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

Unlike her daughters who submit to the patriarchal order, Kenza understands her
religion rather as a call for the equality of men and women, thus presenting an
alternative and resistant interpretation of Islam.
The author also appropriates the colonial language, using it to communicate
beyond cultural limits and to present cultural specificity within a broader
framework of human activity and belief systems, a technique that allows audiences
of other cultures to comprehend her message. The narrative presents elements of
universally recognizable human behavior and wisdom within the culturally specific
Arab Muslim context. The author reminds the reader, for example, that though the
dawn prayer is specific to Islamic cultures, people here, as everywhere, participate
in "universal gestures of waking."
Bientôt [. . .] chacun s'affairera, d'abord pour faire les ablutions et la prière
de l'aube, dans le petit matin ombreux et frais, puis dans ces gestes
séculaires et universels du réveil qui préparent au jour nouveau. (9)
Soon the call to prayer would announce dawn to the sleeping population.
Each person would perform ablutions and pray in the cool, shadowy early
morning before preparing for a new day in the universal gestures of
waking.
In another passage, the author emphasizes the similarities between familial groups
of this and other cultures. Lalla Kenza's extended, traditional, patriarchal, and
distinctly Moroccan family displays "all the genial and base emotions a human
community brings to life, wherever it takes root" ("tout ce qu'une communauté
humaine, là où elle s'implante, voit naître autour d'elle, de bons et de mauvais
sentiments" [13]).
Inscribing the hybridity of the post-colonial experience, the text uses a
literary register extensively hybridized with transcribed Arabic words, phrases,
8