Queering the border and other transgressions
“Who was there to answer to?” This is the question posed by one of two narrators in Bobuq Sayed’s novel No God But Us (Ultimo, 2026). It is a question also suggested by the novel’s humanist title and Sayed’s dedication “to the transgressors of borders”. In their first full-length fiction, Sayed dreams of a world where the borders are, if not erased, at least made more permeable, and we are no longer answerable to the enforcers of those arbitrary lines.
There are, of course, many people and institutions to answer to, as queer Afghan narrators Delbar and Mansur know only too well. We meet Delbar first, at a Middle Eastern drag night in Washington DC where he is working in spring 2015 after finishing college. “No one had any idea who I was, which meant that I could be anyone,” says Delbar, who harbours a secret desire to join the queens on the stage. But this dream is cut short on a family visit to Virginia’s Little Kabul, where his employment and company is exposed. Fleeing his mother Qandul’s histrionics, Delbar leaves with his aunt Yosra to spend the summer in Istanbul.
Delbar’s journey east is mirrored by Mansur’s journey west, which followed a similar exposure eighteen months earlier. We meet Mansur in Tehran, where his family have fled to escape conflict in Afghanistan. Working as a labourer, Mansur makes covert forays into Tehran’s queer underground. In a feverish and spectacular cruising scene, set at a roundabout, our narrator encounters Payam, a cleancut resident of the city’s wealthiest suburbs. Any budding romance is abruptly truncated when Mansur’s family learns of his activities, and he is forced to leave, smuggled across borders into Turkey. In sentences as spare as the time Payam and Mansur are granted, Sayed conjures the heat, yearning and despair of their fleeting romance:
His fingers slid over and gripped the stitching on my inner thigh. The voltage of his touch surged through my veins. It was the closest to orgasm we’d ever come.
Delbar and Mansur are destined to cross paths in No God But Us’ contrapuntal structure. Sayed evokes the precarity of Mansur’s life in Istanbul, as he makes his way through dormitories and exploitative living situations. Later, he meets Leif, a German trans man who runs an evening for Afghan refugees called, amusingly, Peace Meals. There, Mansur encounters Delbar, sent by his aunt to make himself useful. There are immediate fireworks, especially on Delbar’s part. “Who are you?” Mansur asks:
Maybe it wasn’t the question that upset me but the fucked-up beauty of the man posing it. He was dizzying to behold. I found myself indulging in the heavy pour of his body, looking up and then away, and then back again, the way one gawks after alcohol has done away with insecurity.
The fireworks must be held on simmer though – Mansur and Leif are by then in a relationship that, thanks to Leif’s German citizenship, is key to Mansur’s asylum hopes.
No God But Us sings in the dance of power and desire between the trio, particularly Delbar’s deliciously calculating aspirations to split the couple and claim Mansur for himself. The novel foregrounds incident and character, and the relationships between our protagonists, over overt lyricism; Sayed resists any particular adherence to genre. Almost diaristically, we circle amidst a cast of queers, notably the acerbic Anahita, an Afghan trans woman whose asylum application is a fraught counterpoint to Mansur’s. Theirs is a fleeting moment when a small community coalesces before being scattered once more.
The novel that comes most to mind is Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, also high-octane in action and personality, and similarly uncompromising in its gleeful transgressions of the borders of gender and sexuality. Like Peters’ novel, there is a great sense of play in Sayed’s pointed dramatisation of interpersonal politics – Delbar’s insistence that he can ‘save’ Mansur from Leif’s guilty Euro do-goodism; Mansur’s insistence that he doesn’t need saving by an American; Anahita’s insistence that she doesn’t need saving by anyone.
Sayed sets their novel in 2015, an inauspicious time in Istanbul, and the world at large. Already, authorities are cracking down on queer lives; Delbar, Mansur and their company are victims of police brutality at the annual pride parade, the last year in which it will be technically legal. Within a year, Trump would be serving his first term, and an attempted coup would serve as the excuse for a brutal crackdown on political opposition in Turkey. Fast forward a decade, and the imperial forces that lurk in No God But Us have reached a grotesque and brazen denouement.
“The border reproduces a global colonial racial social order that fortifies the rich against the rest, deflates labor power, treats sacred land as a possession, and provides the ideological basis for all repressive immigration enforcement,” activist Harsha Walia wrote in 2022 in the Boston Review. There are many borders in No God But Us: national, of course, but also those between race and ethnicity, religion and secularism, class, gender-sexuality, even the relationships we practice. These are borders policed by state authorities but also in more quotidian spaces.
Both Delbar and Mansur leave their homes due to the ‘insult’ of their sexuality; some of the most moving passages in the novel see the pair grapple with the love and fears of their mothers. This fear, Sayed suggests, derives from the precarity borders produce, where even Qandul, who has found success in the West, seeks the refuge of tradition and community. “I wonder if motion is a form of punishment,” Sayed wrote in a 2019 Rumpus essay titled “Terror Is A Faggot With Halal Sausages Strapped To His Chest.” Empire turns what should be a fundamental freedom into a punitive measure; the greatest asymmetry between Mansur and Delbar is that Delbar can move with relative ease. Answering the determined lineation of the border, Sayed revels in the contradictions of needs and desires. These are people beholden only to themselves and each other.
James Whitmore is a writer based in Melbourne. He is the co-author of The Handbook: surviving and living with climate change. You can read other reviews on jameshwhitmorereviews.com