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

"Shouting out her love for her own husband in public? As if marriage
could persist in lovers' ecstasy. As if such "immoral" words as passionate lover,
desire, sensuality, all the words of lovers' language could be those of a couple
married in the spirit of purity. As though it were acceptable for a married couple
to abandon themselves to dizzy sensuality and build their life on carnal delight.
That way of life is destined to fail," people said. "This marriage is an insult to
decent society. It cannot last!"
Indeed it did not last, to the joy of those who had wished it to fail, tortured
as they were by jealousy.
Drafted into debilitating rootlessness, Lalla Kenza had blindly waded in
the polluted waters of her suffering. Then, like a fat fly on raw flesh, she had
finally landed in fallow field, her second husband. With wicked pleasure she
harassed him and put him through a thousand torments. He played the game for
gain at first, but also on a whim, and perhaps by choice. An exacerbated
masochism pushed them into each other's arms, not to share life, but to mutually
destroy each other.
They developed an ambiguous relationship that even Marjana, in spite of
her lively intuition, could neither understand nor interpret.
Worried by her mistress's free fall from the higher spheres of happiness
toward cynicism and perversity, the Guinean began to scold the young woman in
an attempt to prevent a catastrophe. Strangely enough, the invincible fighter
submitted; a frightful child who nonetheless bowed to the admonitions of her
slave because she knew her slave was right.
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