asianamlitfans | A Review of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Knopf, 2024)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

Occasionally, we consider the most flexible capacities in defining Asian American literature, and we look just West from Afghanistan to cover Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), which is all about an Iranian diasporic context. Let’s let the pithy marketing description get us somewhat situated: “Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.”

This description leaves out Cyrus’s crucial friendship, not-quite-fully-romantic relationship with Zee, a mixed ethnicity Egyptian American. Akbar’s poetic sensibilities—he is the author of a number of poetry collections, and I believe this publication is his first novelistic foray—are on full display here, as he uses parataxis as a technique to provide us with multiple perspectives. We consistently get first person perspectives of other characters, including Cyrus’s father and mother. The description doesn’t mention the fact that Cyrus’s father dies just after Cyrus enters his college years. Cyrus has something of a death-wish, which explains his huge interest in martyrs, and why he is writing a potential book about them. He wants his death, whenever that may come, to have meaning, which is why he continues to research these figures. He eventually comes upon a performance artist who is completing a kind of dying-installation at a NYC museum. Her name is Orkideh and has terminal cancer. Cyrus finds himself drawn to Orkideh, who Cyrus sees as a modern-day martyr. It just happens to be that Orkideh is also of Iranian ethnicity, so they do have an important connection. Here, I will pause for the requisite spoiler just because this novel has a major twist, so look away now. In any case, the big issue that readers will have to grapple with is the eventual revelation that Orkideh is in fact Cyrus’s mother! *gasp* Yes, you heard it right. Originally, readers will think she has died in a plane crash in 1984 (a historically-specific crash), taken down by the US military. Eventually, we realize that Orkideh (real name Roya and Cyrus’s mother) had swapped identities with her same sex lover Leila, hoping that they could reunite elsewhere, especially in the wake of Leila’s husband finding out about their lesbian affair. Roya ends up in Turkey and then manages to get to NYC, and she realizes that she cannot now go back to her former life and decides to live out her choices. Leila of course has died, though everyone else believes that Roya was the one who had perished in the plane crash. This information Cyrus receives belatedly by the curator who eventually meets Roya/Orkideh and helps to launch Roya/Orkedeh’s career. While readers will probably have divergent responses to this revelation, I did think that the novel operated quite ingeniously as a queer diasporic narrative. Whereas the predominant homosocial narratives write out any minor character marked as queer, this novel operates sort of in the reverse. It is Ali Shams (Cyrus’s father) who exits first, even though we do think Roya is initially dead. The novel thus becomes a queer intergenerational immigration saga, which I found incredibly interesting. Indeed, by novel’s end, Cyrus begins to realize that his relationship with Zee is not just some casual, friendly, semi-erotic affair, and that he must realize the depth of their feelings toward each other. It is this kind of concluding arc that really makes this novel brim with possibility, even despite the apocalyptic undertones that filer throughout. A poignant debut!

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