Anaiis Rios-Kasoga

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Random House Large Print, 2024, 464 pp., $30

I heard a chapter of Martyr! read aloud by Kaveh Akbar in July of this past year. We were both in Paris for a brief time, attending a visiting writers series through NYU. He read from what I would come to know as chapter eight, a saga of unconventional grocery shopping both gruesome and hilarious. Although the program had exposed me to many wonderful authors, it was the visceral nature of Martyr! that motivated me to mark my calendar for its release date.

Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar spent his childhood across the American Midwest. His poetry has received numerous awards including the 2017 and 2018 Pushcart prizes, and his poetry book Pilgrim Bell was named NPR’s Best Book of 2021. Akbar became the poetry editor for The Nation in 2020 and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. Martyr! is Akbar’s debut novel. While the book is not explicitly a work of auto-fiction, there are strings that run parallel to Akbar's own life–he is open about his struggle with substance abuse, his relationship with death and with his homeland.

Strangers who saw me reading Martyr! in public were often attracted to the book jacket’s bold typeface and bright color, an accurate exoskeleton which mirrored the contents within. They would ask with enthusiasm what the book was about; I always found myself saying “Death.” I would be met with morose expressions or soft murmurs. Now that I have finished my copy, I know that Martyr! should not elicit that response–I was left feeling quite the opposite.

When we meet our protagonist Cyrus Shams, he is laying on a piss-soaked bed staring at the ceiling of a decaying apartment. Immediately we know that he is Iranian, that he is a writer, that he is an addict, and that he may or may not have received a sign from god.

In the next few pages we jump forward in time: Cyrus is a few years into recovery living in Indiana in his early 20s. Like Akbar, Cyrus was born in Tehran but has grown up in the Midwest. He has recently graduated from Keady University. He makes his living working in the university hospital, where he pretends to be terminally ill to test medical students’ bedside manner. Much of Cyrus’ existential struggle stems from his mother Roya Shams’ death on Iran Air Flight 665, which was shot out of the sky by a US warship in 1988.

Cyrus is haunted by his mothers death not because of the loss itself, but because of the meaning of it–or rather its meaninglessness. “My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after.” Cyrus’ quest for this elusive definition drives the book’s narrative arc, and we see him become paralyzed by the idea of martyrdom. He wants to die but isn’t interested in dying without meaning.

He lives with his best friend and sometimes lover Zee Novak and thinks a lot about martyrs: Joan of Arc, Hypatia of Alexandria, Bobby Sands, Bhagat Singh. They are with him constantly, both in his mind and taped haphazardly on his bedroom walls. When Cyrus hears about an art exhibition “Death-Speak” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art wherein a terminally ill artist lives in the museum and chats with patrons until she dies, he is attracted to it–more than that, he is motivated to leave the midwest for the first time since his recovery. Cyrus feels that what the artist Orkideh is doing is inextricable from his own plans to pursue a novel or book of poetry about martyrdom–to figure out what it can or should really mean to die. Most importantly, he thinks her insight might be the missing piece to finding the definition that can accommodate his mother. With this hope of fulfillment, Cyrus and Zee fly to New York to meet with Orkideh.

Martyr! is a multigenerational family story. Intercut with the differing perspectives of Cyrus’ family are bits and pieces of historical context that never let us forget about the plane destruction that anchors the book’s explorations of death and existence. Flight 665 looms over the reader and Cyrus alike, not unlike an omnipresent god. Through perspective and time switches we visit with Roya’s brother, Arash, before he fights in the Iraq-Iran war and later navigates his mental trauma only to watch his sister die. We watch Cyrus’ father, Ali Shams, wake up every morning at 5am to work at the chicken farm that supports him and Cyrus. We watch Roya Shams wish for something more from her life. We get bits of each character that they never give to each other and sometimes don’t even give to themselves. The result is an intimate and heartbreaking family portrait.

To successfully weave all these voices together, Akbar embraces a more experimental version of “the novel.” Reflecting on his positionality as a writer, Akbar spoke about his transition from poetry to prose in his Paris reading. To explore the concept of narrative further, he read two novels a week and watched a movie a day. Not only was I charmed by this process ( I can assure you I was), but I was also reminded of a Sylvia Plath essay “Comparison” (1997), in which she discusses the differences between a poet and a novelist:

And there is really so little room! So little time! The poet becomes an expert packer of suitcases: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough. There it is: the beginning and the end in one breath. How would the novelist manage that? In a paragraph? In a page? Mixing it, perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out.

Martyr! is a triumph not only in content but in form. Akbar takes Plath’s idea and pushes it even further. He breaks up his narrative into fragments of time like pieces of art that are fulfilling on their own but turn into something different when looked at all at once. I don’t mean that this is a collection of thematically-linked vignettes–it isn’t. That however is the magic of it: Akbar ascends the narrative form to create many complete fragments within a whole. Like Plath, Akbar is an expert packer of suitcases: when moving from poetry to prose, he simply packs many suitcases. He boxes up whole houses over many years and straps them to a caravan that drives through the decades from Iran to Indiana to Brooklyn and back.

The families testimonies and the news reports about the crash are spliced with excerpts from Cyrus’ developing novel BOOKOFMARTYRS.DOCX, and dialogues between people in Cyrus’ life and celebrities. Ali Shams talks with Rumi, Roya Shams chats with Lisa Simpson. The conversation between these characters are inextricable from Cyrus’ own thoughts, as the characters embody different dimensions of the protagonist’s consciousness. These dialogues were born from a childhood exercise. To cope with his violent insomnia, Cyrus developed a technique wherein he imagines scripted conversations between public figures and people in his life with the hope that his mind will take over, writing the dialogue automatically as he sleeps. The conversation between Roya and Lisa Simpson is a brilliant externalization of Cyrus’ desperate desire to know his mother. His desperation to demand some answers from her.

Bookending the story is a partial and then full quotation from Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and this inclusion is the cherry on top of the thickest most layered milkshake I have ever eaten. The page preceding the prologue offers us this snippet: “My God I just remember that we die.” When the reader has reached the coda, ready to close the copy and bid the characters goodbye, Akbar gives us the rest: “My God, I just remembered that we die. But-but me too!? Don’t forget that for now, it’s strawberry season.” This brilliant structural choice solidifies that Yes, it is a novel about Death. But more accurately, it is a novel about the persistence of life. It insists that there is something for the reader to look forward to after they close the book.

“The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.”
– Sylvia Plath

I say Anaiis Rios-Kasoga. You think _____ (something really nice she hopes).