The Martyrs Who live

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!

for the martyrs, who live

Great and constant sufferers, for that is one way to describe a martyr. It lacks the adornment popularly imagined. There are no lions or colosseums in this story. No holy wars. There is only the long and constant suffering of life.

Some suffer more, some suffer less. Some bear pain with grace and dignity while others are destroyed. Some effortlessly float above, never having to face the black hole of despair. What is it that decides these things?

The titular martyr Cyrus Shams has more reason than most to despair of the world. His mother is dead. Her life was pointlessly ended by the United States’ accidental strike on an Iranian commercial airliner. His father, having immigrated to the very same United States, worked as a lowly laborer, who drank himself asleep each night, and seemed to die the moment Cyrus moved out.

Cyrus turns to the stupor of alcohol and drugs to cure his pain. He wallows in beds filled with piss and cigarette ash and sinks into the void of addiction. By some miracle of divine intervention he sobers. He is alive. Yet his despair remains uncured.

It is these passages, scattered throughout the novel, that feel the most well rendered and rooted in realism. It is no surprise that Kaveh Akbar is mirroring his own life, his own addiction, and his own salvation from a death just avoided. It’s a story told many times over: drugs, sex, isolation — yet when done well, it always seems to work. Martyr!, though, has greater ambitions than just this.

We start with Cyrus presented in the third person. Then, the novel quickly explodes its aperture. There are dreams, poems, military communications, excerpted passages from an unfinished novel. Other characters take over. His mother, his father, his uncle, and his best friend sometimes lover. These other viewpoints are conveyed in the first person.

The staccato nature of the differing sections of prose is ambitious. So are the subjects that it grapples with. Addiction, sobriety, immigration, isolation, death, homosexuality, meaning, and purpose, and more. Martyr! sprawls like a nineteenth century Russian novel. It tries so much. It doesn’t always succeed, but in the trying it should be applauded.

Kaveh Akbar chooses to shift perspectives. To seat us more intimately with the others through the use of first person. Cyrus feels close, but is held more detached by the choice of the traditional third person. What drove this choice? Why are we functionally more removed from Cyrus than his mother Raya? Cyrus is the protagonist, shouldn’t we be deeply centered on his journey?

In some ways this choice makes sense. In others, it feels like a wayward decision. I’m oddly reminded of the 2009 film Watchmen, where some threads of that story are told in the traditional manner, and others utilize narration. In the case of Marytr!, the choice of narration brings us closer to the more complicated and challenging characters in the story.

However, we spend less time with these others. Yet, with less story, and at a quicker pace, the first-person perspective allows us to grow close to them. In particular, Raya is the more magnetic, the more complex, and the more interesting of all the characters. One could argue that the novel should really be her story.

I longed for more of Raya. Once she entered the text, Cyrus’s self-centered repeated fixations felt rather annoying and dull. We’re all narcissistic, but like Zee, I became exasperated with this schtick. And unlike Zee, I wasn’t in love with him.

Cyrus believes his mother to be a martyr and becomes possessed with the idea that death should have meaning. But can, and should, dying mean anything? Isn’t living the more important, the more challenging? For everyone wants to feel like life has meaning. It’s a simple and universal idea.

What does meaning in death even resemble? Jesus Christ represents the most famous death in the history of the world. His death was only important because he is believed to have conquered and defeated it by rising alive after three days in a tomb. The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand kicked off the start of World War I. War was already inevitable, and his death lit the match. Is that how he wanted to be remembered; was that a death with meaning?

Death can illuminate a life, a person, but it cannot define worth. Would Martin Luther King Jr. be remembered the way he is for merely dying? No, he is remembered for the way he lived, for the way he believed and acted while breathing.

The novel’s insistence with this focus on death, with characters facing and heading towards suicide frustrates. Is an important death all that important? The modern American life is pushed far from death, far from the reality of what it might be. And so, without saying it, we all move forward and pass our time never truly believing that death is near, or that it will come at all. This removal from the reality of death has created an outsized obsession and fixation and abhorrence for this natural process.

