series revives very present and recurring controversies in the United States, around the place of blacks in society and the way their history is told.

In a petition launched in Egypt and already signed by more than 18,000 people, the director is accused of “blackwashing”, that is to say of having deliberately transformed a supposedly white historical figure into a black woman. “Blackwashing” and “whitewashing” – much more frequent – ​​respectively consist in employing black actors to embody white characters, or supposedly such, and white actors to embody characters who are not, in a historical fresco or adaptation of a work.

In American fiction and in works of art, Cleopatra has long been an icon for the African-American community. But if the problem with this new film is that it is a documentary: its educational aim requires nuances and precision.

Cleopatra in America

Cleopatra has been a figure in American culture at least since the mid-19th century. From 1858, it was embodied in marble by the very neoclassical sculptor William Wetmore Story. In 1876, the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis in turn produced a work in marble representing the suicide of the queen.

The same year, the golden porcelain bust by Isaac Broome shows us a mixed-race queen, with a Greek profile and black skin. Broome thus questions two major themes in the United States: the political role of women and the place of blacks in society.

The civilization of ancient Egypt poses an ideological problem in segregationist America: the history of humanity had known a great civilization that was neither white nor European, unlike the Greek and Roman cultures. As Frederick Douglas, an activist for the abolition of slavery, expressed it in 1854: “The fact that Egypt was one of the first abodes of knowledge and civilization is firmly established. […] But Egypt is in Africa”.

This is how Cleopatra gradually rose to the status of a symbol of the fight against slavery.

A black icon

But it was especially in the second half of the 20th century that Cleopatra became a black icon. The context in which this renewed interest in the queen, and more generally American Egyptomania, blossoms, is quite particular: the new avatar of Cleopatra falls within the framework of the demand for civil rights for blacks.

The Queen represents Africa's fight against slavery. His suicide is seen as a refusal to submit to white power. This is, of course, a rereading of history, a retrospective reconstruction of the past in which, for completely contemporary reasons, a social group is looking for a reputedly glorious character in order to transform him into an emblematic figure.

This type of recuperation is, moreover, not unique to Cleopatra. We can compare the contemporary Afro-American idol to the figure of Vercingetorix, another defeated leader, whose second half of the 19th century in France made national glory.

This touches on a completely different aspect of the problem: the need to find in the distant past, in this case Antiquity, icons capable of embodying contemporary demands or pride.

It is therefore no coincidence that the name of the queen was given to the black heroine Cleopatra Jones, CIA agent, female and black James Bond, in two blaxploitation films of the 1970s: Cleopatra Jones (Dynamite Jones) in 1973, then Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold, 1975 (Dynamite Jones et le Casino d'or).

A heroine who loves fur jackets, bell bottoms and flashy outfits. Like the queen of texts from the Roman period, she embodies the inversion of the codes of society at the time and, on the contrary, symbolizes the hope of a new, fairer world. The black vigilante with the “afro” cut hunts down nasty blondes, in a mixture of claiming and irony: here, the criminals are not black, black is beautiful.

In 2002, in the film Austin Powers in Goldmember, singer Beyoncé Knowles parodies the role of Tamara Dobson. This time, her name is Foxxy Cleopatra. But the ingredients are the same: the contemporary black Cleopatra, all dressed in leather, brandishing firearms in the service of world justice.

A problematic review

Cleopatra has already been successfully embodied in the theater by black actresses, such as Yanna McIntosh in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (Stratford Festival, 2015). Which, moreover, is not in contradiction with the text, since the queen is defined there as a “tawny front”.

The following year, in the same role, Chantal Jean-Pierre (Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, 2016) largely convinced the public with the poise and elegance of her interpretation.

If the documentary series proposed by Netflix denotes in relation to these fictional interpretations, it is because it broadcasts a message that is questionable to say the least in a format that is nevertheless intended to be educational.

In the trailer, a first speaker rightly recalls that Cleopatra was “a Ptolemaic sovereign” and that “the very first Ptolemy was a general of Alexander the Great”. We deduce that Cleopatra was, in part at least, of Greco-Macedonian and European origin. This is the only certainty we have about its origins.

Then, another participant affirms: “It is possible that she was Egyptian”. It is true that his mother and grandmothers could have been Egyptian concubines of the late Ptolemys. But Cleopatra herself says nothing about it in the official texts. She only mentions her father, King Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos, and defines herself as thea philopator, that is to say "goddess who loves her father".

A third speaker finally says: “My grandmother used to tell me: I don't care what they told you at school, Cleopatra was black. ".

This is where the documentary takes a particularly dubious turn from a scientific point of view, and carries accusations that seem unfounded. What is the point of this intervention if not to suggest that not only was Cleopatra really black, but also that her skin color was deliberately bleached by the repeated lies of generations of teachers?

Trapped Cleopatra

In reality, the figure of the queen has long been trapped in debates between “eurocentrists” and “afrocentrists”. Researcher Ella Shohat reported in 2003 on controversies as virulent as they were futile over the color of the queen's skin and her "racial" type.

Was Cleopatra white, black or mixed-race? Such questions refer less to the time of Cleopatra, multicultural and syncretic, than to the racist fantasies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Is it relevant to try to qualify as European or African the shape of the nose or the lips of the queen from her representations? This type of questioning seems extremely dubious. Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism have in common the same segregationist logic, ignoring the ethnic diversity specific to the time and region where the historical Cleopatra lived.

We do not see why the population of the Nile Valley, 2,000 years ago, would have been uniformly black, that is to say fundamentally different from what it still is today: diverse and mixed.

Egypt and singing stars

The association between ancient Egypt and Africanity has also led some singing stars to take up Egyptian themes. The African-American singer Rihanna shows off the winged Isis with which she is tattooed under the chest. She goes on stage dressed as Cleopatra and sings, microphone in hand, seated on a golden throne, during her "Cleopatra Performance" (2012).

This is an "Africanist" reappropriation of ancient Egypt. At the same time, Rihanna, planetary celebrity of the 2010s, contributes to sprinkle Egyptian themes on this globalized culture, produced in America, which then spreads to the rest of the world.

All this topicality of the myth translates the extraordinary popularity of the character of the last queen of Egypt, although in a superficial way, with a young and adolescent public.

Cleopatra lends itself very well to the staging of a mixed society that the historical character would probably not have denied.

Article by Christian-Georges Schwentzel, professor of ancient history, University of Lorraine, author of "Cleopatra", PUF editions, "Biographies" collection. Also posted in The Conversation France