The main character of Martyr! is Cyrus Shams, a thirty year old Iranian American living in a small university town in Indiana. Cyrus is an alcoholic, a drug abuser, and a poet, and he is obsessed with martyrdom. More precisely, he wants to know how to have a good death, a death that means something. This quest is rooted in his past and his family tragedies, but his search for enlightenment will propel him foreword into startling territory.
Cyrus Shams was born in Iran in 1988 to Ali and Roya Shams. The reader will learn more about each of these people through their own reflections as presented later in the story, but the reader knows that on July 3, 1988, while Cyrus was still a baby, his mother boarded a flight to Dubai which was subsequently shot out of the sky by the USS Vincennes, which mistook it for a hostile craft (this is a real event). Everyone on board died, and Ali Shams was left alone to care for his infant son. Ali eventually took Cyrus to the US, settling in Indiana where Ali found work at an industrial chicken farm. Ali devoted his life to working and drank quite a bit himself. Cyrus presented a number of troubling issues as a child, including insomnia, but he was smart and worked hard. Shortly after Cyrus got in to Keady University, Ali died. Cyrus spent extra time at university, drinking, doing drugs and writing poetry, as well as picking up a variety of side jobs and a couple of close friends, including Zee. It is Zee, who also happens to be in love with Cyrus, who encourages him to travel to New York for an art installation called DEATH SPEAK. This exhibit involves a female Iranian artist named Orkideh who is dying of cancer. Her show involves living at the museum as she dies, sitting in an exhibit every day until the end, speaking to whomever visits about death.
Cyrus’ friends know about his personal interest in death and martyrs. In conversations, Cyrus tries to explain exactly what it is he is trying to figure out with his poetry/martyr fixation and he links it to his mother, first and foremost:
“…my whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning.”
Cyrus acknowledges that his mother’s life and death had meaning to his family personally, but it didn’t matter to the US or to Iran. The US tried to rationalize it and not apologize for their mistake, and the Iranian government used it to whip up hatred versus the US.
But it’s not just his mother’s senseless death that fuels Cyrus’ quest. His uncle Arash (Roya’s brother), still in Iran, suffers from PTSD due to his experience of the Iran-Iraq war. Arash was one of the few men chosen to act as an “angel of death” on the battle field. At night, he would don all black robes, ride atop a black horse and carry a sword, while a flashlight underneath lit up his entire head like a ball of flame. In this costume he rode amongst the dying, saying nothing, but reminding them to die well, to die bravely and not seek to cut short their own suffering.
All of these circumstances — his mother’s tragic death, his uncle’s trauma, his father’s death, and even his father’s job raising the best chickens to die — have made death a central focus in Cyrus’ life and TRIGGER WARNING he does contemplate suicide and when/how to make it the most meaningful.
When Cyrus and Zee go to New York, Orkideh’s art (staging her own death) has enormous impact on Cyrus. He visits the museum for days in a row just to sit with Orkideh to talk about death but also about life and what it means to be alive.
Martyr! deals with some very heavy themes — death, addiction, suicide — but still manages to be funny at times and is a revelation about life in Iran after the revolution. It is an excellent read and was a National Book Award finalist.