Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

him. I perfumed his sheets with rose water and burned incense in his room. I went
up and down the stairs ten times, forgetting my age and his, to arrange small
objects on the table that might remind him of the past and of our life together that
was so abruptly torn apart.
"Oh, my cousin, my friend, my twin brother, soul of my soul and flesh of
my body. Oh, my mind, my conscience, my obsession and my folly, drop of
honey in the blood of my heart bled dry. Oh, melody of my life, my defense
against despair, old age and death. My love for all eternity.
"I fought for you. I conquered bitterness and survived adversity. For you, I
accepted the taint of this other man and never gave myself away. I tricked them.
His advances withered me, day after day, because I had to pay tribute to my
family and protect my memories. I had bit into a tasty morsel with a ferocious
appetite, but they snatched it away from me and threw me a bone. I don't know
when this oppression began or when it will end. I am my mother, my grandmother
and my great grandmother. I am my maiden aunts afraid of mismatches. I am my
preadolescent cousins married to older men. I am my daughters confined in their
empty bliss. I am all the victimized women around the world, body and soul
abused: the French woman who prostitutes herself, the English woman addicted to
drugs, the Chinese woman whose feet and brain are compressed, the Hindu
woman burned on her husband's funeral pyre. I am all these women and more.
Because I was aware and they were not. Because I could have lived and did not.
"When I saw age attacking me, my eyesight diminishing, my ears
becoming deaf and senility lying in wait for me like a laughing demon, fear
gripped me. So, is this the beginning of exile into nothingness, toward
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