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.
Meanwhile, Mansur, in his late twenties when we meet him, was born in Afghanistan. He travels with his family by foot across the border to Iran, where his father was killed by a sniper (“Every promise of safety had come at a price”). Mansur lives in poverty with his sister, mother, and aunt, Schaesta Ama, and works as a day laborer. While trying to find other men like him, he briefly connects with Payam, his upper-class crush. When Schaesta Ama outs him and kicks him out of their home, Payam comes to Mansur’s aide (albeit temporarily) but does not invite him up into his caste for more than an afternoon. Instead, he pays to smuggle him out of Iran to Turkey, where Mansur will work as a dishwasher and an informal sex worker.
Delbar and Mansur meet at an organization called PeaceMeals; like much of No God But Us, PeaceMeals is riotously funny. 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—how PeaceMeals workers have a proclivity for patting themselves on the back for trying to fix problems their countries have caused, the way participants are forced to sign an image release form (to get a free meal) and smile on camera. Delbar is appalled by PeaceMeals’s uptight “Anderson Cooper-looking” German leader, Leif—whom I loathed as a person but loved as a character—and is “struck by the formality of his sermon, the mention of the German philanthropic trust that funded these weekly dinners, and the good work they did to keep refugees alive.”
No God But Us is very much a book about Afghan refugees who are trying to forge a future amidst great displacement.
In its opening and closing, the novel engages with what the late queer theorist Jose Esteban Muñoz called a “sense of brown.” (Peppered with Farsi and Turkish words which aren’t translated, No God But Us is unapologetic in its brownness ) At the beginning, Delbar is part of a drag show which his drag mother, Kreamy, explains to him has “Oriental aesthetic”—a safe space with “barely any white people” meant for a “sea of other Arabs loving what we love” and who are “fucking with the exoticism.”
There’s only one issue: Kreamy (parents from Pakistan) and Delbar (parents from Afghanistan) are “not even Arab.” By the end of the novel, Mansur also finds himself in a situation in which he’s cast as an Arab despite being Afghan: “I’m not Arab at all, but who cares. It’s not important what I am. I become what they need me to be, a thick-dick machofucker.” (This is a kind of brown corollary to “BBC” tropes and what Ann duCille calls mandingoism.) This conflation of brownness and Arabness is due, in significant part, to how in the wake of 9/11, the War on Terror crudely lumped Arabs, Muslims, and people living in countries as geographically and culturally disparate as Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Egypt into the same stigmatized state of brownness.
In The Sense of Brown, Jose Esteban Muñoz considers “people who are rendered brown by their personal and familial participation in South-to-North migration patterns.” While Muñoz was primarily writing case studies about Latin identity, his sense of brown can be applied to other parts of the world—particularly to the “brown commons” forged in Turkey between 2001, and the 21st-century “Fortress Europe” movement of the mid 2010s. While brownness is a “place of fractured togetherness,” Muñoz notes, “Brown, it is important to mention, is not strictly the shared experience of harm between people and things; it is also the potential for the refusal and resistance to that oft-systemic harm.”
Two forms of kin stand out in No God But Us: aunties and children. The aunties play an enormous role in Delbar and Mansur’s outing (and, in ways both positive and painful, in their flight from America and Iran, respectively). They are a kind of Greek chorus who, Delbar says, “could be mistaken for buxom, aging crows lined up across a power line, each one wrapped in a slightly different, but equally demure, head scarf.” Despite often reinforcing traditional values, No God But Us’s aunties have a femme, queer (indeed, almost misandrist) force the scholar Kareem Khubchandani has described as auntology. When Delbar sees two women at PeaceMeals in Turkey, he says, “In them, I saw my own aunties, and their dismissiveness of any man bold enough to make a foolish bid for their attention.” It is Delbar and Mansur’s meddling aunts who launch their journeys towards Turkey; but it is also Delbar’s Aunt Yosra who protects him from his family (and confides in him that the other aunties assume she is a lesbian for divorcing her abusive husband).
