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

Never had anyone seen a vicarious passion lived so intensely.
They were grateful to her and willingly included her in their games when
they wrestled like kittens on the rooftops under the heavens, satiated with love,
their ardor calmed.
When they were so cruelly separated, when Lalla Kenza's father decided
that under no circumstances would his daughter follow her husband who had been
appointed to work in another city in Morocco, the slave devoted herself to saving
her mistress from insanity. She put up with her unjust behavior without complaint,
submitted to her sarcasm, and felt Kenza's suffering in her own flesh. No one
knew as well as Marjana what the young woman endured, the nights she spent
screaming into her pillow, the awful tantrums during which she fought in the arms
of the Guinean who was as patient as a mother. No one remembered as well as
she, scorched in her mind and heart, the young divorcee's wrenching moans and
burning distress in the starless night as she cried for this aborted love that was
sacrificed to a father's egotism. She saw her mistress's heart catch fire in her
bosom and stood, in useless devotion, incapable of stopping the disaster.
How many married couples were thus separated by parents' despotic wills!
How many households were destroyed by insults--both families fighting a
merciless war above their children's heads--more surely destructive than digging
under the foundation of a building! How many impulsive and thoughtless
mothers, for a trivial arrangement or for simple feminine rivalry, put their sons in
the dilemma of repudiating their unwanted daughters-in-law or being cursed
forever: "You have to choose between her and me. One house is not big enough to
hold us both. Obey your mother, my son, to reach paradise. I will bring you
216