Kaveh Akbar's Bone-Chilling and Death-Haunted Debut "Martyr!"

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.

Cyrus Shams, the aching protagonist at the heart of Kaveh Akbar’s incandescent debut novel Martyr!, is a veritable Rushdiean multitude: an Iranian-born American, a 'bad' immigrant, a recovering addict, a straight-passing queer, an almost-30 poet who rarely writes, an orphan, a runner of open mics, an indefatigable logophile, a fiery wit, and a self-pitying malcontent. But above all, Cyrus is profoundly, inconsolably, suicidally sad.

His oceanic sorrows are fed by many Styxes, but none runs deeper or darker than his mother Roya’s “unspeakable” death. Months after Cyrus was born, Roya boarded a plane from Tehran to Dubai to visit her brother Arash, “unwell since serving in the Iranian Army against Iraq.” Her plane was shot down by a missile from a U.S. Navy warship: “Just shot out of the sky. Like a goose.”

The reference is to the real-life downing of Iran Air Flight 665 by the U.S.S. Vincennes in 1988. Sixty-six children were aboard Flight 665 — Cyrus should have been the 67th, but Roya chose to leave him behind because he was so young.

Her death shatters the Shams family. Arash spirals into paranoia — “He began seeing ghouls out the windows, demons, angels, Iraqi soldiers” — while Cyrus’s father, Ali, immigrates to the United States, seeking a future for his son in the same country that took his wife. If the condition of a native is nervous, the condition of an immigrant who settles in the country that vaporized his loved one is even more fraught — the other American dream.

Ali, hardened by grief and resignation, finds work at an industrial poultry farm in Fort Wayne (“a chicken hadn’t shot his wife out of the sky”) and lives solely for his son. But Cyrus, plagued by night terrors, insomnia, and irrational fears of deportation and lethal root beer, struggles to hold himself together. He seeks solace in art, intoxicants, and friendship, but nothing quiets his survivor’s guilt or stills the “doom organ” throbbing relentlessly in his throat, calling him toward oblivion.

Martyr! opens with Cyrus at a breaking point. Now orphaned after his father’s death from a stroke during his college years, he flirts with self-destruction. He alienates his A.A. sponsor and jeopardizes his hospital job with confessions about a failed suicide attempt, in which he soaked himself in alcohol and almost set himself ablaze. Driven by an obsessive desire to make his life — and death — meaningful, he considers martyrdom.

“You want to be a martyr?” his incredulous sponsor asks.“I guess. Yeah, actually. Something like that,” he replies.

A fascination with martyrdom consumes Cyrus. He decorates his apartment with images of “people whose deaths mattered”: Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc, the Tiananmen Square Tank Man, and his parents on their wedding day. A conversation with his roommate and sometime lover Zee sends him on a fateful journey to New York City, where he encounters Orkideh, a cancer-stricken Iranian artist living out her last days at the Brooklyn Museum. Orkideh, with her tissue-thin voice and hairless skull, teases Cyrus about being a cliché — “another death-obsessed Iranian man” — while her secrets shift the trajectory of his life.

Akbar’s genius lies in making Martyr! both an intimate character study and a sweeping family saga. He traces the Shams family back to Iran, exploring who they were before Flight 665. We see Arash as a boy, awed by his fearless sister Roya, and later as a “zero soldier” in the Iran-Iraq War — “zero education, zero special skills, zero responsibilities outside of my country” — a martyr-in-waiting. We meet Ali before his life is shaped by chickens, fatherhood, and heartbreak. Most poignantly, we follow Roya as she navigates dissatisfaction with her marriage and motherhood, finding unexpected freedom through a transformative friendship that opens her up to emkanat — possibilities.

Akbar, an acclaimed poet, wields language with precision and intensity. His prose stuns with evocative lines like, “When you are 10, shame stitches itself into you like a monogram,” and, “Ali’s anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones.”

Though Martyr! isn’t flawless — some sections, particularly those focused on Arash, feel researched rather than lived, and a few plot coincidences stretch credulity — Akbar’s storytelling brilliance more than compensates. His writing pulses with a fierce, undeniable life force, implacably curious about humanity’s small, everyday struggles and dignities.

Even if we shattered ones cannot always piece ourselves back together, Akbar reminds us that there is meaning in the attempt — in the stories we tell to hold off the silence. Like Scheherazade, Cyrus tells stories — beautiful, tragic, laughing stories — so that the unspeakable will not have the last word. If that’s not emkanat, what is?