Finding Meaning Through Death

Iranian American writer Kaveh Akbar established quite a reputation as a poet. Born on January 15, 1989, in Tehran, Iran before moving to the United States when he was two years old, Akbar’s poems appeared in prominent literary publications and magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, PBS News Hour and Best American Poetry, among others. He published two collections of poetry: Pilgrim Bell (2021) and Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), both of which are well-received commercially and critically. It earned him several accolades and made him a household name. He also published a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic in 2016. In 2014, he founded Divedapper, an interview site for contemporary poets, helping raise the profiles of other poets. In 2020, he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. It was a prestigious position previously held by equally successful poets such as Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and William Butler Yeats.

Without a doubt, Akbar is one of contemporary’s most successful and highly-heralded poets. His oeuvre and the accolades he earned for his body of work speak for itself. Deviating from what he has become renowned for, in 2024, he ventured into the world of prose with the publication of his debut novel, Martyr! It was during the pandemic when he decided to venture into full-length prose. His debut novel’s release was, expectedly, a highly-anticipated affair. At the heart of Martyr! is Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American man born in 1987 in Tehran to Roya and Ali Shams. Shortly after his birth, the accidental shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 killed his mother who was traveling to Dubai to visit her brother Arash. His father was devastated but was not provided space to process his grief. He found himself suffocated by relatives and friends who, despite their good intentions, were encroaching on his space.

Ali then unilaterally decided to move to the United States, particularly to Fort Wayne, Indiana. to work in a chicken factory. Ali raised his son as a single parent. Cyrus, on the other hand, grew up struggling with night terrors and nighttime incontinence. To overcome this, he taught himself to sleep by staging imaginary conversations between the most influential figures in his life. Shortly after he started attending Keady University, Ali passed away. With neither a father nor a mother, Cyrus found himself sucked into the quagmires of addiction; his father also struggled with alcoholism. He found himself haunted by the death of his mother while coping with the death of his father. Cyrus started to believe that his father died a long time ago but only forced himself to live for as long as his son learned to live independently; when Cyrus entered university, Ali’s earthly duties had been fulfilled.

Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.

  Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

When we first met him, Cyrus was recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction. His struggles were exacerbated by depression and insomnia. He was anguished by the sense of inadequacy in his existence and the role he plays in the world. He was, nevertheless, able to clean up his acts and set on a road to recovery. He earned a degree in literature and was working part-time for the university hospital as a medical actor. He started attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings. However, the feeling of inadequacy still lingered. He cannot seem to shake it out of his system. He feels like he doesn’t belong: 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.

Cyrus is, without a doubt, a passionate but troubled soul. As an escape from the bedlam of his life, he finds reprieve in his writing. He is a poet – stereotyped because of his Persian origins – and worked on his poetry as part of his recovery. The crux of the story involves his writing endeavors, Cyrus’ growing desire to write a book of poetry about martyrdom. His fixation, which bordered on obsession, with death and dying as a martyr further fueled his drive to write this book, a tome of “elegies for people I’ve never met.” He was haunted by the past and by the ghosts of his mother and uncle Arash. Perhaps by a stroke of luck, his friends came across an advertisement for DEATH-SPEAK, the Brooklyn Museum’s latest installation. They saw it as a sign and promptly informed their friend. Without ado, Cyrus spent the last of his savings traveling from Indiana to New York City and checking out the exhibit.

As advertised, Death-Speak was an exhibit about death. At the heart of the exhibit was Orkideh, a terminally-ill Iranian artist who has resolved to spend her final days in the museum, inhabiting it and speaking to visitors about death as part of a performance. The dying artist granted Cyrus an audience and, throughout three meetings, Orkideh managed to alter Cyrus’ worldview, which once revolved around Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc, and the Tiananmen Square Tank Man. Orkideh captivated the young man and the feeling, it seemed, was mutual. In Orkideh, Cyrus found a life coach and they built an affection for each other. But then fate plays one of its cruel jokes. As the story unfolds, family secrets are slowly unlidded. The intersection of Orkideh’s and Cyrus’ individual paths is more serendipitous than it initially seemed.

