Kaveh Akbar’s book Martyr! is a delight because it manages to embrace seriousness and irreverence, darkness and light.
Cyrus Shams is an orphan. His mother, Roya, died when he was only a few months old. She was a passenger on Iran Air’s fatal Flight 655 – a real event in 1988 when a passenger plane was mistakenly shot down by the US Navy. Cyrus and his father Ali then emigrated to the US state of Indiana, where Ali worked as a poultry farmer and the boy experienced a typical displaced diasporic childhood. When Ali died in 2013, Cyrus was left without any family.
Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s kaleidoscopic debut novel both inhabits and skewers the tropes of the diaspora writer – their dreams, inspirations and aspirations, and the concurrent impossibility of the project.is the work, but it is simultaneously a critique and deconstruction of the work. Snippets of Cyrus’ manuscript are interspersed as BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx – layers upon layers, all the way down.
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