Review: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
A novel that chalks out the protagonist’s identity crisis to minutely observe Iranian-American angst and dissonance in ideas of nationhood
Poet Kaveh Akbar’s new novel on loss, displacement, identity and nationhood is an experiment in narrative style. Mixing the novel with poetry in a dream-like manner, the 331-page book opens with the protagonist, Cyrus Shams, seeing God. He is 28, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and a poet who is about to begin a writing project but doesn’t know where to go with it. What he does know, however, is that he wants to write about martyrs. His mother died in a plane that was bombed by a US navy warship. His father died in the US, mourning his wife’s demise until Cyrus left for university. He has no siblings, or relatives he can depend upon. His only relative, Uncle Arash, is in Iran dealing with PTSD since his service in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Cyrus is lost among these martyrs.
Akbar deftly sketches out Cyrus for his readers. The son of Iranians in the US, he learns “Midwestern politeness” but detests how other Americans make him feel about himself. At a restaurant with Middle-Eastern decor, his ex-girlfriend had sneered that they were in “Baghdad, Indiana”. The dissonance in the ideas of nationhood and the protagonist’s identity crisis is minutely observed and chalked out with thorough intelligence. It recalls Vietnamese-American poet-novelist Ocean Voung’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Vuong’s exploration of the mother-son relationship finds a parallel in Akbar’s lonely Iranian-American son searching for an answers about his mother’s untimely death. “Mostly what Cyrus felt was empty. A crushing hollowness, which governed him.” He is rude to his friends. He is helpless with frustration at his habits. He wants to change. He wants to die. But he also wants his death “to matter”. Akbar presents a rounded character who is easy to understand but difficult to reach, much like Karen Jennings’s 53-year old single woman trying to make sense of life after the disappearance of her family in Crooked Seeds.
Even secondary characters add much to the novel. Between Cyrus’s third-person narration, the text is interspersed with the first-person perspectives of his mother, his father, his friend Zee and several others. This makes the structure of the story playful and offers readers a comprehensive understanding of Cyrus’s life in contemporary America.
The best written perspective is that of his mother, Roya Shams. This is a stunning portrait of a woman disinterested in the usual ideas of domesticity, who did not want a child, and is mystically annoyed by a relative. In one opening scene, she states, “I never really loved being alive. It’s hard to get there without some sort of distance.” The character of the painter whom Cyrus meets in New York – the one who is going to change the way he sees himself, his mother’s death, and his life in general – is similarly fascinating. The characters, the plot and subplots coalesce well, bringing meaning to the story, and propelling the narrative forward.
However, the range of crises that play out is ambitious for a single novel. While Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans places the nationhood of characters from different races as the background to their discomfort with class, desire and gender identity, Martyr! tries to do many things at once. The attempt is well-intentioned but the execution leaves something to be desired. Cyrus’s sexuality and that of another character becomes a mere plot device to bring in twists and turns. Towards the middle of the novel and in its latter part, the angst of the Iranian-American identity is lost in constant theorisation. Where Akbar could have used his appealing images to show characters feeling agony, he brings in Edward Said, WEB DuBois, Ta-Nehisi Coates. This results in the characters appearing controlled by the author’s theorisation, which leaves little room for the reader to form their opinions. And then there are the dream sequences. Dreams featuring the painter and the President of the US, his father and the Persian poet Rumi feel like impediments that delay the story. Perhaps, within a poem, these would have offered cadence or more depth to a character. In a novel, they read like snippets best reserved for the book on martyrs that Cyrus himself was setting out to do. In all of this, what manages to stand out is the protagonist’s relationship with Islam. His “bargaining” with God as a child, making promises, and then recreating scenarios in search of God are all memorable.
Written in language that adds warmth to the hurt caused by its melancholic storyline, this is a book about martyrs who have sacrificed themselves for reasons both personal and structural. Cyrus stays with the reader not as a martyr but a man who does not have to be one because of those who preceded him.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata as a Junior Research Fellow. He writes about books at Instagram (@fook_bood) and X (@rahulzsing).
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