For over two millennia, the popular image of Cleopatra VII has been shaped not by her own words but by the hostile narratives of her Roman conquerors. Historical accounts written by Romans Plutarch, Cassius Dio, and Cicero—often influenced by political propaganda—portrayed her as a decadent, manipulative, foreign seductress. The dramatization of these accounts by William Shakespeare in his play, Antony and Cleopatra (1607), cemented her legacy as a tragic figure defined by romance and ruin. El-Arifi’s novel directly confronts this long-standing literary and historical caricature, emphasizing the biased nature of her historical portrayal. The author, who holds a master’s degree in African studies specializing in Cleopatra’s myth, brings a scholarly and revisionist lens to the novel. The Author’s Note explicitly states this intention, observing that historical records were shaped by “the propaganda of the Roman Republic” and that Cleopatra’s own story remains elusive (ix).

Cleopatra joins the pantheon of feminist retellings of historical lives and classic myths that have traditionally reduced their female subjects to archetypes rather than the full personhood afforded their male counterparts. The novel sits in conversation with Lauren Groff’s Matrix (2021), which reimagines the life of poet Marie de France, “the medieval writer who became France's first female poet,” but whose life is almost entirely absent from the historical record (Westenfeld, Adrienne. “Who Was Marie de France, the Woman at the Center of Lauren Groff’s “Matrix?”” Esquire, 7 Sept. 2021). Similarly, Pauline Gedge’s Child of the Morning (1977), which tells the story of Hatshepsut, “the first woman to rule [Egypt] as Pharaoh, thirty-five centuries ago. Yet her name […] did not appear in dynastic rolls, nor is her reign celebrated on monuments” (“Child of the Morning.” paulinegedge.com). Each of these examples uses novelized accounts to provide insight into the inner lives of women that have been excluded from the historic record.

In Cleopatra, El-Arifi’s use of the first-person perspective imagines Cleopatra’s story told through her own voice, emphasizing The Use of Self-Narration to Combat Historical Erasure. Cleopatra herself announces this project in the Prologue: “You know my name, but you do not know me” (xi). The narrative allows her to reclaim her humanity from the myth, presenting her not as an archetype but as a calculating ruler, a devoted mother, and a complex woman navigating a world determined to misunderstand her. This reimagining challenges readers to reconsider a history written by the victors and to uncover the person behind the legend.