Martyr!

“Her impeccable posture gave her a boarding-school air, New England royalty. Cyrus reflexively hated her. That Yankee patrician veneer.”

Cyrus’s arrogance, a key component of his self-image as a martyr, is on full display when he instinctively decides to hate a medical student due to her appearance, which Cyrus deems elite. His perception of her in firmly American cultural terms helps establish the American part of his Iranian American identity.

“They were the same thing, talking to God and talking to my dead mom.”

Here, Cyrus engages in a false equivalence fallacy, likening Roya to God. The deification of his deceased mother is the same process that turns mundane people into martyr saints, suggesting that even as a child, Cyrus was drawn to concepts of martyrdom.

“I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?”

Gabe is a figure who confronts Cyrus about his egotism early on in the novel and receives immense backlash for it (this interaction will later be contrasted with Cyrus’s conversation with Orkideh in which she calls him a cliché). The pomegranate is a traditional Zoroastrian symbol that Cyrus utilizes in his poetry as a symbol of his Iranian identity. Gabe pits it against the iPhone, a symbol of Cyrus’s daily life as an American that does not have the same poetic appeal.

“Ali’s anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror. On the news he saw the vice president of the United States say: ‘I don’t care what the facts are. I’m not an apologize for America kind of guy.’”

The metaphor likening Ali’s anger to a moon positions it as his constant shadow, revolving around his gravitational pull. Here, the text directly quotes George H. W. Bush while he was campaigning for president in 1988, speaking to a group of Republican leaders about the downing of Iran Air Flight 655. By placing the quote within the context of Ali’s broader perception of hostility from white conservative Americans, Akbar heightens the sense of insensitivity and cruelty inherent to Bush’s words.

“In the distance, two tiny floating pebbles of white. Were they moving? Getting nearer?”

This enigmatic observation by the unnamed woman on Flight 655—retrospectively, deduced to be Leila—is the only mention of the two missiles that will eventually hit the plane and kill her. The neutral tone of this moment, along with its brevity among other, longer trains of thought, downplays the missiles themselves. Instead, the author places emphasis on the moments before destruction, in which Leila is able to find hope.

“‘When people think about traveling to the past, they do it with this wild sense of self-importance. Like, “gosh, I better not step on that flower or my grandfather will never be born.” But in the present we mow our lawns and poison ants and skip parties and miss birthdays all the time. We never think about the effects of that stuff.’ Roya was working herself up. ‘Nobody thinks of now as the future past.’”

Roya makes a broad generalization about human nature, culminating in her construction of an impromptu aphorism. “Future past” is one of the book’s many uses of oxymoron, and it evokes the fleeting nature of the present in its construction.

“Later in her life Roya would fantasize about getting a nose job. She was at times obsessed, devastated by her own nose’s sweeping bigness. A lover, a British academic, once described her as ‘Hellenic.’ She may as well have said ‘beaky.’ As Roya aged and grew more and more into her face, she tried to see it as a kind of Persepolian nobleness. A crown worn on the face. This only half worked.”

This anecdote about Roya’s life foreshadows the fact that she is not, in fact, the person who died in the Iran Air bombing; if Roya had died as a young mother on the plane (still married to Ali), how could she have had a British lover in later life? Subtle bits of foreshadowing such as this one help cultivate a sense throughout the earliest stages of the novel that all is not as it seems.

“There was a kind of pride in Ali’s face when he said it, that Iranians were uglier. There was a satisfaction that took Cyrus years to unpack.”

Ali characterizes Iranian identity through physical appearance; “ugliness” is a sign of the unique set of struggles that Iranians face in their native country and around the world. For Ali, a rugged image thus becomes a symbol of those struggles, a way of immediately recognizing someone’s story before they even speak to him.

“‘Do you worry,’ Orkideh began, after another long pause, ‘about becoming a cliché? […] Another death-obsessed Iranian man?’”

The utilization of cliché throughout the book is heavy with irony, as Cyrus’s arrogance motivates him to think of his own ideas as groundbreakingly profound. Here, Orkideh points to this irony succinctly and starkly, shocking Cyrus.

“Sports was a language everyone at the farm, and in Cyrus’s school, spoke. So we learned to speak it too.”

Ali compares sports to language, using it to connect with his coworkers from around the world and help Cyrus fit in at school. Ali’s reason for loving basketball is highly pragmatic and contrasts with Cyrus’s description of their love for the game, which has a more romanticized tone.

“He wanted to be on ‘the right side of history,’ whatever that was. But more than that (he admitted this to himself when he was practicing being rigorously honest), he wanted other people to perceive him as someone who cared about being on the right side of history.”

Cyrus’s unreliability as a protagonist is apparent in this moment, where he explores his motivations for wanting to become a martyr. The parenthetical admission that he is not always honest with himself indicates that he is likely not fully honest with other characters in the book.

“Cyrus wondered what about him made Kathleen feel like he’d think ‘Baghdad, Indiana’ was funny. His unaccented English? The sex they had? His perpetually bitten tongue, the way he rarely challenged her regressive political takes? All these things sat outside Kathleen’s experience of them-ness, so to her Cyrus was an us.”

