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

Her dada held a silver platter with two fine fresh whitefish on a bed of
parsley. Another dada held a silver pitcher and a towel perfumed with rose water,
ready for use. A third held a censer from which rose enchanting spirals of sandal
wood incense.
Her mother, her aunts, and other women who were close family relatives
surrounded her, playing tambourines, clapping, and singing rhythmic songs.
Moulay Ali was the only man admitted to this feminine party. He was ill
at ease and shy in his new masculine role, and all the women pushed him toward
her in instinctive conspiracy.
Paradoxically, in spite of her extreme youth, she was the one whose eyes
shone with desire for the beloved. Inside the stiff caftan, her young body trembled
with impatience.
Her mother handed her a knife with an ivory handle, and she began to
scale the fish she was supposed to clean. She worked with a frenzy that was out of
proportion to what was expected of her; this ceremony was only a symbolic
representation of the role of housewife that the bride would later have to fulfill.
She reached further into the maze of her memories. She saw herself as a
little girl, ten or eleven years old. That night, her aunt gave birth to her cousin
Asma. She remembered her cousin, now a grandmother, as a red and wrinkled
new-born, her kohl-lined eyes wide open in a detached gaze.
Everyone in the house had been kept awake by the mother's screams that
tore an enormous hole in the wintry night. Her other cousins were playing a noisy
game of blindman's buff, but after her aunt had delivered the baby, Kenza sat on a
window sill dangling her legs and thinking. Leaning over a wall fountain, the
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