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.
Themes
Modern Martyrdom as Performativity and Privilege
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of death and racism.
Cyrus draws upon a long list of historical martyrs to attempt to justify his own longing for death in the modern world. At many points, the book suggests that this modern form of martyrdom is more about performance and privilege than it is about the more traditional ideals of piety and sacrifice. Describing the cult of martyrs in Iran, Roya observes,
In Isfahan, the old capital, soldiers showed up unannounced at the doors of old women, saying, ‘Congratulations, your sons have been martyred.’ The mothers would have to hold back their tears, wringing their lips into the eerie not-quite-smiles they’d spend the rest of their lives perfecting. They were the lucky ones. Inside Tehran’s Revolution Square, the sons of other mothers hung from cranes (42).
Here, the Iranian military imposes the idea of martyrdom as a privilege onto mothers who have lost their sons to war. This privilege is juxtaposed and therefore heightened by the alternative: a shameful death for the sons who have been killed by the government. This anecdote demonstrates that the social glory of martyrdom helps fuel a violent status quo in Iran, implicitly calling into question the romanticization of martyrdom.
Chasing the social privilege afforded to martyrdom, Cyrus makes a conscious effort to turn himself into one. In a rare moment of honesty with himself, he concedes, “He wanted to be on ‘the right side of history,’ whatever that was. But more than that […] he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history” (114). This preoccupation with the perceptions of others reduces his obsession with martyrdom to the realm of performance rather than spiritual quest. Other characters such as Orkideh and Zee see through this performativity, with Zee calling it “bullshit” and Orkideh asking Cyrus if he worries about “becoming a cliché” (101).
Akbar juxtaposes the performativity and privilege of Cyrus’s desired martyrdom with historical martyrs mentioned throughout the book, whose sacrifices are made more genuinely for greater purposes. Poems elegizing Bobby Sands, Qu Yan, Hypatia of Alexandria, and Baghat Singh all serve to contrast Cyrus’s motivations for martyrdom with more authentic martyrs throughout history. Though Cyrus strives for such authenticity, he has no causes to die for, other than martyrdom itself. Ironically, his preoccupation with martyrdom is what makes him a bad candidate for martyrdom. The phenomenon of an authentic martyr is best encapsulated by Orkideh’s idea of earth martyrs: “people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God” (103). In this sense, the book suggests that the performative, privileged martyrs of modernity are not martyrs at all.
Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience
One source of Cyrus’s angst is his struggle to reconcile the American and Iranian components of his identity with one another. Having never been to Iran, except for during the earliest months of his life, he is a cultural transplant in the American Midwest who grew up immersed in American culture. Nevertheless, his mother’s murder at the hands of the US government drives an internal conflict wherein he struggles to accept his own “American-ness.” White Americans, including Gabe and his ex-girlfriend, Kathleen, make it clear to Cyrus on multiple occasions that they do not view him as Iranian at all. During their confrontation at the cafe, Gabe tells Cyrus, “[Y]ou’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones?” (26). Though Cyrus bristles at Gabe’s blunt reduction of his identity, a small part of him sees truth in it: “Cyrus wanted to kick him in the face. For being racist. For being a little right” (26). This nagging feeling that perhaps he is not as Iranian as he would like to be haunts Cyrus for the majority of the book.
Orkideh embodies the dissonance of the Iranian experience through the death of her previous identity as Roya. The formation of her new identity comes at the expense of what she held most dearly in Iran: “I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son…I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art” (291). The “abyss” that Orkideh refers to here reveals the overwhelming loss of self that can occur in the process of immigration. When Orkideh fills that void with her art, her art becomes her entire identity.
Toward the end of the novel, Cyrus struggles to recognize how these two selves could belong to the same body. He finds answers in a hadith from the Quran in which Satan discovers that man is hollow. In Martyr!, identity formation addresses this feeling of emptiness. Both Cyrus and Orkideh grapple with balancing their conflicting cultural backgrounds, even as their struggles remain largely unrecognized or minimized by those around them.
The Insufficiency of Words
Throughout the text, Cyrus struggles to find words that sufficiently describe his own experience. He tells Orkideh, “I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it’s damned, right?” (185). Here, the Sisyphean nature of his life’s work is laid bare; Cyrus has decided to devote his life to an endeavor that he knows is, to some degree, futile. Orkideh echoes this sentiment several times, including when she begins to fall in love with Leila: “A horse is beautiful, a mountain or an ocean is beautiful […] Leila, in those sunglasses, was something else. Something beyond language. I get frustrated this way so often” (198). The parallelism between Cyrus’s and Roya’s internal dialogues in moments like these speaks to their shared life experiences and how they strive to depict them in their respective artistic endeavors.
Whereas Cyrus chooses to combat the inadequacy of words by learning to use them as a poet, Orkideh turns to visual art to express herself. In the raw materials of stone, paint, and canvas, she finds endless opportunities. Her description of stones in one art exhibit—“They were all potential, great heavy wedges inside of which the soldier, the horse, the Venus, might be patiently waiting to be carved” (283-84)—echoes a quote about sculpture attributed to Michelangelo earlier in the book: “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David” (270). This connection places her in the long tradition of artists who find physical materials to be a better medium for expressing ideas than words.
In the end, however, Orkideh makes a concerted effort to convey to Cyrus that words have the same potential. In her self-written obituary for The New York Times, she writes, “An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything” (317). Spoken from beyond the grave, this message is a plea for Cyrus to recognize that both his life and poetry have meaning, even if that meaning does not always achieve perfection. Although Martyr! presents words as inherently insufficient, therefore, its author also makes the argument that this insufficiency is not a justification for giving up on artistic endeavors like poetry and writing.
