The Brooklyn Rail

Is there more meaning in our deaths than in our lives? Cyrus Shams—orphan, recovering addict, poet, and the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s ambitious and expansive debut novel Martyr!—is on a quest to find out: “The difference between wanting to not be alive and wanting to die.” Cyrus’s mother is all but unknown to him, her passenger plane shot down by US forces when he was a baby (referencing a true event with Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988). His immigrant father Ali was a farm worker and led a life of quiet desperation in the Midwest before he passed away when his son reached adulthood, and his uncle Arash, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, is barely surviving PTSD near the Alborz Mountains in Iran.

Yet the title of the novel suggests that the narrative to come may not be as straightforward as it appears: note the cheery wink of an exclamation point rubbing against the heavily-freighted word martyr, especially with a Middle Eastern protagonist. There’s a certain nobility in martyrdom, to sacrifice oneself for others, or one’s art, that understandably speaks to Cyrus, given how tenuous his sobriety is, a kind of all or nothing thinking, and he decides “to write a book of elegies for people I’ve never met.” Soon, Cyrus learns of the dying artist Orkideh, who is part of a performance art exhibit at a Brooklyn museum called DEATH-SPEAK, and spontaneously decides to go see her, accompanied by his friend and sometime lover, Zee. “This idea for the book, for his own dying—going into the museum he’d had a grasp of its shape, why it mattered. It was a tidy, gallant idea about leaving life for something larger than mere living. Becoming an earth martyr.”

As befitting a gifted poet, Akbar plays with form, even in prose: interspersed with the current-day narrative of Cyrus’s quest are excerpts from his manuscript, his poetry, and unexpected vignettes—his mother Roya conversing with Lisa Simpson, or his imaginary brother with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and more. This is an apt description of our technologically-distorted lives where the imaginary and ordinary, past and present mix. In this modern world, is Lisa Simpson as real as Cyrus’s late mother Roya? If we smudge the lines of reality, could they interact? And ultimately, does what we think about most shape who we are in the world?

Another thematic element is the luck and pain of survivorship. Cyrus’s uncle Arash, who spent the Iran-Iraq war traveling through fields of dying young soldiers, outfitted as the Angel of Death in order to give them emotional ease, is ostensibly alive, but is he really living? What of Cyrus’s father, who took on the sole parentage of Cyrus after Roya was killed?

That Cyrus Shams bears some resemblance to Akbar is part of the playfulness of the novel, which questions whether even public experiences and characteristics can truly identify a person. In one of the vignettes, Ali talks to Rumi: “You’re still so beloved on earth anyway, it makes sense you’d want to stay near it. Cyrus told me once you were the best-selling poet in America. A dead Persian poet! I thought that was crazy.” Rumi responds “Well, I don’t know how Persian the me they read in America really is.”

In Akbar’s prose, like his poetry, there are repetitions that build layers to themes, among them the issue of identity in a disassociated world: “But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes—neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, neither drunk nor in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim.” Is identity a sculpture whereby external impressions and judgments chip away and shape who we are in the world? Or as in the case of Orkideh, is it a private unveiling that confounds public perspectives?

This unreliability of what is presented to the outside world feels especially appropriate when considering life in cultures and countries where true expression of self will often not be accepted or worse, lead to exile or death. Cyrus’s ability to ultimately become who he is meant to be, to have the freedom to do as he chooses is contrasted to the lives of his parents and uncle, who were constrained by gender, by class, by generation.

Adding to the delight of the book are subtle aspects of the narrative that may be unnoticeable to some, yet offer flavor in the context of the story—one anecdote about enuresis during Roya’s childhood slyly echoes the mythology of Mandana, the mother of Cyrus the Great. These Easter eggs add to the complexity of the narrative. Fans of Akbar’s poetry will also recognize familiar poetic guideposts, such as Ali’s Sofreh restaurant, which makes an appearance in the novel.

It’s telling that Cyrus meets Orkideh—that her last act of performance art occurs—in a museum, a space that often pedestals the work of those no longer among the living, as this book and many of its temporally dynamic interactions exist in the liminal space where life and death can be at the same stratum. Cyrus’s father is both dead, and alive, in Cyrus, in his memories. Cyrus’s uncle Arash, living a hermetic life in Iran, is both alive and dead.

There are a few plot twists along the way that cause Cyrus to revisit and revise his personal history, and future. Martyrdom—subsuming, or destroying, the self—ultimately doesn’t provide solace and meaning, but in Martyr!, art, which is the essence of creation, and has its own sense of eternity, does. As Orkideh says, “It’s easy for people who have sacrificed nothing to rationalize their own ordinariness by calling me lucky. But I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.”

For a novel predicated on death—good, bad, and questionable, all linked by inevitability—the novel is equally focused on life. Beyond all of the philosophical examinations, there is Cyrus’s deepening relationship with Zee, which centers on intimacy, vulnerability and honesty. Finding meaning in one’s life, finding meaning through art, the importance of connection in this imperfect world, the risk and necessity of loving, even though we are destined to be left, and destined to leave others, is the real exclamation point of the novel.