Zendrah Bonnick, Assistant News Editor
In 2024, Kaveh Akbar published his debut novel, “Martyr!” Akbar is an Iranian writer with extensive experience writing poetry and is known for “Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell. Martyr!” is a tragic yet beautiful and lively story of a human search for meaning, dealing with difficult subject matters of substance abuse, suicide, war, and violence.
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“Martyr!” is a thought-provoking novel that brilliantly depicts human struggles with the often oversimplified reality of grief and depression, as not only a period of gray over the mind, but an experience, with moments of sadness, laughter, guilt and forgetting that do not undermine the significance of the pain but speak to its humanity.
The work of fiction follows primarily the perspective of the main character Cyrus Shams, a queer man and a first-generation Iranian immigrant who moved to rural Indiana with his father, Ali Shams, shortly after the death of his mother Roya Shams on July 3, 1988.
Roya Shams was killed by the United States Navy after they shot down a commercial airliner on which she was a passenger, flying from Tehran to Dubai. Inspired by the real events of Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the United States Navy warship USS Vincennes on the same name and date as in the novel.
The fictional Cyrus Shams has perpetually questioned the significance of 290 deaths rather than 289, reckoning with why his mother had to die, developing a lifelong obsession with the idea of lives and deaths with meaning, specifically the concept of martyrdom.
Cyrus Shams is a poet who works as a medical actor, performing sickness and injury for medical students to practice on. Cyrus also struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, misusing fentanyl on multiple occasions. In addition to this, Cyrus has chronic suicidal ideations, only moving towards sobriety after an incident when he attempted to light himself on fire while drunk in the bathtub of his apartment, only stopping when he realized others would be affected by the fire.
The novel explores the significance of being marginalized in a place that treats you as the “other.” In his battle to maintain his sobriety, Cyrus is in attendance at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when another person wrongly diagnoses his identity as irrelevant to his addiction. However, as anyone who has ever felt eyes on them for simply walking into a room or had their presences in said room be challenged due to the observation that they are in some way different can attest to. Identity in itself is not the cause of suffering, but the world’s response to that identity regardless of how harmless, innate and arbitrary impacts not only how you are treated in life but how you go through life.
In Cyrus’ case, following his mother’s death, his family was compensated with $150,000, the compensation the United States gave for families who lost women and children, half of what those who lost working men received. Even while granting compensation, the United States refused to claim responsibility for its actions, saying it was self-defense, and stating, “Action is defended.” 290 people died on the commercial flight, primarily women and children, and the action was justified as self-defense in both the novel and reality by the United States Navy.
In childhood, Cyrus suffered from nightmares, eventually finding the only thing to help him sleep would be writing stories in his mind of what people and characters he liked would say to each other if they ever met. Years later, he would rely on narcotics to sleep, only returning to this dream game in sobriety. During his adulthood, Cyrus travels to meet an artist who is part of an art exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Orkideh, who is dying, is part of the piece “DEATH-SPEAKS,” and Cyrus wants to speak to Orkideh about dying with meaning.
Cyrus’ mother was on the way to visit her brother Arash in Dubai when she was killed. He had long been struggling mentally after being drafted into the war with Iraq. In the Iran-Iraq war, he had a unique role. After battles, he would ride in on horseback with a long coat and flashlight so dying soldiers could pass more peacefully and would be dissuaded from suicide; he was to be their angel.
From Arash’s perspective, he saw illuminated mass death and suffering. Earlier in the novel, Cyrus recalls that during the war, in the city of Isfahan, soldiers would come to the doors of women and mockingly declare, “Congratulations, your sons have been martyred,” while the women tried not to cry.
Even in sobriety, Cyrus’ obsession with martyrs is often paralleled by the reminders of Sham’s fixation on deaths having meanings. The macabre expression of his own ideation and desire for his own death having meaning, is repeatedly demonstrated through the novel in many ways, in his own words to a dying artist, Cyrus says, “I’ve been about dying… dying soon.”
There is so much more to this story than this review describes, and for those who find this analysis interesting and the subject matter is not too painful, reading this novel is a beautiful experience.