Martyr!

Martyr! is a 2024 literary fiction novel by Kaveh Akbar that follows Cyrus Shams, a first-generation Iranian American and poet who is recovering from alcoholism and reckoning with the senseless murder of his mother, Roya, at the hands of the United States government. Akbar is an Iranian American poet who has worked in editing, film, and advocacy. In 2024, he was named a finalist for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize for Martyr! Through Cyrus’s story, Akbar follows threads of his own life, including the Iranian American experience, recovery from addiction, and poetry’s place within these struggles.

This guide refers to the 2024 Kindle edition of the text, published by Knopf.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide include discussions of alcoholism and addiction, suicidal ideation, political violence, terminal illness, death, and racism.

Plot Summary

Cyrus Shams was born in 1987 in Tehran, Iran, the son of Roya and Ali Shams. Less than a year later, the bombing of Iran Air Flight 655 killed his mother, who was traveling to visit her brother Arash, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War. Cyrus and Ali moved to the United States shortly afterward. Ali got a job at a chicken factory in Indiana. As Cyrus grew up, the Shams men were careful to minimize their presentation as Iranians to Americans who might be hostile toward them. They learned to love American basketball, and Cyrus was an avid learner at school. Cyrus struggled with night terrors and nighttime incontinence, eventually teaching himself to sleep by staging imaginary conversations between the most influential figures in his life. Ali coped with his grief over Roya’s death with alcoholism. Their only remaining connection to Iran was Arash, who they called annually. The tale of Arash’s time in the war when he rode across battlefields dressed as an angel to soothe dying soldiers fascinated Cyrus.

When Cyrus went to college at Keady University, Ali died shortly afterward. Now entirely on his own, Cyrus fell victim to the same alcoholism that plagued his father, along with drug addiction. In 2015, while lying on a urine-soaked mattress in his dilapidated apartment, Cyrus asks God for a sign to help him turn his life around, and the lightbulb above him miraculously flickers on and off. Flashing forward to two years later, the book finds Cyrus in recovery, attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings with his sponsor, Gabe. He also works on writing poetry and has a part-time job as a medical actor, pretending to be a patient for medical students to train with at the university. One day at his job, he is paired with a medical student whom he finds particularly irritating. In an attempt to make life difficult for her, he uses his acting as an opportunity to vent about his thoughts of death and struggles with addiction.

Immediately after this shift, he attends an AA meeting and speaks to the group about similar things, including his struggles with religious belief. Gabe asks to get coffee with him afterward. Gabe confronts him about his desire to die and the way he performs his Iranian identity through poetry. Cyrus lashes out at Gabe and vows to never see him again.

At a coffee house open-mic night, Cyrus hangs out with Zee, his lover and best friend, and discusses his plans to write a book of poetry about martyrdom. Cyrus admits that he is hoping to find meaning behind his mother’s death but does not know exactly what form the book will take. Sad James, another artist friend, shows Cyrus an article about Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian artist who has taken up residence at the Brooklyn Museum for her final exhibition, called “DEATH SPEAK.” Orkideh is spending her final days forgoing treatment and instead speaking to museum visitors about difficult subjects such as death. Cyrus is immediately compelled by this concept and wonders if he might be able to include Orkideh in his book of martyrs if he goes to talk with her in New York. Zee encourages him to go, volunteering to accompany him on the trip, and the two make plans to travel there the following weekend.

In New York, Cyrus begins visiting Orkideh at her DEATH SPEAK exhibit. They immediately connect over their mutual Iranian background, and Cyrus is effusive about how much he admires her decision to spend her last days in the museum. Orkideh shrugs off his praise, simply saying that as an artist, she gives her life to art. She is also critical of Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom, suggesting to him that he is dealing with cliché. On his third visit to Orkideh at the museum, Cyrus starts a conversation with her about the loss of his mother (he does not specify Roya’s cause of death), and she tells him that poetry will never bring back “any of the people on that flight” (185). After leaving the museum, Cyrus realizes that it does not make sense that Orkideh knows his mother died in the plane bombing.

Flashing backward to 1987, Roya learns that she is pregnant with Cyrus. She hopes to have a couple of days to herself before telling Ali the news, but he invites his friend’s wife, Leila, to stay at the Shamses’ house over the weekend while the two men go on a fishing trip. Roya initially resents Leila’s intrusion into her home but, striving to be a good host, acquiesces when Leila begs her to go somewhere special together late at night. This makes Roya nervous because it is dangerous for women to travel unaccompanied in the nighttime, but Leila boldly takes her headscarf off and impersonates a man while they walk through the park. She takes Roya to a spot where they can peer over a wall and see the back side of the zoo, where giraffes calmly graze in their enclosure. Though a police officer who tells them to leave apprehends them, Leila asks Roya to stay a little longer and rests her head on her shoulder. In another subsequent flashback, they kiss in an alleyway, and Roya begins to feel that her life is full of possibilities.

Back in the present, Zee and Cyrus try to find an explanation for how Orkideh could know about Roya’s death on Flight 655, but they come up short. Desperate, Cyrus googles Orkideh and finds her portfolio of paintings on the gallery website of her ex-wife and gallerist, Sang Linh. One of the paintings catches Cyrus’s attention: a picture of a man riding across a battlefield dressed as an angel, entitled Dudusch (the Farsi word for “brother”). That night, Zee and Cyrus get into an argument over Cyrus’s selfish desire to die a martyr, and Zee leaves the hotel. Not knowing where Zee has gone or if he will return, Cyrus calls Arash to see if his uncle might have any explanation for Orkideh’s painting. Arash is obstinate, insisting that Cyrus seeks mundanity in an image that is serendipitous and sacred.

Cyrus goes to the museum the next day to ask Orkideh questions about her knowledge of his mother’s death and the painting, but he is shocked to find a notice from the museum that Orkideh has passed away during the night. When he recovers from his initial shock, he is further surprised to receive a call from Sang. Sang informs him that Orkideh was his mother all along and that Leila was the one killed in the bombing. Leila’s husband had found out about their affair and threatened them; Leila used Roya’s papers in order to leave the country without being caught. Cyrus struggles to absorb this information but bonds with Sang over their mutual love of Orkideh and shared experiences with addiction.

In the final chapters from Orkideh’s perspective, she recounts the experience of coming to the United States under a false identity (Leila’s) and reinventing herself as a famous artist. She spent years working as a server in a restaurant before Sang discovered her work and offered her space in the gallery. When introducing herself to Sang, she used the name Orkideh, what she and Ali had planned to call Cyrus if he had been a girl. She began to receive critical acclaim very quickly and was well established enough by the time of her cancer diagnosis to convince the Brooklyn Museum to stage DEATH SPEAK.

While he sits in a park absorbing the conversation with Sang, Cyrus receives a call from Zee, who promises to come meet him. Reunited, they profess their love for one another, and Cyrus apologizes profusely for his prior behavior. Cyrus then tells Zee about Orkideh’s true identity, and during this reconciliation, the park begins to melt around them, giving way to chaos. They stand up together and begin to take a step forward.