Saara El-Arifi Couldn't Find the Real Cleopatra in the Historical Record — So She Looked Inward and Wrote a Memoir Instead

The author of a new Cleopatra novel dismantles 2,000 years of Roman propaganda, finds almost no usable primary sources, and pivots to memoir. The result is a book about history, identity, and who gets to tell whose story.

The essay opens with a provocation that earns its place: ask a child who Plutarch is and they'll scrunch their brows, but mention Cleopatra and their eyes light up. Saara El-Arifi, who has Ghanaian, Sudanese, and British heritage, uses this to frame what the piece is actually about — not Cleopatra's skin colour (she explicitly says 'enough breath has been spent on that by others') but the more interesting question of why a mixed-heritage girl with a pristine brown crayon felt an immediate, instinctive connection to a woman dead for two millennia. That's the emotional entry point. The intellectual one follows fast: Cleopatra lived closer in time to El-Arifi's birth than she did to the construction of the pyramids, which were already ancient relics to her, already covered in graffiti. That single reframing does more work than a paragraph of argument. The historical excavation is where the essay earns its credibility. El-Arifi pursued a master's in African studies at SOAS and went looking for the real Cleopatra in the primary sources. What she found was a 'cesspit of propaganda and ancient court gossip.' Primary sources from Cleopatra's actual time are all but nonexistent. Plutarch, who influenced Shakespeare's depictions of both Antony and Caesar, wrote his accounts more than 100 years after Cleopatra died. Suetonius, Appian, and Dio — the other main sources — share two distinguishing features: they were all Roman, and they were all men. The Roman incentive structure is important: it was more useful to these writers to frame Cleopatra as a seductress who corrupted great men than to acknowledge her as a strategic equal. 'Meretrix regina' — harlot queen — was the label they reached for. The dissolving pearl story, in which Cleopatra supposedly drops a priceless pearl in vinegar for a guest's amusement, was told by Pliny the Elder a century after her death and was, El-Arifi argues, less a historical account than a morality tale venerating Roman restraint over Egyptian luxury. Against this thin and hostile record, El-Arifi assembles what she can. Cleopatra was a polyglot who could speak at least eight languages. Her interest in alchemy and healing remedies was cited in later texts, suggesting she had once published her own research. These fragments — scholar, linguist, researcher — are the Cleopatra the ancient sources were most motivated to suppress. The tension the essay establishes is between the Cleopatra of myth (Elizabeth Taylor in the most expensive film set ever made, sustaining the image of enchantress and seductress) and the Cleopatra of recoverable fact, which turns out to be frustratingly sparse. El-Arifi's honest conclusion: 'the more I learned about Cleopatra, the more I realised we know nothing at all.' That admission of epistemic failure is what makes the subsequent creative pivot convincing. The pivot is the essay's structural centre of gravity. Unable to write the richly sourced historical fiction she planned, El-Arifi realised that 'pure history didn't exist — like fiction, it always has a narrative.' If every existing account of Cleopatra is already a construction, shaped by the politics and gender of its author, then her own experiences are as legitimate a source as any. The book became a memoir. She wrote the early motherhood scenes in the weeks after giving birth to her son. She drew on the experience of walking into a boardroom full of men intent on dismissing her voice. The Cleopatra she built is 'as thoughtful as she is cunning, with a mind sharper than any give her credit for' — and, crucially, is allowed to make mistakes. The imperfection is deliberate. A flawless Cleopatra would be as much a distortion as the Roman caricature. The essay ends somewhere larger than a book promotion. El-Arifi watches governments 'inch closer to the authoritarian brutality of the ancient kingdoms,' sees women's rights eroded and democracy challenged, and wonders whether 'the Roman insignia stole Cleopatra's breath as the St George's flag does mine.' It's a comparison that will land differently on different readers — some will feel it as overreach, others as the essay's honest core. Either way, it's the line that clarifies what El-Arifi has actually written: not a historical novel, not quite a memoir, but a book about who gets to narrate whose life, and what it costs when the answer is consistently 'not you.' Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi is published by HarperCollins.