Week Six: Martyr!
JULY 17, 2024 • CAMP TOB WEEK SIX
Martyr!
second half discussion
It’s week six at Camp ToB 2024, and this time we’re discussing the conclusion of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
Returning to guide us through the second half of the book is Activity Leader Kate B., who has discussion questions to get this week’s conversation started—take it away, Kate!
1.
Cyrus tells Orkideh that his BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx project is all about “how to make a death useful”; later, his narratorial voice tells us that it’s about “want[ing] to live perfectly enough to die without creating a ripple of pain behind him, like an Olympic diver knifing splashlessly into the pool.” He tells Zee he wants his “having-been-alive” to matter. Do you see these explanations as contradictory or complementary? What do they offer Cyrus?
2.
A recurring motif in this novel is the person who lives beyond their death in one way or another: the brother who gets drafted twice; the woman who gives up her life and, in return, gets art; the angel of death who returns to civilian life. Do you feel that any of these people succeeded at getting the “martyrdom” experience Cyrus wants?
3.
Cyrus’s dreams tend to pair someone known to him with a (fictional or actual) person who has a mythical stature in his mind: Roya Shams and Lisa Simpson, fictional brother Beethoven Shams and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ali Shams and Rumi, etc. What other book characters would you like to see in a dream-world having a chat with a celebrity?
4.
What do you make of the final scene of the book? (Do people smirk in your dreams?)