Kaveh Akbar's Narratives of Love

Cyrus becomes obsessed with martyrdom as an idea, believing that a meaningful death will retroactively imbue value into what he perceives to be his meaningless life. Akbar later told me that if the title was just Martyr—without the exclamation point — it would have seemed relentless, dour and self-important. ​“It’s not for me to say whether the final book is those things, but I hope it isn’t,” Akbar noted with an uptilted smile. ​“The title of the book is sort of grammatically enacting what the book, narratively, is exploring,” he added.

Akbar and I spoke about what it means to be a martyr in today’s world, the moral crisis we’re facing, and his newfound writing practice.

KAVEH AKBAR: It was a real event that happened. On July 3, 1988, an American military vessel, USS Vincennes, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Strait of Hormuz, killing 290 people on board, including 66 children. The vast majority of Americans don’t know about it. It’s certainly not taught. The fact that most people don’t know about it isn’t surprising in and of itself; what is really interesting is that, when I mention it to audiences who don’t know about it, nobody frantically pulls out their phone and says, ​“Oh my God, no way that happened.” Nobody is taken aback by this information. The idea that 290 innocent people can be shot out of the sky and everyone just agrees that it’s the unpleasant but necessary operating cost of being a world military superpower — our tolerance for civilian death feels like a moral crisis when you look at the death tolls in Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan or Ukraine, and the vast ambivalence of the ruling class in this regard when presented with that data.

With literature, we’re all touching different parts of the world. I’m touching the part that is interested in the Iran Air Flight 655 disaster. Darwish was touching a lived Palestinian experience. Hikmet was talking about being imprisoned in Turkey. Wheatley was talking about being enslaved in America. We have all of these different people touching different parts of human experience, and when you read them all in concert, you begin to get a glimpse of the whole.

KA: There has never not been a time like this. I think that maybe more people are tuned in because of social media, but settler colonialism has been happening in Palestine since 1948; this country is built on native genocide and chattel slavery. We have always been murdering people who look and pray like me. That has never not been the case. 

I read Darwish and feel like he’s incredibly contemporary. I read Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Enheduanna, Li Po, Rumi and Hafez, and I feel like they’re talking directly about what is happening right now. I don’t know if our nature, our cruelty, our endless regression into tribalism and malice, has ever really improved as a species. We have better medicine and technology, we have computers and stuff, but at the heart of things, history doesn’t seem to suggest that we’ve gotten a whole lot further than the Sumerian state.

KA: The notion that poetry and prose are isolated modes of contemplation, with an individual specializing in either one or the other, feels very new and European American. We have a million novels written by poets: Walker’s The Color Purple, Berryman’s Recovery. Lucretius writes his scientific findings, On the Nature of Things, in poetry. The idea of these as isolated modes of contemplation just doesn’t bear out historically. I had this idea in mind for a story and quickly recognized that it was not a narrative that my lyric could accommodate. That’s not to say that narrative lyric does not exist — Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah is an extraordinary narrative written entirely in poems, but my lyric doesn’t move that way. 

I was going to have to deploy a different tool set, so I began studying narrative art. I read two novels a week and watched a movie a day, doing so kleptomaniacally. Watching what Bergman had an actor do with their hands while they were being yelled at, or how Toni Morrison gives the floor plan of the house in dialogue — these sorts of gestures were what poetry hadn’t prepared me for.

KA: Reading is a conversation with other creatives. When you read a book by a dead author, you might cry, you might laugh. I have always thought of writing as a way to whisper into this conversation that has preceded me by millennia and will continue long after the last person forgets my name. To that end, I started a website where I call my favorite poets and they tell me their secrets, then I publish these conversations for other people to read too. Many people were very gracious and glad to do it: Claudia Rankine, Sharon Olds, Fady Joudah. 

Teaching myself narrative was the same thing. I didn’t know how to do it, so I went and asked the experts. The experts, in many cases, were dead, but you can still tug on their shirt sleeves. I read a lot of Woolf, Borges, Nabokov and Morrison. I often joke with my students that my job could be replaced with a library card and I’m only half joking. If you want to know how to do this thing, just go to the library and spend the ass and chair time learning how to do it.

