51 pages • 1 hour read
Kaveh AkbarMartyr!
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Downing of Iran Air Flight 655
In August 1988 at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, the US Navy ship USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus A300 carrying 290 people, with two missiles over the Persian Gulf. All 290 passengers, most of whom were Iranian citizens, were killed. The Vincennes was stationed in the Persian Gulf as a response to increased attacks on foreign shipping infrastructure in the region by the Iranian and Iraqi armies, an extension of their ongoing war. In the preceding months, the Iranian government mined another US warship, and the US mined Iranian warships in response. After Flight 655 had been bombed, the US government claimed that Vincennes had mistaken the Airbus for an attacking Iranian fighter jet.
The incident was a source of massive international controversy, especially as President Ronald Reagan’s administration refused to apologize. Iran perceived the bombing as a purposeful attack—in essence, a declaration of war from the United States—and fear of combat between the two countries began to grow. Distrust over the incident has continued to negatively influence relations between the United States and Iran for decades, particularly in the 2010s during the adoption of the Iran Nuclear Deal.
In Martyr!, Cyrus grows up believing that his mother was killed on Iran Air Flight 655, and this origin story determines the immense internal conflict he feels over his Iranian American identity. The author intersperses primary sources of the event such as news articles and government memos throughout the book, demonstrating the central role that this event plays in the narrative.
Cultural Context: Iranian Ideas of Martyrdom
Martyrdom is a concept with both secular and religious significance that fluctuates across time and culture. While Martyr! addresses the subject by invoking a plethora of historical martyrs, ranging from Joan of Arc to the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square, it views these people firmly through Cyrus’s Iranian American perspective. To understand the way that Cyrus thinks about martyrdom, it is necessary to understand the specifically Iranian connotations of martyrdom that influence his character.
Most immediately relevant to the book, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 fostered a new, modern cult of martyrdom in Iran, elevating civilians and soldiers who were killed in the war to the sacred status of martyr. Olmo Gölz argues that the development of this modern wartime archetype, which drew upon traditional Islamic concepts of martyrdom, was directly tied to the reinforcement of male hegemony under the country’s increasingly conservative government. He writes that “the erection of a hegemonic masculinity [in Iran] idealises martyrdom as a promising way of proving one’s manhood” (Gölz, Olmo. “Martyrdom and Masculinity in Warring Iran.” Behemoth: A Journal on Civilization, vol. 12, no. 1, 2019, p. 47). In this context, fallen soldiers become valorized as martyrs, influencing the significance of this concept within Iranian society.
In Martyr!, Akbar highlights the connection between gender and martyrdom that Gölz discusses. Notably, Orkideh admonishes Cyrus for becoming “another death-obsessed Iranian man” (101), and Arash encourages men on the battlefield to die nobly as martyrs. Though Cyrus claims not to have known about this cultural connection to the cult of martyrs before beginning his research on the subject, there is a sense that these ideas have been transmitted to him in passing, confirming his Iranian identity that other characters in the novel question. Both the novel’s title and its narrative underscore the significance that martyrdom as a cultural concept has in the work.