Eventually, Cyrus learns of an art installation in New York City called Death Speak. An Iranian artist named Orkideh has decided to live out her remaining days cloistered among the white walls of a museum speaking to strangers. Cyrus sees this as a noble act… as important. It feels as if she is calling to him. So he and Zee decide to travel to New York so Cyrus can meet and learn from this Martyr.

One of the greatest joys of this novel is speaking to it in full. From here, I cannot help but discuss its entirety.

This death and martyrdom of the novel feels selfish and self-important. Cyrus can analyze his own life, remain fixated on his parent’s deaths, but cannot see the chance at life in front of him. The artist Orkideh decides to make her death into an artistic statement unaware or unsympathetic to how it will impact those around her. A Martyr in this way is a selfish person, a person who does not know enough about life to risk the chance at actual living. Yet the novel seems to glamorize and condone such actions.

Cyrus’s obsession remains, and he insists that he wants to die. That it is good for him to die. Zee grows angry at Cyrus and can no longer tolerate his absurd and selfish attitude. The story finally pushes back on Cyrus’s main thesis.

Zee loves Cyrus. He loves him in a forlorn and hopeful way. In a way where he just wants Cyrus to see him, to truly see him just once. Instead Cyrus cannot see past himself.

“Have you ever felt like that? Do you have any idea what I’m even talking about?”

Zee walks out and leaves in silence. My mind immediately jumped to the idea that he intends to kill himself to show Cyrus how he feels, to show him the truth of what Cyrus’s misguided poetic hypothesis really means. The split felt irrevocable and Zee, broken.

Later, in what we understand to be Cyrus’s dream Ali Shams and Rumi hang out outside a nightclub. Ali isn’t fully ready to enter, he’s happy to be outside, just outside the afterlife as Kaveh Akbar imagines it. At one point Ali turns and recognizes Cyrus’s friend Zee. He puts his arm around Zee and they walk into the nightclub together.

To me this is confirmation that Zee is no longer among the living, but has passed through the thin veil of life into what constitutes the after. For why else mention his presence with Ali and Rumi. What purpose is there in this revelation, unless only to indicate Cyrus’s unconscious life.

Cyrus had been visiting Orkideh and we learn that she is his mother — somehow he knew. The woman on the plane was her lover, swapped out to escape the tyrannical Iran so they could start a new life together. There are many threads we could pull on Raya/Orkideh’s story, but in the end she selfishly decides to end her life the night before what was set to be a meaningful conversation with Cyrus.

Zee calls him and they meet in the park outside the museum. Clouds swirl, trumpets sound, and Zee becomes a voice of knowing and calm. The tone shifts to the saccharine and something has changed. Either this is an extreme version of magical realism, or they are both dead in one way or another, ended their lives, unable to continue to live in the world.

“It won’t be long now”, said Zee.

Tears fall, an orange bright sky blazes overhead, and birds sing in the air. They join together and the world feels good and warm and right. They are gone, taken away from reality and suffering and brought up into whatever heaven is in store for them.

Depending on how one may interpret the ending, three main characters have taken their lives. Their ends occur as high drama, suicide is treated lightly, and they find themselves freed from all their pain. But there are those who remain, who continue to face living.

These deaths are only too softly repudiated in the final coda. For that can be the only point of the closing pages. A moment of life, a happiness that Sang Linh, a character introduced late, remembers. The subtlety falls flat compared to the bombastic transfiguration of Cyrus and Zee.

The opening line, the very beginning of the story, martyrs who live… provides a key to the entire novel. Because I believe that is what Kaveh Akbar is saying. He is showing the selfishness and the pain of Raya, Ali, Cyrus, and Zee, but we end with Sang Linh. She lived with great suffering and great joy, but she lived all the same and did not give herself up.

And in the end, it is those who live, who suffer and still live, that matter.

You can find a copy of Martyr! at Penguin Random House

Next week at The Cultural Review: Camille Pissarro and Claude Monet