Kaveh Akbar Delivers a Wholly Unique Debut Novel

Books coverageShondaland
Written By Shelbi Polk
originally Published: Jan 26, 2024

In “Martyr!,” Cyrus battles with an addiction and becomes enamored by religion and all that it promises.

In his first novel, Martyr!, poet and educator Kaveh Akbar takes on addiction, religion, and displacement with a tender touch. None of these is a new subject for Akbar. He is also the author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and Portrait of the Alcoholic, which mine similar experiences.

The main character of Martyr! is Cyrus, an Iranian American poet whose biographical details bear a striking resemblance to Akbar’s. But (as Akbar shares below) his own life wasn’t the impetus for the novel, and some of the most important parts of Cyrus’ story, like losing his mother in the (very real) Iran Air Flight 655 tragedy, were fictionalized. Instead, Akbar set off on a strict course of reading to study narrative writing to craft the greater forces affecting Cyrus.

The impact of the tragedy on Cyrus’ father prompts questions about identity, survival, and the ways that we apply meaning to, well, anything. Along the way, there are poems from Cyrus, dream juxtapositions, and poignant meditations on some of the extremes of living.

Shondaland sat down with Akbar to talk about the differences between writing poetry and prose, the links between religion and addiction, and the point of reading at all.

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SHELBI POLK: Tell me about the move from poetry to fiction. How and/or why did that happen?

KAVEH AKBAR: I have thought of myself as a poet since I was a teenager. I've called myself a poet, I've written poetry, I've declared to the world that I am a poet. It's the only identity marker that has really been of much value to me for a big chunk of my life. So, it was, and is, scary, exciting, joyful, thrilling, and vertiginous to try stepping foot into another genre. I put myself on this narrative crash course of reading two novels a week and watching a movie a day just to try to teach myself how narrative works, just to learn the beats. I didn't want to assume hubristically that because I know how to write poems, or because I've thought about writing poems a lot, that I would automatically know the impossibly difficult art of writing narrative. In fact, I've increasingly found there to be not very much overlap between the two. I mean, certainly both are forms of language art, and I enjoy language art. And I enjoy thinking about the way that the auras around words might usefully or interestingly illuminate or complicate each other. But things like getting people into cars, to have conversations, and things like that, it's just totally outside my wheelhouse. So, yeah, it's just been thrilling to learn. It's been a profound delight.

SP: Obviously, there's a difference in the mechanism and craft between the two, but do you think that poetry and fiction serve much of the same purpose? Is that one of the differences as well?

KA: Well, the purpose of a poem or a novel is sort of bespoke every time a person encounters it, right? The first time I read [Toni Morrison's] The Bluest Eye, the work that it did in my life felt profoundly different than the last time I read The Bluest Eye. A purpose of my writing a poem might be wildly different from its purpose in the life of a reader. So, it's hard to say anything empirically true about the similarity or difference between the purpose of poetry as a whole or the purpose of fiction as a whole, other than to say, of course, there are overlaps. And there are differences as those purposes are created anew every time that text is encountered.

SP: That makes the places where the genre distinctions blur very interesting too. So, it makes sense that Martyr! is a very poetry-saturated novel.

KA: Yeah, there are straight-up poems. I wrote new poems that I hope work as good poems in the voice of a character for the novel. It's not even just a novel orbiting poetry, but I also don't necessarily think of it as a lyric novel, whatever that means. I think it is a meat-and-potatoes, novel-ly novel, right? There's sort of mystery, there are characters, they undergo arcs. It's written in prose that has no aspirations towards calling itself poetry. But there are poems in it, which is a strange distinction to say, a novel with poetry that is not a lyric novel, right?

SP: It's so tied to plot and characterizations in a way that quote-unquote lyric novels are not.

KA: Totally. I mean, so many of these distinctions ... "Poet" was a useful taxonomization for me for a long time, and alcoholic addict has been a useful taxonomization for me just practically. There haven't been a lot of other taxonomizations that I found particularly useful. You know, if someone calls me Persian American or Iranian American, that is perhaps a useful shorthand for them. But to me, that just grammatically subordinates Iranian to American, right? "Iranian" is the word that modifies the word "American" in that construction. And it's equally incorrect to say, "American Iranian," you know what I mean? I'm just very dubious of who such classification serves and therefore tend to be pretty skeptical of their application to my own work. And I feel similarly about genre categorizations.

SP: Do you think that there is a link between religion—not spirituality, but this absolutist fervor that we associate with martyrs of any religion—and addiction? They felt very related in this novel.

KA: I absolutely do, but I don't know that I have a more irreducible utterance about it than, you know, this tome that I've already created. I think that I'm speaking just for myself. It's funny, this novel, as I move away from it, is encountering people like you for the first time in its life. People are asking illuminating, smart, insightful things about it that I had never really considered and seeing things that I wasn't consciously aware of that existed in it. It's becoming in the way that everything one produces and gives to the world becomes its own thing, right? So, I'm trying to be cognizant about not saying, "This is what the novel thinks," but "This is what I think," right? Because the person that I am now is discrete from the artifact that I have produced. 

