Live Encounters Arab Women Poets & Writers June 2025
A Free Woman, poem by Touria Majdouline.
Translated from Arabic by Dr. Salwa Gouda.
A Free Woman
In my mind, I intend to return language to its rightful owners
And content myself with gestures
For whenever I forget time,
I grow wiser.
I begin giving names to the years
And colors to the days,
And perhaps, out of sheer boredom, I read pre-Islamic poetry,
Amusing myself with the shadows of regret on time’s face.
No—I have forgotten nothing.
All nights are mirrors for remembrance,
And there is no distance for absence.
All speech is windows for presence.
I simply save a few breaths for myself,
And perhaps, in the last third of the night,
I ring the bells of truth.
I care not for what was or what will be.
I do not knock on rhetoric’s door to reach truth,
Nor do I wander in imagination like butterflies.
My tongue is no longer an oasis of metaphors
No moon grows old in my sky,
No anger sprouts at the edges of speech.
Alone, the evening and I
Share a balcony at sunset,
Then slip into night’s embrace
With fewer dreams, less sleeplessness,
And enough shadows for forgetting.
Who are you?
The critics and guardians of meaning ask.
Even I wonder who I am.
I have no thresholds for first readings,
As the critics have taught us.
And my heart, broken by longing,
Has grown light
Just as I wished a year ago.
And my wounded shadow,
Which once collapsed like a drowning man on my shores,
Or flailed hopelessly like a shipwreck in the Atlantic,
I now stretch into space and plant within it,
Drawing many suns upon it,
And from their transparent light, I distill words,
Singing for the little time that remains:
I am a free woman.
And above all,
I was not the one who led Adam to the apple.
I merely grew tired of sitting beneath the lush tree,
So I stood
To strip away the shadows coiled around me.
That beautiful, clumsy apple took Adam’s hand
And burdened me with the sin of women.
Now it is good for nothing,
Powerless to rewrite history again.
I am a free woman.
I do not remember where I last met my bitter features.
My hands once sought refuge in water,
My body weighed down by wounds,
The earth bewildered, restless with anxious steps,
The sky a forest of metaphors.
I crossed time standing like a spear,
Gazing into the flame.
I left the land that witnessed my toil
And carried my borders with me to another exile.
I built a voice for echoes,
A roof for my small dreams,
And forgot to change the sky!
This is me
A woman, utterly free.
I have no dream
Except to die in full vigor.
© Touria Majdouline
Dr Salwa Gouda is an accomplished Egyptian literary translator, critic, and academic affiliated with the English Language and Literature Department at Ain Shams University. Holding a PhD in English literature and criticism, Dr. Gouda pursued her education at both Ain Shams University and California State University, San Bernardino. She has authored several academic works, including Lectures in English Poetry and Introduction to Modern Literary Criticism, among others. Dr. Gouda also played a significant role in translating The Arab Encyclopedia for Pioneers, a comprehensive project featuring poets, philosophers, historians, and literary figures, conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Recently, her poetry translations have been featured in a poetry anthology published by Alien Buddha Press in Arizona, USA. Her work has also appeared in numerous international literary magazines, further solidifying her contributions to the field of literary translation and criticism.
Touria Majdouline is a distinguished Moroccan poet, novelist, and university professor with a Ph.D. in Criticism and Modern Arts. An award-winning writer, she has received the Nazik Al-Malaika Poetry Prize (2011), the ISESCO Prize for Cultural Work Development (2012), and the International Excellence Prize in Cultural Work (2024). She is an active cultural figure, serving as a founding member of the Association of Creative Women in Mediterranean Countries, head of the Moroccan-Andalusian Friendship Association (Ibn Rushd Forum), and an advisory board member of the Lebanese magazine Manarat. Her acclaimed works include poetry collections like A Sky That Slightly Resembles Me (2005, translated into Spanish) and Nothing More Beautiful (2023), the novel The Trace of the Bird (2025), and the critical study Vision and the Mask (2016).
My great admiration and respect to Touria Majdouline whose poetry is deep and refined. Congratulation for the wonderful translation by Selwa Gouda. Having been Touria’s first translation I know it is no easy translation for the richness of the metaphors, the vocabulary and the depth of the words in all Touria’s poems.