Conventional wisdom says suicide bombers place no value on life; tragedy, hardship and extreme religion have blunted their human feelings. But what if the opposite is true? What if poverty and degradation feed extremism because they cause their victims to feel too much? These daring and uncomfortable questions are explored with poetic grace in Horses of God, a troubling yet beautiful novella from Moroccan artist and writer Mahi Binebine.
Based on a real incident from 2003, Horses of God is a picture of what pre-martyrdom life may have been like for boys growing up in the slums of Casablanca. Through Yachine, a young bomber who narrates from a regretful afterlife, Binebine leads the reader through a world of scavenge and filth, of casual violence and hunger. But for all the fear and privation, Yachine's world is also sometimes the world of all young people, where home has its special comforts, where a game of soccer can make a poor boy feel like a king and where the affections of a special girl can scent the air with beauty.
Binebine depicts, achingly, how the Sidi Moumen slum extinguishes that universal spirit of youthful possibility. When the opportunity for martyrdom comes to Yachine and his friends through a predatory group of older terrorists, the choice to trade the injustice of this world for the rewards of the next seems an obvious outlet for the passionate rage their cruel lives have engendered. Horses of God is a haunting elegy for the broken souls of mass murderers. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic