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

"I want her to be free like the antelope who leaps and plays with the wind.
I want her to be sovereign and not submissive. I want her standing on her own,
not sitting down. I want her pride to grow and ramify, and I want no hand to ever
crush her freedom of thought."
"As for me, I have lived with my destiny, but I have not lived it. My whole
life has not been long enough to make me accept it. I spent my youth
remembering what had been but had not lasted. I spent my youth in revolt,
nostalgia, regret, and bitterness. And now that my life is coming to an end, I still
feel this profound abyss in me that grows forever deeper and wider. It makes me
want to bite, scratch, and stand up against death to ask, "What do you plan to take
away? An already dead body, an unlived life, an incomplete existence? What
good will it do you to rob a penniless person? What glory to beat an invalid?
What death will you be for me, when for all this time I have been chasing after
life and never caught it?"
Dada finally climbed the steep stairs to the attic to persuade her
"harebrained" mistress to come down to rest.
Lalla Kenza scolded her roughly, "I'm old enough to know what I should
and shouldn't do."
"You are proud and stubborn more than anything else. Do you think you
are still twenty years old? Look at you! Stiff as a board, but you'd never admit it."
"You are just a crazy black bastard. Mind your own business and don't
come stick your nose where it doesn't belong."
"I'd be the one to have to put up with your mean temper if you were stuck
in bed. And you certainly will be if you stay here acting like a little girl. Look at
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