The performance of certainty seemed to be at the root of so much grief. Everyone in America seemed to be afraid and hurting and angry, starving for a fight they could win. And more than that even, they seemed certain their natural state was to be happy, contented, and rich. The genesis of everyone’s pain had to be external, such was their certainty. And so, legislators legislated, building border walls, barring citizens of there from entering here. “The pain we feel comes from them, not ourselves,” said the banners, and people cheered, certain of all the certainty. But the next day they’d wake up and find that what had hurt in them still hurt.
Kaveh Akbar’s ‘Martyr’ is a narrative whose focus, more than a person are emotions and conflicts perpetuated within people through tragic yet avoidable circumstances. Cyrus Shams around whom all these turbulent elements evolve, is an Iranian immigrant in America who lost his mother Ruya Shams in the shooting of Iranian commercial flight 655 by 2 missiles fired by USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser of the United States Navy. Raised by a father, who left the country, exhausted due to the overwhelming condolences, Cyrus at the surface is a vivid reader with an immense passion for poetry and literature, informing his father of all that he kept learning. At the same time, the child goes through bouts of insomnia and incontinence. However, the pandora’s jar of conflicting sentiments blew wide open as he begins to socialize in college. Within someone else’s convenient American dream, he is an individual who frequently suffers from depression, addiction and racism. Surrounded by vague shadows of death and dying all his life, with a mother turned into dust and an uncle suffering from PTSD after serving in the Iranian battlefields, his nature of a poet makes him dive deeper into the concept of death and particularly into the idea of martyrs.
Interestingly, these “martyrs” are not the ones who died in eminent wars. Cyrus martyrs live in different corners of the world. They walk inconspicuously within the crowd, haunted by tragedies triggered through acts of people in power.
But my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It’s actuarial. Not even tragic, you know? So, was she a martyr? There has to be a definition of the word that can accommodate her. That’s what I’m after…
Her death is tragic on the human level…but that level of tragedy wasn’t legible to the U.S. or to Iran. It’s not legible to empire. Meaningless at the level of empire is what I mean by meaningless.
As indicated, unlike the classical concept of martyrs, these are lives whose destruction doesn’t mean anything, is not equally valued. Cyrus’ uncle who traumatised by the war, lives in constant paranoia doesn’t mean anything to the state. While some sort of financial compensation is offered, the actual reward, would be to circumvent the origins in future. Circumvent wars and disasters that create them.
As Cyrus begins to delve deeper into the idea of writing about such individuals, his friends Zee and Sad James lead him to a website that explains the work of a conceptual artist. Orkideh, a Persian term for Orchid, the artist is suffering from breast cancer and has decided to live the end days of her life through a performance called Death-speak. According to the idea, she sits around in the Brooklyn Museum where visitors are free to come and talk to her about anything at all. This idea of dialogue is important. Important especially in the context of Cyrus as we witness, moving across the narrative.
Orkideh understands Cyrus’ dilemma i.e., his curiosity towards “Earth Martyrs” as another adjective of a death obsessed Iranian man. Both Cyrus’ and Orkideh’ s discussion on the subject reflects a brilliant play of language through which Kaveh Akbar explores why the contemplation around Martyrs is so important to both the characters. While Cyrus’s multilayered life remains open to interpretation for the reader all across the narrative, the veil lifts from Orkideh’s life towards the end, explaining her own Martyrdom. The artist who is Ruya Shams herself has followed with sacrifice; as a homosexual woman in patriarchal Iran, hoping to live her life in a way that is considered unconventional for a woman of her times. Being a martyr, her search for life has sent her loved ones into a similar spiritual quest. However, Akbar skilfully brings out the systemic guilt that had resulted in this particular trajectory, in Orkideh’s words.
I demand the same leniencies, rationalizations, granted to mediocre man for centuries.
Martyrs! is an accurate representation of how literature reflects and constitutes the heterogenous layers of socio-political conflicts and their presence in the lives of common people.