Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar’s poetry has received wide acclaim, including several Pushcart Prizes. His newest project is a novel, Martyr! Akbar’s protagonist is Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-American whose obsession with martyrdom is fueled by the death of his mother, Roya who died in 1988 when the plane she was traveling on from Tehran to Dubai was shot down by the U.S. Navy (a fiction based upon the real-life destruction of Iran Air Flight 655). After his mother’s death, Cyrus and his father Ali, immigrate to the United States, where his father gets a job in a chicken processing plant.

Cyrus is left to himself much of the time because his father works long hours and when he is home, he is ill equipped to deal with the needs of a young son who feels hopeless and struggles to understand his mother’s senseless death. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet when we meet him and he is obsessed with the life of martyrs – those throughout history, as well as those in his own family – his mother and his uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to comfort the dying. When an artist with terminal cancer decides to turn her death into a performance, taking up residence in the Brooklyn Museum, Cyrus travels to meet her, hoping that their conversations about her death will shed light on living.

Akbar’s prose is searing, his plot is evocative, and his insight is profound. Cyrus can be funny, tender, and misguided. Martyr! Is about displacement and loss, addiction and redemption, and all the ways that art can save us.

Listen to my interview with Kaveh Akbar on January 25th at 7pm and the 27th at 6am on Superior Reads.