Since its release, Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel Martyr has been creating waves, and for all the right reasons. The story of Cyrus Shams—the logophile (lover of words), and orphan protagonist, who strives, albeit exhaustively, to salvage or heal his world through art—is told in a prose that helps the reader feel things that are otherwise rendered ineffable. Kaveh attempts to write about martyrdom but ultimately rejects its possibility.
As the novel progresses, we see Cyrus experience exhaustion and ennui with art and writing. But he stays at it. Even if art can’t reprieve—it can’t bring back his parents—it offers him something like “palliative care”.
It serves as an elegy that gives him room to lament, grieve, and eventually, feel better. Cyrus was brought up in America by his father, Ali Shams, after the death of his mother. He was a baby when they moved to the US from Iran.
His father tried to hide his Iranian identity since he believed that “announcing his Iranianness was to invite violence, harm”. He worked as a labourer in a chicken farm, and made sure his son got a good education, until he died of a sudden stroke when Cyrus was in college. The novel grows on a reader.
Cyrus’s quest, and struggle with art, feels personal as he delves into his family history, almost remaining oblivious to his personal life. We realise that he is obsessed with death. When he finds out that his mother’s Iran Air flight 655 was accidentally shot do.