Erasing Cleopatra

Netflix's Queen Cleopatra is not a documentary.

Last week a trailer for Netflix’s soon-to-be-released Queen Cleopatra was released. The description on Youtube reads:

From Executive Producer Jada Pinkett Smith comes a new documentary series exploring the lives of prominent and iconic African Queens. This season will feature Cleopatra, the world’s most famous, powerful, and misunderstood woman -- a daring queen whose beauty and romances came to overshadow her real asset: her intellect. Cleopatra’s heritage has been the subject of much academic debate, which has often been ignored by Hollywood. Now our series re-assesses this fascinating part of her story.

Styled as a documentary, Queen Cleopatra has caused a wave of online controversy in Egyptian and Greek communities – accusing Netflix of ‘blackwashing’ because Adele James, a black actress, was cast to play Cleopatra.

Adele James as Cleopatra

This post does not deal with Cleopatra’s racial background. For that conversation, you can read Cleopatra’s true racial background (and does it really matter?) by Duane W. Roller, author of Cleopatra: A Biography, by Oxford University Press.

Instead, this post is a conversation directed toward the various diasporic Greek communities, mainly American, but it may be relevant to all of us worldwide. Netflix’s Cleopatra is a good time for us as a community to explore appropriation and narratives that we Greeks in the diaspora need to familiarize ourselves with. We see our culture all around us, from neo-classical architecture or movies based on ancient Greek myths and history. But if there is one thing I have learned as a Greek-American, all these things are not for us; we are never the target audience. The stories being told, the ideologies being promoted, the narratives – are not Greek.

I will go deeper on this overall topic in time with other posts; for now, I will focus on Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra and how it fits into what we need to recognize as an American-centric conversation, which we Greeks in the diaspora, are pushed aside in the conversation and unfortunately many Greeks end up, through knee jerk reaction, support white supremacy by blasting off online in the comments “Cleopatra was white.”

Western civilization has built its identity on the back of Greece and Rome for centuries. White Western Europeans created the idea of Western civilization and the whole narrative around that. Thus, the ancient Greeks, according to early scholars, pictured the ancient Greeks as white (Aryans) like themselves. Modern Greeks are just Ottoman/Balkan mixed bastards (as said to me by an American). At first, in America, Greeks were not considered white and faced discrimination at the hands of the KKK; see Forgotten History: The Klan vs. Americans of Greek Heritage in an Era of Hate and the Birth of the AHEPA.

The AHEPA worked very hard to help Greeks assimilate into the United States, which meant assimilating into whiteness and being accepted as white by the existing white population. However, this shallow assimilation cracks once the otherness of Greekness is displayed; it makes white people unnerved. A small example can be noted here; an Orthodox Easter celebration in Astoria was reported as an incident on the Citizen app, which prompted conversations about gentrification. Astoria Greek Orthodox Ritual Reported As 'Dangerous Incident'

The antiHellenic sentiments from early 19^th century scholars such as Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer sadly linger around. The view that we Greeks are not really related to the ancient Greeks is common. This may explain why Greeks are not cast in prestigious ancient Greek roles like Achilles, Alexander, Cleopatra, etc. We are relegated to the Big Fat Greek Weddings and other typecasting of modern stereotypes.

Homer Simpson dancing in a Greek diner.

When Greeks respond with XYZ Greek historical figure was ‘white,’ we do ourselves a disservice because we allow and accept any white person to play our historical characters and not ourselves. In the age of ‘representation matters,’ why aren’t Greeks getting the roles to play Greek characters in these ancient-themed movies or other media portrayals? Why can’t we see a Greek name on the movie poster for the next Cleopatra movie? Why Gal Gadot and not Marina Kalogirou? The goal should not be to find a Greek passing actor but to get a Greek actor,

Greek actress Marina Kalogirou.

However, it seems that is an uphill battle. Because the white people have, for a long time now, painted the ancient world in their image, the reaction and response to that have been to bring back the color that has been removed. Sadly, though, with the reductive categories of race in the USA and how Greeks have assimilated into whiteness, we go from Elizabeth Taylor to Adele James as if that ‘fixes’ the white bias when it just erases the Greeks and keeps our actors from (1) stepping into our history on screen and (2) profiting from our history, just like every other group that is seeking representation and is combating appropriation.

The narrative of Queen Cleopatra. What bothers me (few Greeks seem to be aware of it) is not the casting of a black actress to play Cleopatra; it is the erasure of who Cleopatra was in order to insert and project onto the ancient world, a modern American conversation concerning white v black race tensions in the guise of a documentary.

If it was a movie, sure, have at it. It is normal to explore contemporary issues through period movies. 2009’s Agora is an excellent example of a film that explores the life of Hypatia as an allegory for the science/religion battle happening at the time in the USA.

Netflix is styling Queen Cleopatra as a documentary. How can you produce a documentary and erase Cleopatra’s Greekness? I would like to see a black Cleopatra dressed in the royal diadem and speaking Greek at court. There is so much history to show people since Cleopatra was the last Ptolemaic ruler of a dynasty nearly 300 years old. The syncretic of Greek and Egyptian culture offers so much to use for a film.

We will likely not get any of that in Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra. Instead, from what I can tell from the trailer, the narrative I gather is; Cleopatra was a black African Queen of a black nation who came into conflict and struggled with a white European power (Rome). It is, in a nutshell, a projection of modern American racial tension between whites and blacks in the ancient garbs of Egypt and Rome. Such a story would make for a great movie but not a documentary because the story being told reflects more about modern American life than anything related to the ancient world.

Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra replaces Eurocentrism with Afrocentrism, both equally crappy worldviews. We Greeks get shut out, and many end up propping up one poor ideology over another flawed ideology.  Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra does the same thing white people have done with ancient civilizations (Greek, Roman, Egyptian) – using those ancient civilizations to project onto it themselves.  White people have been dressing up in other cultures and identities for a long time, and I think we as a community need to reclaim our historical figures and narratives.

Below is a side-by-side of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra and Adele James’ Cleopatra. To me, both are problematic. Both Taylor and James engage in appropriation, which serves narratives aimed at white and black people, respectively. Both push aside and ignores Greek and Egyptian narratives and deny Cleopatra's role to Greek or Egyptian actresses,

Eurocentric Cleopatra v Afrocentric Cleopatra.

One person told me, “Elizabeth Taylor is closer to Greek,” as if I should be happy about that and accept any white woman to play Cleopatra, a historical figure important in a broader Greek story. I wish the Greek community would be as outraged by Elizabeth Taylor as they are with Adele James. However, we cannot easily detect the problem with Taylor because of assimilation into whiteness. Because of this assimilation, the automatic reaction of a black Cleopatra, “Cleopatra was white!” only supports white supremacy and undermines Greekness.

If I could have a movie made featuring Cleopatra, as a Greek-American, I would like to see a film that would highlight and explore Cleopatra’s mixed Greek and Egyptian identities and the struggles that go along with it. In Cleopatra’s life, I want to explore my own dual identity struggle, which many diasporic communities can relate to. To me, that is a more meaningful usage of ancient figures than to use them as stand-ins for reductive white/black narratives that are American-centric and end up confusing history.   

Last words. I want Greeks to understand that color is not important, what is important is narrative. Are the narratives being told about us proper, are they Hellenic? Or are narratives created by someone’s twisted idea of history that serves non-Hellenic ideologies?