KA: Cyrus didn’t come into the novel organically. He was the solution to a narrative problem that I was having in early drafting. In the novel, the artist Orkideh is a character who performs her own death at the Brooklyn Museum. She has a terminal cancer diagnosis and isn’t taking medicine for it, so she spends the last two weeks of her life just sitting in the Brooklyn Museum, having conversations with museumgoers. She just sat there in a kind of Marina Abramović artist-is-present sort of way. So the whole novel was just going to have different people who had conversations with her. I quickly realized, after writing a few of those chapters, that it wasn’t particularly narratively compelling. Cyrus came into the book not as me trying to write myself, but as the solution to a narrative problem. I asked myself, what if Orkideh was talking to someone like me, who has a lot of my shared identity markers? He’s my age-ish, man born in Iran, living in America, he’s a poet, he’s an addict in recovery. All of these are identity markers that we share.

KA: While I was writing this novel, I was also working on an anthology called The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. So while I was spending my time in the minds of these characters, I was also spending time in ancient Mesopotamia, reading antipodean Aboriginal epics, or sub-Saharan African oral poetries, or Mesoamerican poetics. I was deeply immersed in all of these different global historical spiritual traditions. That immersion is everywhere in the novel.

KA: That’s a painful scene. My sense is that Cyrus sees his life as fundamentally meaningless because he believes that such meaning can only be formed in relation to other people, and he feels like he is alone after being orphaned. He doesn’t have any family in America, right? I don’t want to put my thumb on the scale too hard, but there’s plenty of evidence in the book to suggest that he’s not alone, and Cyrus’ ability to recognize that love is being freely offered to him is really the protons and the neutrons that make up the atom throughout the novel. That’s the nucleus.

KA: Queer people dying for love is a narrative trope I’m very skeptical of. Most major characters in the book are queer. For Cyrus, everything is an existential crisis. Everything — from the cup of coffee he buys to the kind of shoes he wears to the ethics of yoga — all of these things are an existential crisis for him, except for who he sleeps with. I like writing a book about a queer protagonist for whom queerness is not like the load-bearing existential crisis. He is not conflicted about coming out to his family or doing any of these terminals through which the neoliberal reader might expect a queer character to pass.

KA: If I had an answer to what one does with pain, I’d be running a megachurch or something. I can say that most spiritual traditions of interest to me seem to agree that pain is aggravated by attempts to diminish or relieve it; these things tend to just exacerbate the pain, multiply it, deepen it and complicate it. When I was a kid, I used to be fascinated by the fact that, when I was sad, I wanted to listen to sad music. Later in life, my understanding of that phenomenon is that what I wanted to hear was: ​“I was sad too and I lived to sing about it.” That feels more powerful to me than someone saying, ​“Don’t be sad, be happy,” which feels pretty impotent against a genocide in Gaza or the downing of a civilian aircraft. ​“Don’t be sad, be happy” feels almost immoral in the light of the occasions for grief with which we are presented in the 21^st century.

KA: The word martyr suggests that someone willfully gave their life for a higher power, whether that higher power is terrestrial or cosmic. Cyrus is troubled by the limits of that taxonomy. At one point, he says, ​“I want a definition of the word martyr that can accommodate someone like my mother, whose death was just sort of a rounding error.” He says, if it had been 289 or 291 people, the significance of the event, geopolitically, wouldn’t have shifted. So he wants a definition of the word that can accommodate both her and his dad, who both died on the same day. I think Cyrus wants a definition of the word martyr that can accommodate his uncle, Arash, who served in the Iraq War and then had some form of PTSD, spending the rest of his life just being cared for. 

I think there are politicized valences of the word martyr, in both Iran and America. Look at how we were talking about healthcare workers during the Covid crisis, talking about their heroism and sacrifice, which is sort of laying the track for us to accept their deaths as inevitable when, in fact, their deaths were the result of myriad systemic and political failures. We do the exact same thing here as they did in Iran. We just do it under the guise of this kind of necro-capitalism, whereas in Iran, they do it in the rhetoric of necro-Islam. 

But it’s the same impulse. Political actors obscure their failures, their malice, their greed and their ambivalence, with the rhetoric of martyrdom.