Storytelling Uncovered; recalibrating different narratives and styles
She played Batwoman, starred with Sidney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk (1957), and ran rings around Eddie Murphy in Boomerang (1992), but one role alluded her, and she never forgot it. Today, she might have afforded a wry smile.
Hollywood actress Jada Pinkett Smith is the executive producer behind the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra.
It was a role Eartha Kitt yearned for all those years back but lost to actress Elizabeth Taylor. Here’s Ms Kitt talking to me on the BBC when I interviewed her back in 1992 for the show I hosted Black London. She starts of by speaking about her role in Boomerang (1992)
Kitt would have been aware of the criticism that has followed Pinkett Smith’s series. Was Cleopatra, one of the most powerful figures of her era, Black or White?
Egyptian officials outraged at the depiction maintain she was of hellenic descent, citing carvings of her; the series is being boycotted in Egypt and they plan their own big budget production.
The counter to her form can be found in tracts like Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in which in scene 1 Philo, one of Anthony’s friends, refers to Cleopatra as “tawny” which historians says relates to her brown colour. There are other references mapped out In Middle East Eye newspaper Netflix: Why the idea of Black Cleopatra is so controversial for Egyptians
Whilst no scholar cane be absolute certain of her appearance, piecing together historical messaging from the time provides clues. For instance in anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop’s The African Origin of Civilisation, the reader gains an insight. Diop cites from the great Greek scholar Herodotus’ texts
The Egyptian’s said they believe the Cochians to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjecture were founded, first, on the fact that they were black skinned”.
Herodotus (circa 484 BCE-430/420) is recognised for his scholarly work. Could he have been wrong? Diop’s The African Origin of Civilisation provides a logic to his observations. Last week Dr Molefi Kete Asante in a streamed lecture argued the plausibility of Cleopatra not being an Arab, but likely having an African mother, based on among other logics, the region. Three hundred years before Cleopatra was born, the areas was referred to as Kmt.
Linguists interpret Kmt, often spelt Kemet, as meaning Black land/ soil along the Nile Valley . Did it therefore mean the land, or was it a larger symbol for Egypt and its people? Historical texts in this hyper age of enlightenment, is increasingly challenged by the notion history is not neutral, and new scholarly work continues to question existing narratives.
What is evident in the last few years, which certainly by no means started in the last few years has been traction from revocalisations of the status quo. Pinkett Smith’s quest for Cleopatra versus Eartha Kitt’s story is further evidence of this.
Books from Ibram Xolani Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Professor Olivette Otele African Europeans: An Untold History, David Olusoga’s Black and British, unveil stories that redefine a perceived understanding of the world from the perspective of African and Caribbean people.
Why does this all matter? Because more accurate framing of history; how people were, and how we got here matters. Identity, voice, an understanding of one’s situatedness. Institutional legacies, cultural integrity, and storytelling contesting what has surfaced, is the genuine tapestry of knowledge that grows a society.
But one moment, because this isn’t what I really wanted to talk about. Pinkett Smith is challenging content, but I’ve my eye also on style. And in my next post I want to argue whether a supra narrative we’ve come to adopt particular in film storytelling and journalism, though it’s tied to literature, is less guided by the anteriority of African language. And so, what is a way of visual storytelling that for instance is imbued with the matrix of my language e.g. Akan?
