As I read Bobuq Sayed’s No God But Us in the waning days of the summer, I realized their debut novel paired well with Jose Esteban Muñoz’s final work, The Sense of Brown (2020). Together, the duo made a perfect combination of books for reflecting upon the last quarter century of the United States’ “War on Terror.” As much of the world focuses this week on the events of September 11, 2001, No God But Us offers an important perspective on that terrible day and its horrific aftermath: that of two queer Afghan refugees whose lives are upended by the war. Sayed tells their stories in the first person in alternating chapters.
There is no concrete number for just how many people have been killed, maimed, and displaced due to the US-led War on Terror (or, as it’s called by so many of its innocent victims, the War of Terror). It formally began in 2001, just three days after 9/11, with the passage of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was signed by George W. Bush, approved by every single member of the House of Representatives except one (Barbara Lee), and continued under every president and congress since.
In 2023, the Costs of War project at Brown University estimated that 4.5 million people had been killed by the war, with roughly one million of these deaths “from direct combat in war zones across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.” The remaining 3.5 million were classified as “indirect deaths” stemming from the “destruction of economies, public services, and the environment.” An order of magnitude more—perhaps as many as 37 million human beings—have been turned into refugees and “forced to flee their homes and leave their lives behind.” These refugees are not merely smuggled or trafficked victims. While their lives might be set in motion by U.S. bombs or sanctions, the people who navigate unpredictable life journeys are not merely passive victims. They are sailors, adventurers, poets.
They are sometimes horny, sometimes deceitful, and often funny. Life doesn’t just happen to them; they make interesting lives happen—perhaps more so than many people who try to stay put. Sayed dedicates their novel to “to the transgressors of borders.” Similarly to how I wrote about the late Latinx transgender migrants Cecilia Gentili and Lorena Borjas in my book The Viral Underclass, Sayed explores the transgressive nature of those who attempt to cross multiple kinds of borders—of nation, of gender, of the concept of individual bodies, and (even if they fail) of class.
If you’ve ever spent any time amongst international NGOs and their white savior employees, you will laugh out loud at Sayed’s depiction of this world. Two such adventurers are imagined into being in No God But Us. Delbar and Mansur both have similarly circuitous but differing journeys from Afghanistan; they both wind up in Turkey in 2014, having been outed to their families.
When they meet, Delbar is in his early twenties; his mother, Qandul, had fled Afghanistan for the United States even before the war. Delbar is raised in the Washington, D.C. area and educated at a fancy university in the heart of the metropole, not far from the Pentagon—the building which has played an outsized role in destabilizing his family’s home country. During a very difficult weekend, Delbar is kicked out of his DC share house by a roommate he describes as interlacing his fingers “the way news anchors and cucks do” and having a “ruthless State Department smile” which “grew even more despotic whenever he spoke of the housemates in the third person.” (I could not help but think of Vedant Petal, Anthony Blinken’s obsequious spokesman for the genocide in Gaza.) When Delbar is outed and rejected by his domineering single mother, he joins his sympathetic aunt, Yosra, and her children in Istanbul to sort out his life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
