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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2026, pp. 80-81
Middle East Books Review
By Kaveh Akbar, Vintage Books, 2024, paperback, 352 pp. MEB $18
Reviewed by Delinda C. Hanley
“I JUST FINISHED reading Martyr! Do you have any other books like that?” asked a visitor to Middle East Books and More this winter. Now that I’ve read it, guess what? I don’t think there are any other books quite like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!
The author, Akbar, was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at the University of Iowa. He has published two poetry collections, edited others and his work appears in the New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, The New York Times and elsewhere. His debut novel reads like poetry, with sentences that pierce your soul, characters that baffle you as they settle into your heart, and a story that haunts you.
Like his creator, the main character, Cyrus Shams was born in Tehran, endured growing up as an Iranian American and now is a poet doing his best to recover from addiction. Akbar weaves historical fact into his fictional tale: Cyrus’ mother was killed when the USS Vincennes, a U.S. Navy warship, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. Baby Cyrus was spared because his mother left him behind as she planned a visit to her PTSD-plagued brother, Arash, in Dubai. Cyrus’ father, Ali, cared for his baby son (who rarely slept) until “the widower and his sleepless king” start a new life in Fort Wayne, IN, working on an industrial chicken farm. Ali deadens his exhaustion and grief with gin and then “he’d go to his room and sleep like a mountain.”
Akbar devotes at least one chapter to each character who tells their own story. That leap across time and countries is jarring until you realize whose turn it is—the father, son, mother, uncle—whose bizarre story sent me to google to see if it was based on fact—and even an “interlude” featuring the famous Persian poet Ferdowsi who wrote the epic poem “Shahnameh.” Every Iranian owns the “Shahnameh” and the Qur’an, Akbar tells us. Only one of them is read, he jokes.
Ali describes his routine raising Cyrus in America: “Cyrus grew, I worked. What more to say?” Friday night pizza, watching videos checked out from the library at home, work. “Sports was a language everyone at the farm, and in Cyrus’s school, spoke. So we learned to speak it too.” Ali philosophizes: “What was there to complain about? A murdered wife? A sore back…living happened until it didn’t. There was no choice to it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So, each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.”
Far from any relatives or others in the Iranian diaspora, Ali raises Cyrus alone as an “Iranian in the American Midwest, amidst 9/11 and the subsequent jingoism and lawn flags and yellow ribbons and the ‘aren’t you glad to be here’ set.” Cyrus’ social studies teacher explains how “our troops” are helping Cyrus’ people over there to figure out democracy. Cyrus doesn’t “mention what our troops had done to his mother over there. He hated himself for that, too. At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else…You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.”
That feeling will resonate with readers whose roots lie in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries over there where our troops are “helping” people figure out democracy.
Like non-citizens today, Cyrus worries about being deported “back to an Iran he couldn’t recall.” He has sleep terrors that are replaced by potent insomnia. Ali warns him that “announcing his Iranian-ness was to invite violence, harm. Cyrus’ father was always vague about this part, and the vagueness kept Cyrus awake too.”
Drugs and alcohol nearly destroy Cyrus when he leaves home for college. The author employs dramatic images and even humor to capture the power of addiction. “Cyrus’ true love, his bedrock, his soulmate, was alcohol. Alcohol was faithful, omnipresent, predictable. Alcohol didn’t demand monogamy like opiates or meth. Alcohol demanded only that you came back home to it at the end of the night. Cyrus and alcohol settled into a kind of easy domestic bliss.”
Cyrus yearns to write poetry or a great book, but he earns his living by acting as a terminally ill patient who trains medical students to give him bad news—not the ideal career for a man who is suicidally sad, his roommate points out. This segue is hilarious. Cyrus explores both gay and straight relationships, particularly with his loyal roommate Zee Novak as well as others: “Kathleen was the first Republican he ever dated, the first wealthy person too.” Cyrus is amazed that “she could order delivery twice a day” and that “her groceries came from Whole Foods, not Aldi. The fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice alone was almost worth the cognitive dissonance.”
Cyrus doesn’t want to waste his death—or his life—so he seeks meaning or some kind of martyrdom and hopes to write a book about other martyrs. That obsession prompts a life-changing trip with his roommate Zee to New York to speak to Orkideh, a dying Iranian artist doing a performance art piece about her own death in the Brooklyn Museum.
Was the young woman in our bookstore looking for a book about growing up as a Muslim, Arab or Persian immigrant in the U.S.? Did she want to read about history, culture and literature from a land that is misunderstood or even demonized here in the U.S.? Was she seeking a book that dealt with addiction, grief, redemption, learning to trust and love? It could be that like me she’ll just have to wait for the next amazing novel by Kaveh Akbar.
Delinda C. Hanley is executive editor of the Washington Report.
