Martyr!

Content Warning: This novel and review contain references to addiction, suicidal ideation, death, and graphic violence. 

Martyr! is Kaveh Akbar’s bold, energetic arrival on the literary fiction scene. Ambitious in scope and style, it will surely enthrall any readers on the hunt for culturally astute, imaginative fiction. Though authors have addressed the LGBTQIA+ immigrant experience in many other acclaimed books—see On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee—Akbar brings something entirely new to the subject. He balances every tragic moment with humor and every heavy reality with a delightful touch of the absurd, leaving the reader with a distinct impression of all that is the human experience. 

Cyrus Shams, an aspiring poet who is recovering from an alcohol addiction and who emigrated from Iran to the American Midwest as a baby, sets out to write a book about martyrdom. Though he insists that the project has a grandiose social purpose, it quickly becomes clear that it is a vehicle for Cyrus to process his trauma regarding the untimely death of his mother, Roya, in the US Navy’s bombing of Iran Air Flight 655. When a friend informs him about an ongoing exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum where a terminally ill artist named Orkideh is spending her final days having one-on-one conversations with the museum’s guests, Cyrus hurriedly flies to New York to interview Orkideh for his book. His best friend and lover, Zee, accompanies him on the trip.

Orkideh and Cyrus quickly bond over their shared experience as Iranian immigrants to the United States, but Orkideh is unconvinced by Cyrus’s romanticized notions of martyrdom. When Cyrus confides in her about the death of his mother, Orkideh somehow knows she was killed in a plane crash before Cyrus even tells her. The narrative later reveals the truth: Orkideh was Roya all along. In 1987, she fell in love with another woman, Leila, and the couple planned to flee to the United States, leaving their families and the Iranian government’s political repression behind. Leila assumed Roya’s identity to avoid her abusive husband’s revenge, but the bombing tragically killed her; Roya was left all alone in New York without a name.

Having connected these dots, Cyrus attempts to reunite with his mother at the museum but learns that she has died overnight. Now left to reckon with the loss of his mother twice over, his prior obsession with martyrdom takes on a new light. 

In Martyr!, Akbar reveals his knack for crafting striking imagery, and indeed, it is a book that is highly concerned with the power of iconography. Cyrus’s uncle Arash, who served in the Iranian army as an impersonator of the Angel of Death—riding on a horse amongst the dead and dying bodies of soldiers with a flashlight strapped onto his head to give them hope of a glorious afterlife—appears throughout the novel as an object of Cyrus’s fascination. Orkideh quite literally turns this image into part of the iconography of her own life, creating a painting of it entitled Brother, which Cyrus later discovers. Of all his characters, Orkideh is the one who embodies Akbar’s masterful understanding of images and, fittingly, makes her home in a museum for the duration of the story.

However, Orkideh is not a stand out for her careful characterization; the characters in Martyr! have a universally familiar quality. Even the 13th-century poet Rumi, whom Akbar imagines as a swaggering, glitzy rockstar at a hole-in-the-wall club, comes across as someone you might meet in real life. Cyrus is not always an easy protagonist to root for; he has an egotistical obsession with his own death and a frustrating tendency to disregard the people who are trying to support him. Those flaws are also what make him recognizable and drives the story forward. His preoccupation with martyrdom is what brings him to New York; this, in turn, leads to the discovery that his mental image of his mother as a martyr is fundamentally flawed.

While Akbar succeeds in crafting a complex narrative with relatable characters, there are a few moments where his penchant for striking images and characters borders on the verge of obliqueness. In a haunting scene, a young Roya discovers that her older brother, Arash, has been urinating on her every night while she sleeps to trick her into believing that she is a habitual bed-wetter. After the discovery, however, Akbar never returns to this plot point, and readers never receive any clarification about Arash’s motivations. This is the biggest pitfall of the author’s highly poetic approach; readers should be prepared to connect more dots than they might normally expect to for a work of prose. However, the reward for that work is well worth it—Akbar’s wordsmithery is a treasure trove for interpretation and personal reflection. Every cryptic image and vivid character operates in tandem to create an elaborate literary collage that illuminates the Iranian American experience in a refreshing new light.