Thoughts on Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

The idea of martyrdom is core to me. I said as much to Kaveh Akbar when I rose to ask a question at his book release event at Politics and Prose. I asked him, “Why martyr?” The question was prefaced with my own identity as a Twelver Shia, and Kaveh, who is a delightfully ridiculous person, said, “Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah,” crossed one leg over the other, got both his hands ready to gesture and turned to the crowd to begin. Clint Smith, moderating the chat, sighed; the crowd laughed. The Politics and Prose staff had asked Kaveh to please be brief in his response to my question. 

Martyr! immediately introduces us to Cyrus Shams, a twenty-something Iranian-American alcoholic who wants to die. Unfortunately, he also wants to die in a way that matters, and he can’t quite figure out what that means. His mother died when Cyrus was an infant; one of 290 people instantly vaporized when the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian commercial flight. Cyrus’ survival of his years of alcoholism and drug addiction, combined with the nature of his mother’s death, which he describes as a “rounding error,” leads him to obsess over martyrdom and write a book about it. The journey that this book leads him on is the plot of Martyr!. 

Kaveh returns to his Iranian heritage when describing his interest in martyrdom. During the Iran-Iraq war, soldiers would inform parents that their sons had died by telling them they had been martyred. In response, parents were expected to celebrate or at least pretend to. Martyrdom is honorable- you die for a cause you believe in, often against a greater and stronger enemy, in resistance. For your sacrifice, God guarantees you heaven. Iran is the only country on Earth in which Twelver Shias are the minority. In every other Muslim country, we’re oppressed minorities. But this fits quite well. Shi’ism is a religion of protest, of defiance. And put into the majority, we’re pretty annoying. 

I was raised on the lore of the Battle of Karbala, our origin story, and why Shias and Iranians are obsessed with martyrdom. The Karbala story features Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. With a small band of comrades, Imam Hussain rebelled against the reigning caliph at the time and was subsequently massacred by Caliph Yazid Ibn Mu’awiya’s army. Yazid told Imam Hussain that he could kneel, or die. Every year, during Muharram, Shias wear black and tell stories of the heroic bravery of Imam Hussain, of his half-brother Abbas’ valiant stand against dozens of men from Yazid’s army, of how infants and children were burned alive in their tents before the women were rounded up and dragged away. In these stories, we immortalize our heroes, who are not heroes until they are murdered and martyred. It’s nearly impossible to explain Imam Hussain’s significance to Shias except to say that we call him the Prince of Martyrs or to say that people compare him to Che Guevara. 

When Cyrus tries to explain Karbala to his friend, the friend is puzzled. Why not just lie? Bend the knee and then rebel again later? Because, of course, that’s not as good of a story. That’s not martyrdom. Cyrus’s whole problem is that he probably would lie, just bend his knee, and walk away to figure out his next steps. 

“Can you imagine having that kind of faith? To be that certain of something you’ve never seen? I’m not that certain of anything. I’m not even that certain of gravity.”

He’s searching for something to be sure of. But he doesn’t have anything to look back on- he’s an orphan, an immigrant, and his only family member is his uncle back in Iran, who was driven insane by his time in the war. So, he must forge ahead and search for anything that might mean something. This is a difficult tale of immigration because there is never any belonging to be found. If you’ve migrated, all your belonging must be made. Chosen. And as an adult, certainty is very difficult. Even if you’re like me or Cyrus, supremely self-righteous and interested in the morally correct choice, adulthood pushes in nuance until you feel like you’re drowning in indecision. As one is wont to do, he turns to writing. 

“I guess, 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? And I am too, for giving my life to it.”

But even though writing clarifies, sometimes you end up disliking what you discover. Cyrus’s sponsor tried to give him a reality check at one point, saying: “I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your whole life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many phones? Do you see what I mean?” Cyrus reacts precisely the way I would react if a white guy said this to me. He internally acknowledges the truth in this, calls his sponsor a racist, and storms out of the restaurant. 

The difficulty with thinking about martyrdom too much is that it morphs into something more nefarious than an idea of defiance and protest. Of course, the idea of dying for a cause is noble, and dying rather than compromising your principles is beautiful. But we are not generally faced with those situations, and sometimes, thinking about martyrdom excessively can put you on a path to isolating individualism. Your suffering is different and unique. In no good alone, Rayne Fisher-Quann talks mentions martyrdom in relation to isolationism:

“The worst thing about this feeling is that it makes you a martyr. You may hate yourself, but you’re also a hero, bravely forgoing love, connection, and community to protect the world from the car-bomb of your own instability. You sit in your room and tell yourself lies: that they don’t want to hear from you anyway; that you’ll wait here alone writing Notes app soliloquies until you become good enough to deserve other people; that it is a noble endeavour to punish yourself. “

Even though he doesn't clock it initially, Cyrus is stuck in this inescapable spiral of self-loathing, isolation, and despair. And sometimes I have been, too. Martyr! makes the point that our ugliness is human, too. And the joy of reading Martyr! is not only its exploration of our messy contradictions but also that it’s a tightly plotted book with excellently timed twists. Kaveh Akbar has proven his ability to weave vernacular into gorgeous poems, and now he confirms that that’s not all he can do.