Summary
Cyrus and Chapter 1
Cyrus Shams discusses his desire to begin again after years of drug abuse. He laments the fact that religious figures such as Prophet Muhammad and Saul should have received signs of the divine when he himself had not. Two years later, Cyrus scrapes by as a part-time medical actor helping staff develop bedside manner. He takes an immediate dislike to a young medical student who puts on pretentious airs. To unnerve her and challenge her capacity to hold space for another human being, he shares personal accounts of drinking and fantasizing about setting himself on fire. This suicidal ideation is an attempt to alleviate his dread and anxiety.
Chapter 2
Cyrus attends an AA meeting where he confesses that his reaction to the medical student at work was really an attempt to take control of the moment and move beyond the numbness of sobriety. After the meeting, Cyrus and his sponsor, Gab,e discuss the matter over coffee. Cyrus states he feels out of place in a mostly white and Christian context, while Gabe highlights that Cyrus is more American than Iranian. Cyrus objects to Gabe's comments, deeming them racist. He also perceives his sponsor's attitude as controlling, leading Cyrus to storm out of the cafe. He decides to stop attending AA meetings and cease communicating with Gabe.
Chapter 3
Cyrus considers the performance of falling asleep. Since a young age, sleep was something he struggled with. His childhood night terrors were especially difficult for his single father to deal with. Ali raised Cyrus by himself after his wife, Roya, was killed on Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the U.S. Navy. Sick of everyone's pity, Ali sought a new beginning in America with his infant son. Prior to all this, Roya had not wanted a child in the first place. Chafing against the pressure to be a perfect mother, she vacillated until she eventually consented. Ali was the one who desired a child, and he did the best he could by Cyrus after his wife's death.
Chapter 4
In July of 1988, a woman boards a plane headed from Bandar Abbas (Iran) to Dubai. Unlike others who suffer economically during this time, the woman's husband earns enough money to cushion their lives and pay for her flight. Prices had risen in Tehran, causing people to sell their belongings and raise baby chicks in their own houses. Desperate girls engaged in prostitution. The woman feels chills thinking of a girl she had seen abducted. To distract herself from the anxiety of flying, she reads the magazine tucked into the seat in front of her. Advertisements urge readers to travel to Shush, "the center of Ancient Civilization." The woman finds solace in the fact that past civilizations had also destroyed themselves. Perhaps all of humanity was inevitably doomed in the long run.
The woman does her best to push those she left behind out of her mind. She convinces herself that she is not needed, focusing instead on hoping for a better future.
Chapter 5
Cyrus recalls how when he grew up, his night terrors transformed into insomnia. He would anxiously cycle through each day's events as well as his father's insistence that he not reveal where he was born. While his father drinks gin to help himself sleep, Cyrus eventually gives up on the notion of sleep and gets up to read or draw. He does his utmost not to wake his father and potentially trigger Ali's anger. Unable to sleep, Cyrus sometimes tries to meditate or bargain with God for a good night's sleep. Eventually, the exercise of imagining conversations between different figures and characters allows Cyrus to fall into a light sleep, as well as strengthen his creativity.
Cyrus begins drinking immediately upon going away for college. Ali differentiates his own gin use from the sort of drinking that "low people" did. After a childhood of intensely fearing alcohol due to his father's influence, Cyrus throws himself into experimenting with booze, drugs, and sex with relish. Ali dies during his sophomore year. The chapter ends with one of Cyrus's imagined conversations between Roya and Lisa Simpson.
Chapter 6
In 1973 in Tehran, ten-year-old Roya would wake to find herself covered in urine, having wet the bed. This, coupled with embarrassing moments at school, cements into a sense of shame. She prays to God that the bedwetting would stop. Meanwhile, her parents unhappily decide that Kamran, Roya's father, would accept an electrician position in a different town once the power company where he worked in Tehran shut down. One night, Roya wakes to find her older brother, Arash, urinating on her.
Analysis
The novel opens with a humorous tone as Cyrus introduces his years-long drug habit and his desire to encounter the divine. Written in a close third-person perspective, Martyr! is composed of a mosaic of perspectives and timelines that deal with questions of identity, martyrdom, and what it means to die (and live) well. Akbar juxtaposes humor with serious topics such as addiction and death, which alludes to the messy and multifaceted reality of life. For example, he writes that when Cyrus was in the throes of addiction, he "didn't write so much as drink about writing" (Chapter 1). Cyrus's wry humor is a coping mechanism for dealing with the various hardships he endures, including loss, grief, and addiction. The exclamation mark in the title of the book also balances a heavy topic with humor. The effect is a slightly blasphemous tone that captures the speed at which Cyrus's mind works to seek meaning in his life.
Cyrus admits to desiring power and control rather than the surrender encouraged by the AA curriculum. The metaphor he uses for these moments of lucidity is "rushing the cockpit," which is perceived as an odd choice of words (Chapter 2). However, this expression, as well as Cyrus's overall obsession with the idea of martyrdom, is not an example of fundamentalism. Rather, it gestures toward Cyrus's need to find meaning and purpose, particularly after his mother's senseless death. His verbosity at the AA meeting further reveals the empty numbness he fights to hold at bay. Words cannot capture or alter his existential dread, but that does not stop him from trying to use language to lessen his suffering.
A core issue at the heart of Cyrus and Gabe's argument is Gabe's inability to understand how being a Third Culture Individual profoundly shapes Cyrus's life. This term refers to someone who grew up in a culture different from their parents' culture or their country's culture, developing a unique "third culture" identity that blends elements from both backgrounds. Born in Iran but raised in the American Midwest, Cyrus feels caught between two cultures but not fully belonging to either. In Chapter 2, Gabe insists that Cyrus should fully embrace his current American context and write about the actual details of his life instead of using traditional Persian imagery. Cyrus feels accused of performing his Persian identity, which can be seen in the contested accusation that Cyrus is a "dilettante." This word refers to a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge. Part of what wounds Cyrus most is that despite the racism in Gabe's words, he is also "a little right" (Chapter 2). This highlights Cyrus's struggle with authenticity.
Akbar switches between different perspectives and chronologies in the novel. Chapter Three provides the Sham family backstory, while Chapter Four jumps to Bandar Abbas, Iran in 1988, following a woman as she gets on a plane for the first time in her life. Though the woman remains unnamed for the entirety of the chapter, readers may guess that this is Roya, Cyrus's mother. Regardless of her identity, the woman's marriage and financial stability protect her from the economically and politically tumultuous times. While others are forced to sell everything they own, raise chickens in their houses, engage in prostitution, or resort to some other survival strategy, this woman has the financial means to pay for a flight. In addition, she feels buoyed by a sense of hope in a sea of general despair. In terms of narration, this chapter functions like a piece of a puzzle that will only reveal a bigger picture later on as more of the story comes to light.
Cyrus and his father's precarious immigrant statuses instill a kind of paranoia in Cyrus. Growing up, Cyrus was cautioned by Ali to respond simply with "I don't remember" when asked about where he was born (Chapter 5). To Ali, announcing their Iranianness "was to invite violence, harm." The two Shams respond differently to their trauma. Ali takes to drinking gin to help himself sleep while Cyrus gives up altogether on sleep, instead preferring to spend insomniac nights reading, drawing, and eating snacks. He takes great care not to wake his father and potentially incite his (rare) rage. Various ghosts haunt the men in their family. For Cyrus, the "spectre" of his father's anger dominates his consciousness (Chapter 5). When Ali dies, Cyrus feels numb at the enormity of his aloneness in the world. It is precisely these experiences that Gabe fails to take into account when he makes comments about Cyrus's heritage and experience.
