I often do readings while listening to sad playlists full of tragic love songs. While reading Yasmina, I found myself sympathizing with her even more because the music added an extra melancholic element. Her story moves like music, beginning with quiet innocence, swelling with passion, and ending in heartbreak and collapse. These five songs, for me, capture Yasmina’s journey.
- “Young and Beautiful” – Lana Del Rey
This song reflects the way Yasmina begins: innocent, dreamy, and living her life as a shepherdess among the ruins. She doesn’t fully understand what’s coming, and when Jacques enters her world, she’s swept along almost without a choice. The line “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” mirrors Yasmina’s fate. Jacques is captivated by her youth and beauty, but those qualities fade in his memory once he returns to France, leaving her devotion behind.
2. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
Yasmina and Jacque’s love is doomed before it even begins. She even tells him it’s impossible for a Muslim girl and a French officer to be together. But instead of stopping, they give in, which makes their passion both beautiful and devastating. The song has the same feeling: you know the ending will be tragic, but you can’t look away. For me, the refrain “love will tear us apart” is exactly what happens when Jacques is reassigned. Reality itself rips their love apart.
3. “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – Green Day
When Jacques leaves for his new post, Yasmina is left in total loneliness. The image that stays with me is her lying facedown in the gorge, immobilized by grief. She doesn’t rage or resist. She just repeats mektoub. That resignation matches the emptiness in Green Day’s song, where the singer walks a lonely road with no one by his side. Yasmina’s “boulevard” is the dusty plain of Timgad, but the isolation and drained hope are the same.
4. “Somebody That I Used to Know” – Gotye ft. Kimbra
This song reflects the cruelty of Jacque’s return. Yasmina still sees him as her Mabrouk, the man she loved and waited for, and she calls to him with joy. But Jacques, now married to a Parisian woman, treats her as nothing but a shameful past. Her outburst: “Why did you use all of your ruses… to seduce me, carry me away, and take my virginity? Why did you lie and promise to return?” This fits perfectly with the song’s bitterness about being turned into a stranger by someone who once defined your whole world. For Yasmina, love was life itself. For Jacques, it became disposable.
5. “Back to Black” – Amy Winehouse
The end of Yasmina’s story is the hardest to read, and Back to Black is the only song that fits. Yasmina spirals into illness, poverty, and prostitution, but even then she still clings to the memory of Jacques. Winehouse’s line “we only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times” captures the endless mourning Yasmina embodies. The story’s final words, “Yasmina the Bedouin was no more,” echo the song’s raw finality. Both tell of women consumed by love that society never let them keep.
