There’s No Such Thing as a Meaningful Death

Two years into recovery from a bad romance with booze and other drugs, an Iranian American poet makes a half-hearted attempt to redeem his misspent youth. He decides to write a book about people whose deaths retroactively imbued their lives with meaning: Joan of Arc, the early Muslim leader Hussain, the Irish Republican Army militant Bobby Sands, and, though he’s still alive, himself. Such is the premise of Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, an existential comedy about the difficulty of finding beauty in banality and sense in suffering.

The novel opens in abjection. The protagonist, Cyrus Shams, lies prostrate on his piss-stained mattress in a college town in 2010s Indiana, beset by the anxious stupor that befalls those who do “the right drugs in the wrong order.” In a gesture as old as Saint Augustine’s Confessions and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, he prays for a sign from God. But this particular drunken supplicant happens to be intimately familiar with the tradition of drunken supplication, and he knows that he’s too wretched to expect a grand gesture. Instead of a flash of light on the road to Damascus, he asks for a modest sign: If God grants him a flicker in a bare light bulb, the smallest indication that his life amounts to more than a series of accidents, the poet swears to change his ways.

Cyrus is too jaded to appeal to the divine except in terms that make a parody of this action—“Just a little wink and I’ll sell all my shit and buy a camel.” But as we reach the end of the prologue, we begin to suspect that there’s a kernel of sincerity in the poet’s prayers. He no longer abuses substances in pursuit of reckless ecstasy but in search of relief from a creeping certainty that life is pointless.

Martyr! - A Novel

By Kaveh Akbar

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The central philosophical concern of Akbar’s novel, then, is the fact that, as much as people might try to impose a narrative on their biography, life isn’t literature. The problem is that when human existence seems more like a string of arbitrary occurrences than a story with a discernible arc, finding meaning in it can be difficult. Doing so comes more naturally to those who believe that each and every life is determined by a divine author: God. Others might choose to identify with hackneyed, ready-made tropes: the Drunken Supplicant, the Recovering Addict, the Immigrant Redeemed by Hardship. But Cyrus struggles to believe in God and has a congenital allergy to cliché. Hence the existential crisis that opens the novel: Who, having fled emptiness down a path that leads to licking fentanyl off a chessboard, wouldn’t give everything to believe in something—anything—strongly enough to be willing to die for it?

By the time the novel properly begins, Cyrus Shams has become a regular at the local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Though he’s got enough sense to realize that he’s better off without drugs, he feels about sobriety like he feels about everything else—ambivalent. Akbar’s protagonist is both too cynical and too sophisticated to swallow the received ideas that allow his happier peers to transform the decision to quit into a redemption tale. Again and again, Cyrus resists surrendering to the tropes that others try to foist on him. It’s not just the tiresome recovery journey of Alcoholics Anonymous. His intolerance for such notions also prevents him from adopting the cloying melodrama that some Americans expect their foreign-born neighbors to recite: the mawkish tale of the immigrant experience.

On the surface, the story of how Cyrus came to live in Indiana rather than in his native Tehran contains all the necessary elements of that ready-made soap opera. After the poet’s mother dies a senseless, violent death shortly after his birth, Cyrus’s bereaved father tries to flee her memory by emigrating to the United States to work at an industrial chicken farm. The older Shams makes little money and fewer friends. He leaves for work before dawn and comes home late in the evening, arms covered in deep scratches inflicted by terrified birds, only to proceed to drink enough cheap gin to lull himself to sleep. He’s not a bad drunk or even a bad father; he offers his son the best love his broken heart can muster. Then, shortly after Cyrus moves away for college, his father dies.

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A different version of Cyrus might have constructed a predictable tale out of such materials. The classic immigrant narrative is one of generational sacrifice, in which parents who leave everything behind to bring their offspring to America have a tendency to work themselves to death in hopes of giving their families “a better life.” This, of course, is a heavy burden on their children, many of whom feel ambivalent about this sacrifice, in part because they resent the expectations that accompany it. In the end, however, those children are expected to see that their existence has a purpose—for the simple reason that they can trace its origins to their parents’ martyrdom.

