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

violence. They were peaceable citizens using moderate language to express their
desire for dignified peace.
Sharif had looked at these strong young men whose only wealth was the
nobility of their gaze, and the burning memory of his past life flared up.
He was an ordinary child in a humble family. His father was a farmer who
scraped subsistence from an unproductive land, a rocky field he had to clear and
cultivate to extract from it a meager harvest barely sufficient to nourish himself
and his family. They lived in a small village of only a hundred souls, their homes
rising in tiers up a slope in the Rif Mountains. They led a peasant life. Goats and
the produce of small plots of land were their only livelihood. The agile,
ruminating goats had the same harsh character as the mountain men and women
who worked hard and never complained. When they were still young, they had
wrinkled skin, rough hands and a stubborn disposition. Their rough palms
whipped tender flesh when they spanked their children as the hot wind from the
desert whips the wheat fields to dust. In a few short years, they were ageless and
sexless, having lost distinctive facial features. They looked alike, each faded by
sun and toil.
The children got as much as they could out of the barren land and the
people who lived there. Lifting their short tunics high above their dirty bottoms
and ran down steep slopes, screaming with laughter when they started an
avalanche of stones or startled a flock of starlings into frantic flight.
At a tender age, they were given a shepherd's staff and lost themselves in
windswept mountains, looking for tufts of grass between rocks for their goats to
graze. Left to themselves on these heights where they could touch the sky and the
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