A book to make you tired of Cleopatra: a review of Cleopatra

It's impossible to write a book like this one without summoning up centuries of discourse about Cleopatra and how we talk about racialized women in authority positions. Cleopatra, the novel, is very explicitly participating in that discourse. It has to. False propaganda about Cleopatra caused literal wars, and since then, people have not stopped discussing who she really was. Even today, those discussions get resurrected every few years (usually when Hollywood producers decide to make another whitewashed movie about Egypt circa 50 BCE). This novel would be incomplete without some acknowledgment of all these conversations, so I can't hold it against Saara El-Arifi for writing a story that essentially responds directly to all the rumors about Cleopatra. Maybe it gives those rumors more power over the narrative than they deserve, but sometimes, in order to change the conversation, you have to first join it. Sometimes yoour only choice is to add a new voice to all the yelling.

The hope is that this new voice can be heard above the others. While it probably can't drown out the sexism once and for all, it can at least try. It can at least do something -- anything -- to stand out. Cleopatra is framed as a book about the eponymous Pharaoh reclaiming her own narrative, so some reclamation has to occur for it succeed, and unfortunately, the writing here is just utterly terrible. Cleopatra's voice needs to try to rise above the yelling, and it can't.

There's more summarizing, flirting, and melodramatic foreshadowing in Cleopatra than actual quality storytelling. Technically some of the flirting can count as storytelling, but in a feminist interpretation of Cleopatra's life, I don't see why her banter with these men should warrant so much page time. I guess she's trying to prove that those relationships are loving ones, involving none of the rumored dark magic used to bewitch powerful men into her bed, so maybe I can forgive how much of the plot revolves around romance, but I still maintain that all the foreshadowing and summarizing ruin the book. If Cleopatra really wants to tell her own story, then I don't see why she skips and skims over so much of it, treating her life as nothing more than a series of bullet points followed by clichéd and angsty reactions.

Also the foreshadowing highlights every mistake Cleopatra makes, and it causes her to look painfully incompetent.