Cyrus loomed above the story – his story was told from a third-person point of view – but it was not only Cyrus’ perspective that we got to read. The backstories of Roya, Ali, Arash, and even one of Cyrus’s close friends were integrated into the story, creating a lush tapestry. The story weaves in and out of the past – from  Cyrus’s childhood in Indiana to his parents’ life in late 1980s Iran – as these different voices converge. On top of this, imaginary conversations with prominent characters and personalities such as Lisa Simpson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a President echoing Donald Trump, and even the poet Rumi were interspersed in the novel. This could get convoluted but, with Akbar’s careful and astute writing, he was able to make it work. The swirl of different voices and ideas was somehow cohesively woven together into a lushly and evocatively textured story brimming with humor, wit, and even philosophical intersections.

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.

  Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

Martyr!, palpably, is a story about death. Death and grief are pervasive presences that hounded Cyrus. Death tails his existence, from his birth until his adulthood. Cyrus extensively explores the meaning of death through his introspections and interactions with the other characters. His mother’s death haunted him even though he barely knew her while he struggled to make sense of his father’s death. Death, however, is not always physical, like in the case of Ali who metaphysically passed away upon his wife’s death. Not only was Cyrus captivated by the idea of death, he was also fixated on the idea of giving meaning to the various deaths that have hounded him since he was younger. In conjunction with death, the novel explores facets of martyrdom. Martyrdom, the sacrifice of one’s self for others, often involves death. There is also a certain layer of magnanimity to martyrdom that appeals to Cyrus.

Subtly adding a political undertone to the story, Akbar underscored the role governments play and their duplicity in producing martyrs. The incident that ended in Roya’s death was based on an actual event when, toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War, U.S.S. Vincennes inadvertently fired on Iran Air Flight 655. Nearly 300 people perished, and their deaths were dismissed and forgotten by the United States. Consequently, Iranians developed a distrust of the United States. Cyrus wanted his mother’s death to gain some meaning, rather than just being a statistic. Meanwhile, Cyrus’ uncle Arash was a veteran of the Iraq-Iran war. He had an unusual role. On the battlefield where soldiers lay dying, he dons a dark cloak and holds a flashlight to his face. The effect is for the dying men to see him as an angel of death who comforts them as they honorably die as martyrs; it also convinces them to commit suicide.

Death and martyrdom featured prominently in the story as the primary means of making injury – both physical and emotional – relevant. However, these are not the only means to find beauty and meaning in our struggles. In Akbar’s debut novel, art also plays a subtly prominent role, particularly in the portrayal of Orkideh although Cyrus’ poetry to make sense of his life and death closely follows in second place. It is to art that Orkideh submitted herself and the rest of her life; for her to spend her dying days in a museum, a repository of the relics of those who are no longer among the living, was symbolic. Her art, however, has become an impediment. Through her creativity and her pursuit to define her existence, and by extension, the rest of the world, her relationships with the people around her suffered. It was another form of martyrdom. In Orkideh’s words, I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss.

Beyond the extensive probe into the various definitions and manifestations of martyrdom, the novel also deftly examines the intricacies of identity and sexuality. Cyrus not only had to confront his inner demons but also had to deal with the complexities that inherently came along with his provenance. Due to his mixed heritage, Cyrus is caught in between two glaringly contrasting cultures that prompt him to submit to a pathological politeness that exists in the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness. He inhabits a space where he cannot fully claim belonging to either group, a struggle several individuals of mixed heritage experience. Being a question mark exacerbated his hatred for himself. He always finds himself in a quandary, conscious of how he should act in certain circumstances, an elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette.

The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.

  Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

The question of his provenance also made him the recipient of various instances of outright racism and microaggressions. Akbar’s debut novel also draws strength from its depiction and exploration of queer relationships. Queer relationships permeated the story and across multiple generations. Some of Akbar’s most straightforward but affectionate writing captured the contours of these relationships. Akbar treated queer relationships like a normal relationship, fraught with ups and downs and complications. Queer people in Akbar’s world were confident of themselves despite the presence of forces that threaten them. Highly patriarchal societies, like Iran’s, prompt members of the queer community to hide their relationships and identities. However, the fears of reprisal do not preclude them from loving tenderly.

Interestingly, there are several intersections between Cyrus and the author. One can sense some tangents between them at several points in the story. At times, their voices converge. For one, both Cyrus and Akbar are Iranian Americans. Akbar also struggled with alcoholism; he started drinking as a teenager. Further, they are both poets or at least Cyrus tried. Their voices slowly diverged as the story approached its inevitable conclusion. Cyrus lost interest in his writing project, believing it would never meet any expectations. It was bound to fail. Further, a catharsis ushers a different perspective. While the story is predicated on death and martyrdom, neither ultimately provides meaning. Meaning can be found in other forms. Art is one. Another one is the relationship and the bond we create with the people who fully embrace us, our imperfections, and our vulnerabilities.

Multifaceted and multilayered, Martyr! is certainly one of the best debut novels this year. Akbar seamlessly transitioned from poetry to full-length prose, underscoring his immense writing talent. His debut novel is predicated on death, actual and the yearning for it. It is anchored on finding meaning to define it and, by extension, our injuries, struggles, and sacrifices. However, Martyr! is also about what it means to live. Beyond death and grief, the novel delves into a plethora of themes such as biculturalism, racism, sexuality, addiction, identity, and the secrets that permeate families. It is also about love, art, and our propensity to create something that matters. The avalanche of subjects obscures an equally germane subject subtly integrated by Akbar: mental health. Cyrus’ depression and his self-destructive tendencies, his father’s resignation from life, all underscore this. The novel’s wonderful elements, chaotic on the surface, were all woven together by Akbar into a lush tapestry. Incorporating humor, wit, and bouts of melodrama, Martyr! is an engaging, thought-provoking, and even entertaining read.

 Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.

  Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Book Specs

Author: Kaveh Akbar
Publisher: Knopf
Publishing Date: 2024
No. of Pages: 332
Genre: Literary

Synopsis

Ever since his mother’s plane was senselessly shot down over the Persian Gulf when he was just a baby, Cyrus has been grappling with her death. Now, newly sober, he is set to learn the truth of her life.

When an encounter with a dying artist leads Cyrus towards the mysteries of his past – an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as an angel of death, a haunting work of art by an exited painter – he finds himself once again caught up in the story of his mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed. As Cyrus searches for meaning in the scattered clues of his life, a final revelation transforms everything he thought he knew.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

About the Author

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran on January 15, 1989. When he was two years old, his family moved to the United States, and grew up in various places across the country including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Akbar received his bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, his Master’s in Fine Arts from Butler University, and his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. In 2016, Akbar was granted the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation.

Akbar’s first published book was a poetry chapbook titled Portrait of the Alcoholic (2017). He followed it up shortly after with his first full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017). It immediately established Akbar as a rising literary star. Calling a Wolf a Wolf was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes’s Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and won Ploughshares’s John C. Zacharis First Book Award and the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Levis Reading Prize. One of the poems, “Heritage,” won the Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award in 2016. Akbar’s second full-length poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, was published in 2021. It was included in the Book of the Year selection by NPR, Time, and The Guardian. It was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

In 2024, Akbar published his debut novel, Martyr!. The novel is a finalist for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the National Book Award. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (2022). In 2020, he was named Poetry Editor of The Nation, a position previously held by Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, and William Butler Yeats. In 2024, Akbar founded the poetry interview website Divedapper, for contemporary poets to share their stories and writing. In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the director of the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Iowa. He is also teaching in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.