But I will say that for me, Kaveh Akbar, my active addiction was a time of absolute certainty. I was torn from the country of my birth and plopped into this country where it seemed like I didn't really belong. And neither did I belong in that other country. I can never go back in this lifetime. So, I was certain that I was owed some cosmic restitution, right? And that entitled me to behave boorishly, to be negligent of the interiority of others, to be cruel, to be dismissive, to do whatever I wanted to do. That certainty was deeply, deeply corrosive to my living. And that is also the certainty that hurtles one toward a kind of religious fanaticism that gives one the idea that they have everything figured out enough that they can harm others or harm themselves. Just speaking very boldly about myself, the idea that I should know more than the universe that is presented this day before me... it's a function of my own ego. Like I don't deserve all this. I don't deserve to be talking with a smart reporter about this novel when so many people like me didn't make it. That's something... I struggle with a lot. A kind of survivor's guilt, which is still ultimately born of hubris, right? But yeah, the relationship between certainty and zealotry and addiction, I think, is profound and endlessly fertile to me.

“...The character of Cyrus came into shape through drafting, and dreaming, and imagining, and just working at the language until it led me to him.”

SP: Those moments when Cyrus was looking back at how fun his addiction could be, and how beautiful everything felt, really struck me. Being sold on a religious cause feels like that at times too. It's so comforting and warm and joyful. And then, oops, it's not.

KA: Yeah, exactly. And it's funny too; once you get sober, once you leave that kind of religious fervor, everything is so muted in both directions, right? It's like the highs will never be as high as rolling on Molly while eating shrooms. The highest will never be that high, just physiologically. But neither will the lows be as low as pouring Everclear on myself and trying to light myself on fire in a bath. You know what I mean? So, acclimating to life in this comparatively denuded middle, you learn to differentiate between pleasure and joy. You learn the ways that a kind of longitudinal happiness can feel more fulfilling than the immediate gratification of just an on-demand pleasure button, but I still struggle with it. I've been sober for 10 and a half years, and I still struggle with it. There is a part of my brain that will never go away for which all of this is a consolation prize: the life in art, being married to my best friend, the puppy noodling behind me. All of this is a consolation prize for an eight ball, a handle of Old Crow, and a sh--ty motel for a weekend. And that's so strange. It's so inarticulable. 

SP: I'm curious: These are things you've written about in poetry. Was Cyrus an avatar? How was he conceived?

KA: Yeah, actually, the artist came first, before Cyrus. The idea of [a Marina] Abramović-esque artist's present performance of one's own dying was the precipitating force behind the earliest vignettes that would become scenes in this novel. So, Orkideh came first, then an interlocutor. I'm an over-writer. I write a ton, and I publish very little. So, I have a billion, trillion versions of every scene in this book. And the earliest drafts were just sitting with this ocular, gnomic, dying woman, where she delivers insights. The interlocutor was just kind of a begging bowl, there to receive the wisdom from this font of illumination before she died. I recognized quite quickly that, narratively, that wouldn't really work. The reader had to have some investment in both agents in that conversation.

So, the Iran Air Flight 655 disaster is something that has occupied a large portion of my consciousness my whole life. My mother was pregnant with me in Iran when it happened. So, just imagining the lost-children posters she would be looking at, or the martyred-children posters, in the market or in the mosque... I've never spoken with her about this. But the awareness that the children on those posters, some of them probably look the way her child would look, and the uncanniness of that emotionally, spiritually, and epigenetically. So, in thinking about a way to create a story around this performance and also having been obsessed with this particular massacre my whole life, the character of Cyrus came into shape through drafting, and dreaming, and imagining, and just working at the language until it led me to him.

SP: That is not what I would have expected from reading it, but it totally makes sense to build these stories backward.

KA: That's gratifying to hear. Hopefully, when you read it, it feels like he was inevitable, you know? He's just always been in both directions. Obviously, he's my-ish age, an addict poet, Iranian. There are obvious autobiographical symmetries. But I also sometimes feel like the artist is the character who I relate to the most. Not to be reflexively provocative or antagonistic, but the more I move away from the book, the more I feel like the artist's psychic load-out most resembles my own. Though, again, the autobiographical load-out of Cyrus certainly is pretty similar, and many of the things that happened to Cyrus in the book are just autofiction.

SP: It felt to me like one of the main tensions in the novel was what meaning means, or maybe the source of meaning. It seemed like Cyrus would talk about creating meaning when he was really reaching for connection. Like a meaning created by agreement versus a meaning that intrinsically, actually mattered to the individual. That tension was really fascinating to me because it hit on so many different elements: art, death, family, and love.

KA: That's beautiful. I love that idea. You know, I've been reading poems in front of audiences since I was 15, 16. I've spent a lot of my time trying to curry the favor of strangers. You recognize that there are two kinds of applause there. There's the kind where the audience is like, "Yes, I agree with that." And then, there's the applause from encountering an unprecedented experience that is still somehow resonant, right? This is a book about an Iranian addict poet living in America obsessed with martyrdom. If I did a census to find every Iranian American addict poet living in the Midwest obsessed with martyrdom, there wouldn't be a lot of people, right? But the idea is that you create a kind of unprecedented experience in the language, and then people recognize resonances, despite their superficial dissimilarity. To say in words what others have felt but never spoken is one of the great thrills of language art, and I think that this book is not particularly interested in batting my eyelashes at the reader and being like, "I'm so handsome, and my ethical fitness is immaculate, and all of my thoughts are good." It's more like "I'm making the aperture of the camera as wide as I can, while also staying as granular as I can."

 
Shelbi Polk
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