The dead and the living | Review of ‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar's debut novel Martyr! explores addiction, recovery, and the search for meaning through the life of Cyrus Shams.

Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr! is a book many will turn to, to find themselves — for if you are lost, this book might save you. The reader will ultimately find herself through the journey of Cyrus Shams — a poet, an addict in recovery, a straight-passing queer who is ambitious and vulnerable. Akbar has crafted each character to tell extraordinary stories. This is a book of art, a book of hope. Cyrus’s story starts as a quest for meaningful death and martyrdom and ends with a renewed faith in life. Akbar’s hope is infectious and beautiful.

The American-Iranian Cyrus isn’t particularly interested in staying alive. He is disenchanted with life and has an obsession with martyrdom and making his life (or death) matter. But he is not interested in martyrdom in the theological or nationalistic sense. He wants to write a book about Earth martyrs, about people whose death mattered, who died for a cause. This obsession stems from the loss of his mother, Roya.

The U.S. military mistook an Iranian passenger plane for a military plane and shot it down. All passengers died, including Roya. Ali, Cyrus’s father, migrates from Iran to America with Cyrus soon after Roya’s death. Decades later, Ali passes away while Cyrus is away at college. Ali lived his life and his last days labouring at an industrial poultry farm six days a week. Cyrus believes that the lives and deaths of his parents matter little. Cyrus does not want this to be the case for his life and death, so he decides to write a book about martyrs. This is when he meets Orkideh, an American-Iranian artist with terminal cancer. She is living the last of her days as part of an art installation at a Brooklyn museum called Death-Speak where she talks to strangers about anything and everything. 

Cyrus’s uncle Arash is his only blood relative left. Arash was a zero soldier (a soldier with zero skills and zero responsibilities) in the Iranian army that fought against Iraq. Being a zero soldier meant that Arash was expendable. He rode through the battlegrounds among dying Iranian soldiers on a horse, looking like the angel of death, in an attempt to comfort the dying. Being surrounded by dying soldiers, pleading for water or for a quick death, traumatised Arash. He is visited by ghosts of dying soldiers long after he has left the army.

Akbar writes about Cyrus’s addiction and recovery with tender yet witty prose. “When I got sober it wasn’t because I punched a cop or drove my car into a Burger King or anything dramatic like that. I had a dozen bottoms that could have awakened any reasonable person to the severity of the problem, but I was not a reasonable person... Beautiful terrible, how sobriety disabuses you of the sense of your having been a gloriously misunderstood scumbag prince shuffling between this or that narcotic crown.” 

The author delves into the darkest corners of the human experience, but if that was not reason enough to read the novel, it must be picked up for Akbar’s three-dimensional characters. They are brilliantly crafted. The writing takes us to the days when Arash and Roya were children playing in Iran. It takes us to the early days of marriage between Ali and Roya, giving us a glimpse of Roya’s inner life.

While Martyr! brims with prose that shines bright, I will leave you with these lines: “If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself — which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.”