Week Five: Martyr!
JULY 10, 2024 • CAMP TOB WEEK FIVE
Martyr!
first half discussion
Welcome back to Camp ToB 2024! Thanks again for joining us.
With the holiday behind us, it’s a new month around here, and that means it’s time to inaugurate our midsummer vibe—“magic is all around us”—and welcome a new book and Activity Leader. This week and next we’ll be discussing Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, and here to guide us through the book is the Commentariat’s very own Kate B.!
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.
This has been excerpted from the publisher’s summary and edited for length.
Hello Kate, and welcome to Camp ToB! Can you tell us where you’re writing from?
I live in Atlantic Canada, where ToB decisions typically go up shortly before lunchtime.
And how long have you been following the Tournament?
A little over a decade. I signed up to comment in 2017, and I started going out of my way to read along in 2018.
Excellent, and can you tell us a little about yourself as a reader?
I say that I like to read anything as long as it’s good, but my bookshelves are full of queer fiction, mysteries that vaguely remind me of Dorothy L. Sayers, slightly artsy graphic novels, and souvenirs of dozens of nonfiction rabbit holes. My library loan history is all that plus romance novels and ToB competitors.
Thanks again for being here, Kate, and now take it away with your discussion questions! (This week we’ll discuss up to chapter 12, then next week it’s the whole book.)
1.
We can’t not talk about martyrdom, given Cyrus’s fixation on a meaningful, intentional death. Did you also grow up with a favourite martyr or two? Can a good death bring meaning to an otherwise lackluster life? Or are you more aligned with Ali, for whom “Living happened until it didn’t?”
2.
The artist Orkideh deflates Cyrus by declaring that he ticks “all the Persian checkboxes” between his focus on martyrdom and his interest in being a poet. Is this the classic “it's not hackneyed if I have a character call it out” novelist defense? Or is Akbar pointing at something bigger by having Cyrus try to distinguish himself from “all that cult-of-the-martyr stuff,” and by having him arrive at these interests through intensely personal experiences (even if those experiences result from international conflicts)?
3.
Is Cyrus the least interesting character in this book? I find myself looking forward to the chapters narrated by anyone else, even though I recognize that he's more than a little exhausting on purpose. I genuinely have no idea what a satisfying arc would look like for him—where do you think things are going?
4.
And what of the exclamation mark in the title? To me, it evokes Amy Poehler in Mean Girls—I’m not like a regular martyr, I’m a cool martyr! But I hope each of you has a different distinctive voice/tone in your head that you’ll describe in the comments.