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

The young men arrived exhausted and furious with shameless foreigners
and self-important, worthless collaborators. This inconvenient death had come in
troubled times. They only wanted to return to their home as soon as possible after
having paid their last respects to their father. Their family in Fez was as foreign to
them as this city that did not seem to justify in any way their father's attachment
to it. At first glance, the city seemed to them to be harsh and austere, like an old
grandmother embittered by the weight of the years.
Their father had tried to make them love his city, without success. The
grand and noble ideas he built about his beloved city in the evenings, his wife
destroyed in the morning, striking with indifference and disregard.
A middle-aged man--the husband of a cousin, if they understood correctly-
-said to them, "It was a funeral worthy of your deceased father. All of Fez was
there. The prayer for the departed was performed at the Qarawiyin mosque, and
then an impressive following went to the cemetery chanting in two choruses, as it
should be, "There is no God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of God."
Then "There is no force or strength but in God, force and strength equal to His
knowledge in number, volume, and weight. There is no power but in Him."
"May God receive his soul in holy mercy," added another uncle, a
presumptuous man with a solemn expression. "He was very pious."
"Amen!" exclaimed a third, bony old man. "Truly he was. He was buried
in the tomb next to his father's. It's a real stroke of luck that the tomb had not been
occupied before today!"
"No one can know what will happen tomorrow; no one knows in what
land he will die!"
240