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

ut beneath her nobly arched forehead incoherent thoughts of an indistinguishable
past and the present collided in an opaque fog.
Looking at the emptiness before her, behind her, and around her, a woman
stared at the nothingness of her past and future life. When she had seen him leave,
carried on strong arms to his last resting place, she had felt a shiver run through
her entire body. A shiver of cold, or rather of this emptiness that had taken
absolute possession of her.
She felt death within her. She was dead, without a doubt, but even worse,
she was a thinking corpse. Usually, a person's thoughts leave at the threshold of
death. All thought and knowledge end there. All ideas evaporate. All theory
confronts a wall of silence. Not even a wall, for thoughts can perceive a wall, a
stone and cement reality. Thought confronts nothingness.
Lalla Kenza found herself riding on the highest peak, with half the world
on one side and half on the other. Her dilemma was that she had defied death. She
was death, cold, nothingness. She was the paralyzing stiffness. She was especially
the emptiness. Her heart, mind, and the veins running through her body were
empty. Her skin was already crawling with maggots. Her eyes no longer saw the
things of this world. Her ears were ringing with subterranean sounds. Her body
damned, she was dead among the living. She was an absent presence, life and
death combined, a lack of meaning, a work of Satan. And that was the source of
her suffering.
Then, in His mercy, God drowned her pain in dementia. She returned to
the time when days were satisfyingly full, without question of the past, without
concern for the future, nor regret, nor torment, nor desire for better days to come.
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