Remembering To Forget

Iranian American author Kaveh Akbar's critically acclaimed novel, Martyr!, is a finalist for the 2024 National Book Awards, a prestigious American literature award. Its protagonist, Cyrus, is a man chased by his memories—those he is compelled to relive and those that he must hold on to for his own sanity.

- Kartik Chauhan

WRITTEN with a scorching and almost-difficult-toread 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.”