The other queer figure in No God But Us is that of the child. Sayed seems to be very interested in a phenomenon described in the introduction to The Sense of Brown as “the queer and brown experience of childhood.” Children are not always very present in queer literature, certainly not often in the hands of white writers depicting gay men in their twenties. But they abound in queer refugee literature (think of Renaldo Arenas’s childhood in Before Night Falls). No God But Us is very much a book about Afghan refugees who are trying to forge a future amidst great displacement—and queer and trans Afghans play a vital role in nurturing their communities across generations.
But while living with intergenerational family may bring protection from racism for queers of color as they reach adulthood, it brings another problem. As Mansur says, “Privacy was a luxury absent from our home”—meaning sex had to dangerously be sought in public spaces. Samuel R. Delany described the cross-class, interracial sexual playground of pre-Disneyfied 42nd Street in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. In a similar spirit, Sayed playfully explores the cross-class connections which happen when yuppies and laborers alike have to cruise for sex in the same Tehran roundabout.
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Though it is set in a country and society far from the United States, No God But Us is not wholly dissimilar from other queer novels which have found large followings in the US. Despite that, the novel has so far not generated anywhere near the same coverage as comparable novels like André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name (set in 1980s Italy), Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness (post-Soviet Bulgaria), or Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles (ancient Greece)—to say nothing of the Canadian hockey romance Hidden Rivalry. Putting the larger issue of decreased books coverage aside, I find Sayed’s prose to be in the same league of writers like Greenwell or Miller, and I believe it has not received anywhere near as much attention thus far—at least in part—because it’s a novel by a queer Muslim author that is also a damning critique of American empire.
As someone who lived in New York City for most of my life, I am not immune to the feelings of sadness being expressed by my fellow New Yorkers.
No God But Us leaves little room for the reader to avoid confronting America’s (and the EU’s) contemporary violence—and the way such violence destroys queer lives and queer love. It is a direct challenge to pinkwashing as well as a warning about the seductive nature of the diaspora; even when dealing with the most intimate of matters, Delbar is conscripted into imperial thinking. For instance: When Delbar tries to give his mother an ultimatum about how she must engage his sexuality on his terms if she is to stay in his life, Mansur observes that to Delbar, it meant “Either she was with him or against him.” Mansur, who desperately longs to be reunited with his own mother, is appalled. It’s a chilling line, evocative of George W. Bush saying “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” or then-Senator Hilary Clinton saying “Every nation has to either be with us, or against us,” in September 2001.
It’s all or nothing with Delbar, a much less deeply drawn character than Mansur. And while Mansur appreciates Delbar’s attention, he also knows that “With such naive, pure adoration came the stupidity of a juvenile, as well.” Delbar finds any number of things important which confound Mansur—an insistence on terms for identity, an obsession with YouTube videos of famous people he doesn’t know—because, Mansur surmises, Delbar “held onto his big ideas because nothing had ever been taken from him.
No God But Us also made me think anew about the missed opportunity 9/11 gave the world.
As someone who lived in New York City for most of my life, I am not immune to the feelings of sadness being expressed by my fellow New Yorkers this week. I, too, was there to witness 9/11 up close. I watched the flames with my own eyes.
And though I remain angry about the war that followed the destruction of the towers , I am touched every year when I see the memorial columns of light—a monument of possibility and luminescence, evoking angels flying into space.
But light, tragically, is not the dominant legacy of 9/11. America could have responded to that tragedy by creating a kinder world, one that truly honors the dead. Instead, we have plunged more of the world into darkness and suffering. We missed the possibility of different futures those days offered—much as we continue to miss—or ignore—the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic (and its blueprint for creating a more just society). In a preview of the genocide in Gaza, by the fall of 2001, the US was dropping “Daisy Cutters”—a deceptively cute name for 2,000 lb bombs—upon some of the poorest people on earth.
And yet, despite America’s best efforts, in the midst of this horror, millions of artists, travelers, and inventors created love, and light. Sometimes, against all odds, they created life itself.
Delbar, Mansur, their aunties and their lovers remind us that to bring the worlds we want into being in the wake of the war of terror, there is no god but us.
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