Cleopatra: A Novel
63 pages • 2-hour read
Saara El-ArifiCleopatra: A Novel
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Reading Tools
Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide references graphic violence, sexual content, sexual harassment, death by suicide, illness or death, and animal death.
Storytelling and Hakawati
The recurring motif of storytelling, introduced through the figure of the hakawati, foregrounding the novel’s thematic focus on The Use of Self-Narration to Combat Historical Erasure. From the first chapter, stories are established as living, evolving entities rather static artifacts. In the novel’s opening chapter, a traveling hakawati emphasizes that stories stay alive when they are retold, urging her to “tell my stories, again and again” (4). When Cleopatra requests that the hakawati remain at the palace, he replies, “you cannot ask a hakawati to stop travelling. It is in our nature. Without it, we will run out of stories” (4), framing storytelling as fluid and ever-changing. Through his words, El-Arifi underscores how narratives shape reality and legacy, emphasizing their power to incite both loyalty and violence.
Later, a hakawati’s attempt to assassinate Cleopatra, reinforces the idea of storytelling as a political weapon capable of inflicting harm. Cleopatra’s enemies, from Pothinus to Octavian, consistently use slanderous stories to undermine her rule, recasting her as a witch, whore, and villain. By telling her own story, Cleopatra insists on the primacy of her own voice over the legends that seek to define her.
Divine Marks and Powers
The divine mark that each member of Cleopatra’s family bears at birth signals their status as gods, undergirding their sovereign rule of Egypt. The powers that each of her siblings possess—such as the ability to breathe underwater or the ability to speak to birds—distinguishes them to their people as vessels of divine authority. Cleopatra’s lack of a specific power fuels her lifelong insecurity and political vulnerability, and this issue is a motif that she returns to throughout the narrative as she confronts the tension and limits of her power.
Although she bears the mark of Isis, Cleopatra lacks a tangible, god-given power, which leaves her vulnerable to slander and political coups. Early in her reign, she is haunted by the perception that she is “tainted, unworthy of the throne” (12). This anxiety about her legitimacy is a recurring wound that her enemies repeatedly exploit, linking the country’s hardships, like the failure of the Nile to flood, directly to her perceived unworthiness.
Snakes and Asps
The snake is a multivalent symbol that embodies the central dichotomy of Cleopatra’s identity: the tension between motherhood and political duty. The rearing cobra on her diadem is a constant representation of her sovereignty and her sacred connection to the goddess Isis, for whom the cobra is a protective emblem. This positive association is reinforced when her father, Ptolemy XII, praises her potential to rule “like a mother asp” (111), a comparison that equates the snake with fierce, maternal protectiveness. As Cleopatra herself says, “the asp and I were alike. For I would bite the hand that sought to strike [my children] down without remorse and without mercy” (284), linking her power as a ruler directly to her identity as a mother, defending her nation just as she does her children.
Cleopatra’s enemies twist this same imagery, using the snake to cast her as a dangerous, chaotic, and exotic monster and undermine her true political authority, underscoring the novel’s thematic exploration of Misogyny as a Political Tool in a Patriarchal Society. The novel culminates with Cleopatra evoking the asp to enact her final vengeance, rewriting the myth that she dies by an asp’s bite. Choosing her own end, she notes: “The twin beads of blood caused by the hairpins were […] Not an asp's bite […] But what better way to emphasise my monstrous ways than to entwine my fate with that of the cobra” (328). In correcting the male-authored historical record, El-Arifi’s Cleopatra makes a final stand against historical erasure, refusing to let her others define her death.
Unlock the meaning behind every key symbol & motif
See how recurring imagery, objects, and ideas shape the narrative.
- Explore how the author builds meaning through symbolism
- Understand what symbols & motifs represent in the text
- Connect recurring ideas to themes, characters, and events