Nibbies Pageturner winner Saara El-Arifi sets out to connect Cleopatra to modern womanhood

“You know my name, but you do not know me. Your poets have sung about my tainted crown, your bards have spoken on my infinite variety.” These are the opening lines to Saara El-Arifi’s latest novel, Cleopatra, her first foray into historical fiction.

Since the publication of her epic fantasy debut The Final Strife in 2022, El-Arifi has gone from strength to strength. Earlier this year, she took home the Pageturner Book of the Year Award at The British Book Awards for Faebound, the first in a romantasy series that will conclude next year with Earthbound. In her acceptance speech, she said: “I didn’t prepare anything because I thought ‘listen, this is not going to happen’ because there are a lot of barriers for people like me: I’m Black, I’m queer, I’m a woman… You guys in the room can bring those [barriers] down.”

Cleopatra is El-Arifi’s best yet. Pairing exquisite prose with a propulsive plot, she resurrects Cleopatra from the tomes of history, retelling the life of Egypt’s last pharaoh and vividly bringing Ancient Egypt to life. The novel also bears the hallmarks of El-Arifi’s message to attendees at the award’s ceremony – her version of Cleopatra is rebellion incarnate, a woman who refuses to be contained or pay heed to the barriers men and society attempt to put up against her.

The novel breathes fresh life into the historical retelling space that is saturated with Western mythology. Here is the voice of a woman too long claimed by historians and playwrights and reinstated here with the full force of El-Arifi’s ferocious prose. But El-Arifi “approached it like a memoir”, not a retelling. “Like all stories, history has a narrative and it is always political. From the form it takes to the words being used, it’s impossible to escape the author’s point of view. Memory, however, is ours. It is the purest truth we have, so I was really inspired by this concept of the novel being Cleopatra’s memoir.” It is “the only truth I could give her”, she adds.

The novel opens with the death of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, and she is swiftly crowned the new pharaoh. Cleopatra’s life and reign spool forth from this point as she battles court politics and deadly sibling rivalries to keep her throne and turn Alexandria into a thriving city. Yet there is another city Cleopatra must be concerned with – Rome. To protect against mutiny, Cleopatra makes a deal with Julius Caesar – his troops for Egypt’s money – and the die is cast. The young pharaoh grows into a politically savvy, compassionate and often ruthless ruler, but her entanglement with Rome sets in motion a tragic collision between the two empires that will echo through the millennia.

Memory is ours. It is the purest truth we have, so I was really inspired by this concept of the novel being Cleopatra’s memoir. [It is] the only truth I could give her.

Very little is known for certain about the historical figure, Cleopatra. In her author’s note, which will be included in the published novel, El-Arifi writes: “The historians we have relied upon to tell her tale lived centuries after her death… The men whose words were preserved, such as Cicero, often originated from Rome, and their opinions were shaped by the propaganda of the Roman Republic. Her legend is only referenced in relation to Antonius and Caesar; too significant to ignore, too unpalatable to warrant her own narrative.”

El-Arifi set out to “reclaim” Cleopatra from these tales. The novel is divided into three parts, each named after a different archetype that has come to define the Pharaoh: witch, whore and villain. “The archetypes are built on her relationships to men. She is a witch because she bewitched men, she was a whore because she seduced them… I wanted to dismantle that truth. She was beyond that: she was a scholar, she was a mother, she was a friend. Who was she in relation to other things but men?”

In 2021, El-Arifi began a master’s degree in African Studies and her thesis – titled Between Rapture and Rupture: Cleopatra as a Site of Resistance for Black Women – set out to connect the life of a woman from ancient antiquity to modern Black womanhood. When writing her dissertation, El-Arifi previously explained that “the question was never, is Cleopatra Black?… The question instead was: why do I, a Black queer woman, have such an affinity to her myth?” The novel sets out with a similar, exploratory goal. Constructing the story like a memoir means that Cleopatra’s voice is not tied to the time at which the events are taking place. The effect is striking. Vacillating between the present and past, Cleopatra often addresses the reader directly – apologising for deviations in the narrative or challenging and lamenting the myths and stories that have circulated about her life. “It’s a conversation between Cleopatra and the reader,” explains El-Arifi. “It’s a conversation between Cleopatra and her histories.”

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