Yachine: Chapter Analysis Of Binebine

Binebine writes Yachine, who has died, as the narrator of this novel to show how boy like him and his friends with are molded into people who are willing to execute acts of terror. By making Yachine the narrator, this allows the reader to see the lives of these boys as an entirety – from their childhood to adulthood. This tool serves as a away to humanize the people that we think of as inhuman or as people who have been groomed to execute these acts since birth. Chapter 15 illustrates the extent of how each boy had become indoctrinated into thinkning that what they were doing was right.
One similarity between all of the boys is that they all lack strong father figures and they are mostly left to their own devices while growing up. I think that
The combination of Nabil’s mother’s work and the repeated rapes that Nabil had lived through turned him into a jaded person that sees the world as a cruel place. With the help of Nabil’s “brainwashing” from his religion to see his mother as a direct contradiction to what a woman should be, he does not think that there is anything left for him except to help his religion. Blackie also agrees quickly, he lives his life under the name of his dead brother due to his abusive father, which has led him live a life with an unsupportive family. He sees the religion as a way that he can be useful and that committing this act is a form liberation from his
Zoubeir tells him that there is no better place than paradise and the authority that the boys view Zoubeir as having coupled with Khalil’s past of repeated beatings and unfair arrests are a justification for the action that he is about to take.

Hamid shows the most emotion out of all of the boys, but he is the one that led the rest of the boys to Abu Zoubeir. He truly believes that they had no choice in the matter because he is the most devout to their religion, he goes from being the terror of Sidi Moumen to a devout religious exteremist.

Yachine answering yes is the most interesting because he was seemed to be the most protected from the injustices and hardships that the others faced due to living in Sidi Moumen. He did not face the humiliation and degradation that Nabil and Blackie faced, his family was somewhat normal, and he was looking to the future with his love interest Ghizlane. I think that Binebine uses Yachine as a way to illustrate how one does not have to grow up in a terrible home in order to willingly die. Growing up in a place like Sidi Moumen with the poverty and constant degradation that this group of boys feels and then being validated and feeling like they are "no longer... parasites, the dregs of humanity, less than nothing" is a major motivator to do what Abu and his friends ask these boys to do (110). This continues with the theme of the other two books that we have read in this