Akhenaten

The mid-1990s, fascinated with the sex lives of celebrities, have seen fictions of Akhenaten coming full circle from those first anodyne portrayals of the late nine­teenth and early twentieth centuries. Amarna has become reincarnated as an Orientalist site of sensual visioning instead of a garden suburb; Akhenaten has become pansexual, having passionate physical relationships with his mother, wives (several of them), various daughters as well as the enigmatic Smenkhkare'. Stacton's novel exemplifies this, especially a scene where Nefertiti teaches Akhenaten how to make love to his harem of male catamites by fellating them; so does Akhenaten (1992), a cycle of poems by the Australian writer Dorothy Porter which narrates the story of Akhenaten and Nefertiti from beginning to end. Her poems emphasise sex and sexuality and use modern vernacular, but still have an oddly anachronistic quality. The unbounded sexuality of Porter's Akhenaten recalls the protagonists of early nineteenth-century Orientalist pornography like The Lustful Turk, while her use of cliched soap-opera situations seems jarringly familiar. In the following poem, She Said Look in the Mirror, Nefertiti is about to leave Akhenaten, whose infidelities and obsessions have got too much for her:

She told me to look

in the mirror.

She was leaving.

I wouldn't see a God

she said

I'd see myself.

I'd see why she was leaving.

She is my mirror.

I saw Meki's face outlined in mummy cloths I saw

with a pitiless indecency Smenkhkare's heaving hips as he comcs in my mouth My dead daughter my debauched little brother oh! my love! '¹

Porter demotes Akhenaten from the quasi-Christ of Rawnsley and Lorimer to the individual entirely constructed around his sexuality that one would expect in a world after Freud, where the orgasm has replaced the crucifix as the symbol of universal longing. Akhenaten has turned from a saviour figure into the soap-opera character whose betrayed wife yells, 'Just take a look at yourself!' before she walks out and slams the front door.

The Amarna fictions show how the basic facts of Akhenaten's reign offer great dramatic and romantic possibilities. The ways in which these facts have been endlessly recyclcd and re-emphasised throughout the twentieth century are proof of the flexibility that gives legends their immortal quality. Akhenaten has been reincarnated as everything from proto-Christ to proto-Fascist. From a 1990s per­spective, the popularly presented Amarna story resembles a kitsch soap opera. Its fulfils all the essential formulae: a simple and predictable plot; the sort of wealth and luxury most people can only imagine; a garnish of moral idealism and a bigger helping of the kind of human tragedy with which anyone could identify - the last two, in spite of all the evidence, seeming to make Akhenaten 'one of us'. This is the common denominator to all the Amarna novels. They are reminders of how strong is this desire to recognise ourselves in the past, and of the ways the past has been pillaged for confirmation of who we are and what we most want to be. Akhenaten is someone who participates in our struggles, con­flicts and desires. This is particularly true of homosexual versions of Akhenaten produced in the 1980s and 1990s, which are the subject of the next and final chapter.

SEXUALITIES

My theory is that Akhenaten and Nefertiti were one and the same person! 'He' was an hermaphroditic transvestite who periodically made appearances as himself and his queen. Comment from the visitors' book of an exhibition of Amarna art at the Brooklyn Museum, quoted in Wedge 1977: 1 15