But Cyrus is too invested in being an individual to avail himself of a sentimental origin story. His father may have displayed the resigned abnegation of a minor saint, but was he a martyr? He didn’t die for his son but rather for the company that owns the chicken farm; the profits the owners of the operation derived from exploiting him are far greater than the meager pay he brought home to Cyrus. That’s worse than dying for no reason: There’s nothing glorious or redemptive about spending decades rummaging through chicken shit.

Cyrus Shams is in trouble. It turns out that the meaning of life is not to be found in drugs or in recovery or in the sacrifice of the immigrant father—not even in prayer. No wonder the poet begins to ask himself whether it might not be found in a meaningful death. But Cyrus is an aesthete, not a man of action. And so, instead of setting himself on fire, he begins to write a book about martyrs. At times, it seems almost as if the enterprise is an elaborate suicide note. But as the novel progresses—alternating between descriptions of the evolution of Cyrus’s book over the course of a few days in Brooklyn and lyrical first-person monologues in the voices of his Iranian relatives—it becomes clear that our would-be martyr might find a reason to stay on this earth.

Akbar is an award-winning poet—the author of the collections Portrait of the Alcoholic and Pilgrim Bell, as well as the editor of the Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse—and his novel revisits many of the themes of his poetry. Here are a few lines that appeared in Poetry magazine in 2016 and read like a dress rehearsal for the opening of Martyr!:

Even some of the neologisms carry from verse to prose. The poem’s “earth-father” becomes the novel’s “earth martyr,” a concept suggested to Cyrus by an Iranian artist with terminal cancer who has chosen to end her life in public at the Brooklyn Museum, and who, as both the reader and Cyrus later find out, happens to be an important figure in his life:

“You’re talking about people who die for other people. Not dying for glory or an impressable God. Not the promise of a sunny afterlife for themselves. You’re talking about earth martyrs.” Cyrus’s eyes widened. “Earth martyrs—that’s good.”

To Akbar’s credit, the novel improves upon the poem. In Martyr!, he allows himself the devious pleasures of irony. The least generous reader might wonder who, in their right mind, says “That’s good” about their own writing, much less writing that is a reiteration of their own writing. But consider a line that comes shortly after the passage I just quoted: To Cyrus, the notion of an earth martyr “was a tidy, gallant idea about leaving life for something larger than mere living.” The word gallant feels too grand to be sincere. Akbar, though, is in on the joke. After all, there are few things more laughable than a poet who thinks of himself as a martyr.

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I don’t believe that critics should reduce a work of fiction to an op-ed. In this case, however, I can’t help asking: What does Akbar’s novel make of political martyrdom—a category that has become especially charged in recent months, as Israeli strikes in Gaza kill tens of thousands of civilians while Hamas leaders declare that Palestine is “a nation of martyrs”?

Akbar is too wise to offer a straightforward answer, but at times he appears to be presenting a critique of the concept. This is clearest in his discussion of the death of Cyrus’s mother, Roya, whom the protagonist describes as being “turned … into dust” after a U.S. warship shot down the Iranian airliner on which she was a passenger. Allegedly, the ship had mistaken it for a fighter aircraft. (This plot point is based on real life—in 1988, Iran Air 655 was felled by U.S. Navy missiles.) The fact that she died at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s enemies automatically means that, to some of her countrymen, she died a martyr. Her death meant something—and therefore so did her life. But Roya didn’t die after running into a burning building to save her infant child, or standing before a tank in Tiananmen Square. Many people understandably want to see victims as martyrs. The unsettling question that Akbar’s novel seems to pose is whether reaching for such exalted categories isn’t just a refusal to face the fact that the death of victims is as senseless as any other kind of death.

Akbar’s novel isn’t about recovery or migration, but about the bewildering fact that we are born and then we die—and that’s it. How, then, can one find purpose in life? I prefer not to reveal much about the—somewhat implausible but nonetheless effective—plot twist that comes toward the end of the novel and recasts the whole story in a new light. Instead, I’ll limit myself to stating the obvious: In writing this novel about a would-be martyr lost amid the banal clichés and tired stories Americans tell themselves in order to live, Akbar has shown that the only way to make meaning out of meaninglessness is to become the author of our own story.