In another string of rhetorical questions, Cyrus ponders his own role in encouraging his white girlfriend’s racist thoughts. Failing to challenge the racism of the culture that surrounds him—including that of his own partner—he is once again confronted with Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience.

“There was a not insignificant part of Cyrus’s mind that resented everyone else waiting in the gallery. Interlopers, he couldn’t help but feel. Vulgar looky-loos here to gawk at the dying woman, the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ shoving in to see her suffering. That Cyrus was here on a mission—and possibly, or maybe even hopefully, to plan his own death—exempted him from this gross voyeurism, he thought, though even as the idea was forming in his mind he wasn’t sure he actually believed it.”

Whereas, at the beginning of the book, Cyrus judges others harshly without a second thought, he begins to have doubts about his own judgments here. This moment suggests that key character development is occurring, as Cyrus recognizes his own irrationality and egotism.

“What I mean is, I think maybe you’ll find your real ending once you stop looking for it […] I think real endings tend to work their way in from the outside.”

Orkideh’s conversations with Cyrus include pieces of wisdom that she has cultivated over the course of her life. These personal adages can have a prophetic quality to them for Cyrus. In this case, the end of Martyr! works its way in from the inside, as the landscape of the city devolves into surreal chaos around Cyrus and Zee.

“You wouldn’t understand even if you heard it, nephew. Get it? I listen to it and see God in it because I’ve been God. I’ve spoken to those same angels, right? But you see a picture of an angel and a sword and think only of your crazy uncle. The most human thing in the world. Because that’s as close as you’ve ever been. Or you believe it’s as close as you’ve ever been.”

Arash’s harsh words for Cyrus, delivered in an unflinching tone, remind him of the dangers of forgetting his own humanity. Additionally, they provide symbolism for Arash’s military role as a faux angel.

“After that first kiss, I wouldn’t have questioned anything. Possibility, freedom. If a great winged angel had come up from the earth and burst apart, I would have gathered its feathers.”

This image of an angel bursting apart in the sky echoes the image of Flight 655 exploding in mid-air with eerie beauty. The image of an angel is also tied to Arash, whose battlefield persona has left him traumatized. Just like the martyr, therefore, the angel is a traditional religious figure whose significance is complicated over the course of the book.

“If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillness and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity, the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself—which, because it is inevitable, means nothing.”

This statement, an excerpt from Cyrus’s “BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx,” draws upon traditional religious ideas of sin in order to subvert the religious ideal of martyrdom. That a martyr could be considered a sinner is an oxymoronic idea, suggesting that Cyrus is grappling with an internal conflict over what it means for him to desire martyrdom.

“Martyrs, man. We just can’t escape it, can we?”

Rumi’s anachronistically colloquial style of speech in Cyrus’s dream suggests that he is more a reflection of Cyrus’s own self-image as a poet and martyr than a historical figure. Additionally, his use of a vague rhetorical question also echoes Cyrus’s manner of speech, leaving ambiguity as to what “it” is.

“His whole life was a conspiracy of other people helping him, other people teaching him this or that. He felt like Hamlet, just moping around waiting for the world to assuage his grief, petulantly soliloquizing and fainting while everyone else fed him bananas and candy bars. Hamlet died at the end, of course.”

Cyrus’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet as a pathetic, passive character marks a turning point in his self-image; before, martyrdom seemed to be a noble pursuit, and now it appears to be highly self-centered and futile. The allusion to Hamlet highlights broader parallels between the two stories—including the return of a deceased parent (the dead king and Roya, respectively).

“She said it in English. I woke screaming. English, fifty years of sun. I wept for a week. Separation from what you love best, that is hell. To be twice separated, first by a nation and then by its language: that is pain deeper than pain. Deeper than hell. That is abyss.”

While Akbar explores The Insufficiency of Words throughout the book, here, language takes on a potent role, striking terror into Orkideh’s heart. The Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience of involuntarily dreaming in her second language, when she longs to hear Leila’s voice in their native Farsi, solidifies the notion that key parts of her past self are dying.

“I thought I could write a book about it. Martyrdom. The gulf between my mother making nothing from her death and this artist in Brooklyn making something. These two opposite Iranian women…except it was the same person.”

The idea of two opposite identities, Roya and Orkideh, existing within the same body contributes to the theme of Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience. In the process of immigrating, her first self is violently destroyed to make way for the other, a shift that renders her unrecognizable to even her own son.

“The first time I died, I wasn’t even there. The whole payoff, the answer to the question of what happens afterward—I didn’t get any of that.”

These sentences read as oxymoronic out of context; it is, of course, physically impossible to be absent for one’s own death. This inherent contradiction of Orkideh’s life story mirrors the broader Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience, wherein characters like Orkideh struggle to reconcile two cultural identities that are at war with one another, both internally and externally.

“There is nothing remarkable about dying this way, but I hope I’ve made something interesting of my living. An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”

Orkideh’s assertion of her own remarkability is a direct contradiction of what Cyrus said to her several times during their museum conversations. As such, it reads as a response meant only for her son, even though it has been published in The New York Times. Her simile likening life to an alphabet also contradicts Cyrus’s frustrations about The Insufficiency of Words, encouraging him to see his words and life as unrestricted.