Check out our interview with Bobuq Sayed, the author of "No God But Us."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
I was inspired to write the book based on what I felt were certain silences in immigrant literature, queer and trans literature, and politically informed literary fiction. We sometimes fall into the trap of considering history as some foregone age-old construct instead of a dynamic text that is actively produced every day. Specifically, the historical junction of 2015 fascinated me. This is a moment when Angela Merkel is portrayed as this saintly figure for receiving Afghan refugees at train stations across Germany, but it is also a pivot point when sympathy for the figure of the undocumented migrant started shriveling up. I guess in some ways the book is my effort at humanizing this figure and asking questions about the conditions that lead queer and trans people to flee their homes in pursuit of a better life.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Reading Rainbow to me means honoring the full complexity and imperfection of queer and trans people and insisting on that humanity even when it is politically costly and/or involves decisions we don't necessarily understand. The truth is that queer and trans people are not a monolith, and this is increasingly the case as we see gay people at the helm of companies like Apple, OpenAI, and Palantir that are cozy with the Trumpy administration. Universalizing the experience makes it harder to ascertain the different power indexes within our communities that play huge roles in determining our fate.
Pride to me is all about political coalitions and, in fact, I am not in a political coalition with Tim Cook, Sam Altman, or Peter Thiel. Those men are my adversaries in the class war being waged against working people right now. Reading with Pride encourages us to open our political coalitions to other kinds of people who may not be LGBT but who we can elect to join forces in solidarity with because our struggles for justice and liberation are kindred, like Palestinian journalists, intravenous drug users, and undocumented migrants, for instance.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
When I was a young queer and gender questioning kid, I found representations of myself in books about flying horses, demonic women, and alien academies. As a writer, I want to
illustrate to young readers the vast possibilities of the imagination, and the role that minoritized people have always played in histories of defiance and revolution.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
No God but Us is told from the alternating perspectives of two queer Afghans as they collide in Istanbul amid an increasingly authoritarian Turkish government’s repression of dissenting voices and minority communities. The book is at once a family saga, a botched love story, and a searing portrait of politics made intimately personal.
What can fans expect from your book?
When I tell people that the book is mostly set during 2015’s so-called “European Migrant Crisis” there is a tendency to assume the tone of the writing is overwhelmingly bleak depressive. On the contrary, I wanted to showcase how even people forced into the margins of society, waiting years in purgatory for the outcome of their cases for humanitarian asylum, are still fucking and sucking and living and loving. The book reads like a racy story shared between friends rather than an academic monograph of a crisis.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I’m honestly so excited to go on book tour in May and June, and to speak about the book and the broader political conditions that inspired me to write it. Honestly, I’m more of a speaker than a writer so I find dialogue and social exchange to be really recharging.
