Remembering to forget
Written with a scorching and almost-difficult-to-read bluntness, Iranian American poet and author Kaveh Akbar’s critically acclaimed novel—a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards—Martyr! (Pan Macmillan) is about Cyrus Shams, a recovering addict and alcoholic, who is on a quest to find a higher purpose and, in effect, overhaul his otherwise “disappointing” life. This hinges on his ability to implode the mysteries of his past and process the legacy of trauma that he has been forced to live with, but on the path to his emotional healing are countless distractions.
Ghosts of time
When he was an infant, Cyrus’s mother’s plane was shot down over the Persian Gulf. The fictional event is a callback to the missile cruiser USS Vincennes “accidentally” shooting down Iran Air flight 655 in 1988, in the final days of the Iran-Iraq war. Cyrus has never been able to comprehend this loss, even though he has never known his mother, but in many ways, the unravelling of his life is tied to this unhealed trauma.
One of the risks of writing a novel that conflates the personal and the political with this fearlessness is that it can quickly slip into grandstanding, but at the heart of this narrative is a fundamental aporia, that effectively leads to an investigation into the nature of truth and identity.
A first-person narrative can blur the lines between the author and the protagonist, but Akbar treads the balance masterfully. On the question of how a lot of debut novels contain traces of autobiographies, Akbar says:
“The book follows Cyrus Shams, who shares some important autobiographical parallels with me—he was born in Iran, raised in America. He is an alcoholic and an addict. He’s a poet. That said, I feel like there are other characters in the book—Orkideh, Arash, and Zee—who are ventriloquising the literal autobiographical me as or more directly as Cyrus.”
In the last few decades, it seems that the discourse on mixed heritage and identity has veered from its ability to galvanise anxiety of belonging to a deep existentialism within the diasporic subject. Talking of his own mixed identity, Akbar says that he wants to break free from the hierarchy of the hyphen: “I don’t believe in the hyphen. If I say ‘Iranian-American’, grammatically, ‘Iranian’ is subordinated to ‘American’. It modifies the American noun. The inverse is true with ‘American-Iranian’. I’m both, at once, always in the same instant.”
Who is a rebel?
As the novel leaps between timelines from Cyrus’s childhood to his parents’ marriage in the early 80s, to his late 20s reckoning with sobriety, Cyrus is tormented by the coincidence of memories—those he is compelled to relive despite his attempts at erasing them and those that he must hold on to for his own
sanity. The collision of these memories leads him into self-destructive patterns of substance abuse and self-harm. But even in his weakest moments, he powers through by seeing himself as an outlier: a rebellious, messianic but misunderstood artist chosen for martyrdom …
Akbar believes that an addict isn’t a rebel “any more than a diabetic is a rebel. Often, punitive legislative strictures and carcerality force the addict into opposition with normative society. But this is superimposed, external to the disease, like if all diabetics were suddenly only allowed to eat Snickers bars”.
No easy answers
The most sensitive force of the novel, then, as Akbar suggests, is its ability to confront simplified readings about alcoholism and trauma, mental illness and addiction. We like to think of them in terms of cause-and-effect, but Akbar’s nuanced contemplations in the novel offer no easy answers, and instead catalyse difficult critical thinking—a habit we are increasingly less familiar with every day. He credits American novelist Tommy Orange’s work as an inspiration: “There, There, and its sequel/prequel Wandering Stars, indelibly inflect every page of Martyr!.”
In winding passages that read like waves in an ocean, Cyrus talks repeatedly about how his death needs to be more meaningful than his life, even while he is alive. This transference of meaning to the aftermath is the impetus of Akbar’s unforgettable novel. Cyrus feels incredibly alone, but it is also essential for him to find an anchor in this life, the novel suggests.
There are dream sequences or “trips” in the novel, where Lisa Simpson (a popular character from The Simpsons sitcom) talks to his mother’s ghost, or Donald Trump makes an appearance, or Rumi deconstructs the meaning of life for Cyrus… About integrating these psychedelic elements in the novel and connecting these to Cyrus’s perception of his inner and outer world, Akbar says: “I don’t have one part of my brain for thinking about God and another for loving The Simpsons, one part of my brain for rage at the world’s iniquity and another for being rapturously in love with my dog. It’s all in there sloshing around, concurrently. I want to be faithful to that slosh.”
Decoding Akbar’s poetics
Talking about his method, Akbar says: “The writing is so much smarter than I am. People balk when I say this as if I’m fishing for reassurance, but it’s very literally true. If I were as wise as my poems, I’d improvise them every time I stepped in front of a microphone. If I was as smart as my novel, I would have dictated it.
Something happens in the synapse between the notepad and me, something not-me enters. Call it God, the unconscious, the muse, instinct, time, whatever; the naming is not important. What matters to me is the faith implied, stewardship of the channel between me and not me.”
The creative, raw and emotional genius of Akbar’s debut is breathtaking. If a “something not-me” enters him during his creative process, we were curious to find out how has his literary training and ability with words as a poet-writer affected his understanding of the world? “When you read Nabokov or Morrison or Woolf, you have the sense for a while that all other writing is just inarticulable buzzing and burping,” says Akbar.
“For all the pyrotechnics of contemporary fiction, what I still seek is that sublimity of sound, composition. Poetry gets one a little closer, I think. It trains the ear.” Martyr! navigates and masters the increasingly rare quality of storytelling: to pop open the lid of the world as we know it and allow its molten discontent to overflow.
Kartik Chauhan is a Delhi-based writer.