Addiction and Identity

POETY LIVES IN RECOVERY –

Jan. 23, 2024 – Poet Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, Martyr!, explores themes of addiction and sobriety, grief and grace, trauma and love. Rich with Daedalian prose, this semi-autobiographical bildungsroman tells the story of Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian American poet and recovering alcoholic.

Born in Iran but currently living in an Indiana college town, Cyrus is drifting, purposeless, and largely unattached. A couple of years into sobriety, he is struggling to learn how to live and write again. The high-highs and the low-lows mostly disappeared when he quit drinking, but the poet wrestles with understanding what remains, what meaning his life holds. His days are loosely constructed around a few people. He is removed from the world, mourning his isolation while also nursing it.

This apartness is rooted in his family history. Akbar weaves his own with Cyrus’ experiences to create an intricate tapestry of a narrative. Cyrus grew up in the U.S., with his father moving from Iran to escape the grief of losing his mother, who died when her flight to Dubai was accidentally shot down. As a novelist, Akbar skillfully fuses fiction with history, modeling this aspect of the story on the real-life tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial airliner that was mistakenly attacked by the USS Vincennes in 1988. The book grapples with what it means, politically and personally, that this kind of tragedy can kill hundreds of people, leaving others—like Cyrus—forever traumatized, and yet be largely unremembered by many Americans.