By Seddiq Abou El Hassan
The Egyptians coated it with their unequalled sense of humour, but the matter is more serious than it looks.
The recent controversy triggered by the Netflix docudrama “Queen Cleopatra” is but the act that accidentally summoned old demons.
The four-episode season produced by the American actress, singer-songwriter and talk show host Jada Koren Pinkett Smith, brought disproportionate outrage even before its release.
A virtual petition has already gathered tens of thousands of signatures calling for a total ban of Netflix in the land of the ancient Pharaohs.
In this part of the world where cultural branding is not taken lightly, it took no less than the Tourism Antiquities ministry to assert that the celebrated Queen of Beauty had “white skin and Hellenistic characteristics”.
There was zero chance THE Egyptian authority in the matter Zahi Hawass would let the opportunity pass him by without bashing the “historical revisionism”, “cultural appropriation” and “black-washing”, no less.
In the very serious Arab News, the Egyptian archaeologist and former Minister for Antiquities Affairs defended that the “documented history attests, she was the descendant of a Macedonian Greek general who was a contemporary of Alexander the Great.
Her first language was Greek and in contemporary busts and portraits she is depicted clearly as being white.”
As an answer to the boldness of the actress playing Cleopatra who advised the blamers who "don't like the casting” to simply look elsewhere, he recommended to “countless Egyptians” to do just that.
Pinkett Smith never mentioned that race was at the core of the concept she pitched to Netflix. But diversity is.
Jade, also the wife of the African-American icon Will Smith, is the very embodiment of the 90s generation of black performers who took it on themselves to upset the established system of aesthetic norms in the film industry and stood to whitewashing as a casting practice in Hollywood where ethnic minorities and marginalised communities couldn’t fit.
Queen Cleopatra is in fact the second season of a historical docu-series memorialising female monarchs from the African continent.
Produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith under the name of African Queens, the series “features dramatised historical re-enactments as well as interviews with experts.”
“With African Queens, a new documentary series from executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith, audiences get to learn about the fearless, captivating lives of queens who were likely not part of their Western academic curriculum”, reads a review on the Netflix official website.
The first season was dedicated to Queen Njinga, the 17th century ruler of the Ambundu Kingdoms who fought the Portuguese expansion over present-day Angola.
The facts might have been oversimplified for a specialist, the plot sensational, the content a notch lurid with a glossy finish in the manner of Netflix, but the overall product was a welcomed change of scenery and topics, and did not set off any uproar.
“The story of Queen Njinga 'speaks for the entire diaspora because we figure out the people who are left behind and the people who are taken”, she triumphantly told the BBC.
The promotional trailers and other digital byproducts (like Jada’s top 5 favourite African queens) reflect how the whole project was wrapped in a playful and candid attitude until it hit a raw nerve.
But Netflix’s challenges with fussy fact-checkers of all stripes did not start with Cleopatra.
The world’s most popular video streaming service transformed legitimate claims for diversity and inclusion into production tools, knocking down in the process some strongly established communities’ perceptions of their history.
Rather than scaring the public off, this ‘digital revisionism’ turned out to be a major selling point and gave Netflix an edge over the competition like Amazon’s Prime Video or Disney+, keen to grab their share of this audience's craving for period drama.
A previous heated debate (a mixed wave of praise and criticism) around the period romance “Bridgerton” dragged the brand from the TV-shows review pages to the not-so-entertaining opinion sections of The New York Times, The Guardian and the likes.
Although set on realistic backgrounds and riddled with easily recognisable characters, the show was based on a bestselling book series by Julia Quinn who made her career as a historical fiction writer and never claimed any authenticity to her work.
In her reconstructed 19th century England, racial equality was a fait accompli, black dukes, duchesses, lords, and ladies were commonplace and the Regency period was much more diverse than we thought.
A culture reporter for Vox expressed her discomfort with the “initial praise of Bridgerton coated in condescension” towards the genre, and pointed out that many of the TV critics who liked the show “framed it as silly, raunchy, overheated escapism, and seemed to be operating within the assumption that romance fiction is frothy and unserious by default.
From a European perspective, The Spectator denounced point-blank “an expensive assemblage of clichés that smacks of the American’s-eye view of Britain’s aristocratic past.” The conservative British weekly Warned against a “popular portrayal of the past being changed to fit the present.”
For Phoebe Dynevor who played Daphne Bridgerton, a lead character of the series, the casting was driven by the actors’ performances with no regard to race. "It never felt intentional: great people were cast in great roles.
There is no one more 'Simon' than Regé. It's perfect casting," she said to a women’s magazine. Moreover, like many of her peers and most of the millennials come to consider Europe’s whiteness as a mere political construction.
Some of the multiracial figures in the show might, after all, match “real historical figures” as put forward by the 27-year-old British actress.
While equated with some sort of ‘historical damages’ or, condescendingly, as a form of “positive discrimination”, an increasing number of voices in the show biz warn that the colourblind casting trend is creating yet another racial rift and, by pulling too much, might hurt itself.
The streaming giant never bothered defending itself against prioritising its proclaimed inclusion goals over dull realities.
Statistical findings obtained from a study conducted by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative team (University of Southern California) serve as a guiding principle, and the company is boasting about it, even if it entails a little fact distortion.
In the meantime, the entertainment industry is struggling to catch up with the frantic production of movies and TV series “touted for their inclusion and representation” in terms of a culture reporter for HuffPost.
There is no denying these mega drama serials were commissioned, scripted and produced by people with an American state of mind, motivated by American issues, in order to address American concerns of our time: racial balance, diversity, recognition and historical scores to settle, even if they take the whole world as a stand and its history as a backstage.
Only, they spill over other nations' affairs and disrupt their agenda of priorities.
The other side of the blame for the excessive reaction lies with the politicised conception of national identities in North African countries.
Hastily cobbled by the nationalist movements under the colonial rule to serve as a rallying factor and further consecrated in the postcolonial era, the settled views of national identities are reductive, simplistic and fail to encompass the more nuanced social fabric.
Cleopatra might not be the ideal specimen to pick up, but even in this old pot of civilizations, the African confluences are still unmistakable among the intermingled North African races and ethnic groups.
Recently, the anthropological analysis of the oldest remains of Homo sapiens found in Egypt, and one of the oldest in the world, revealed that the individual was of African ancestry.
The skeletal remains of a man who lived 30,000 years ago were unearthed in 1980, at Nazlet Khater 2, an archaeological site in the Nile Valley.
An astonishing lifelike approximation, made possible by advances in facial reconstruction technology, outlined an African man looking good about himself.
