Giving Up on Cleopatra

I see the news that Gal Gadot is making a movie about Cleopatra with Patty Jenkins and I am…bored for the many takes that will declare Cleopatra was a Black woman.

I think I have been hearing this since I was a little kid. It was a given that we should love Egypt. I remember having a set of rubber stamps that were carved with hieroglyphics, trying to use them to make a sentence. I remember really trying to read the Book of the Dead. Even as I read this, I remember the smell of Egyptian Cotton incense, which is the unofficial scent of the late 90s, when we used to say “Afrocentric” un-ironically.

I knew I should long for her but Cleopatra never appealed to me. Why should I find empowerment in the story of a woman forced to seduce her colonizers so that she would not be subjugated, who ended up losing in the end anyways? All because I was told she was beautiful? So it was a relief in high school when I learned that Cleopatra was probably not Black but Greek, mixed with other ethnicities. That she was maybe not even beautiful, but noticeably homely, and that her charm lay more in her ability to flirt than anything else made all the lore about her feel like even more of a bait and switch.

I think Cleopatra is still contested only because she’s a brand name. We are told this is a story about the power of being the most beautiful woman in the world which means it is a story about the lack of choices open to a colonized person; the sexual violence against femmes that empire is based upon; and the reassurance, with Cleopatra’s death at the end, that femininity, luxury, ease, exoticism, is defeated and the stoic heterosexuality of it all is restored.

What if, instead of arguing over Cleopatra’s nose, we told the stories, over and over again, of other African queens? Queen Nzinga who successfully staved off the Portugese empire for 37 years? Or the Kandakes of the Ethiopian empire, sisters of Kings who ruled in their own right? Or my favorite, Kimpa Vita, a Kongolese noblewoman who converted to Christianity and preached a pro-Black version of the gospel that led to her being burned at the stake. Her followers were sold into slavery and eventually led a slave rebellion in the United States in South Carolina. So many other stories to use to map the beauty of Blackness besides that of a scared 13 year old with bad skin, trying to sleep with a fifty year old general so that her people won’t die.

So, let Gal Gadot be Cleopatra. She isn’t someone I want to claim, anyways. There are so many other, more interesting stories to tell.