A Debut Novel That Exposes the Ugliness of American Subjectivity

Bobuq Sayed’s début, No God but Us, reinvents the modern American Abroad novel––the story, now over a century old, of Americans departing the US and crossing an ocean to find freedom and growth that they could not access at home. From Langston Hughes to Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin to Garth Greenwell, the American Abroad novel follows the solo expatriate moving through a foreign land, usually a European city, seeking reinvention while reckoning with the racial inequality, sexual prohibitions, or moral repressions of American culture. In none of the canonical examples, however, is the protagonist both queer and racialized. Baldwin famously conceded that he was unable to create a character who was both Black and queer in Giovanni’s Room.

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