Chapter summaries Martyr! Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus and Ali Shams: Chapter 9 Summary

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Chapter 9 traces Cyrus Shams’s early life in Indiana, where his childhood night terrors gradually gave way to chronic insomnia. As a boy, Cyrus lay awake each night replaying the day’s small slights and imagined offenses, convinced that everyone he had accidentally ignored would remember him forever. He also worried about deportation, though he barely understood his father’s visa status. Ali had taught Cyrus to answer “where are you from” with “I don’t remember,” insisting that revealing his Iranianness would invite violence. This vagueness kept Cyrus awake as much as the fears themselves.

Ali worked at a nearby industrial chicken farm, waking at 4:30 each morning to arrive an hour early and earn an extra $1.25 per hour. With that extra money, he bought a Big Mouth Billy Bass, a mounted rubber fish that sang a digitized version of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Both father and son loved this ridiculous decoration with a lack of irony that the chapter emphasizes. Years later, after Ali’s death, the singing fish would be one of the few relics Cyrus kept.

The two Shams men lived alone in America. Once a year on Nowruz, they called Uncle Arash, Ali’s dead wife’s brother. Ali explained that Arash had served in the Persian army during the Iran-Iraq War, where his job was to dress in a black cloak, ride a horse across battlefields at night, and shine a flashlight under his face to appear as an angel. The dying soldiers believed they were seeing Gabriel or the twelfth imam, and Arash watched hundreds of men die. This left him permanently sick—unable to hold a job, often sleepless, seeing ghouls and demons, and sometimes still wearing his black robes and speaking to the Angel Gabriel. The annual Nowruz call always carried an unmistakable grief, as Arash had lost his parents, his sister, and then his brother-in-law and nephew to his ghosts.

In America, Ali drank gin every night to fall asleep, justifying it as a controlled, pharmaceutical necessity. He called people who drank for pleasure “low people” and warned Cyrus that they died from it. Cyrus, meanwhile, struggled to sleep. He tried meditation, bargaining with God, and eventually invented imaginary dialogues between his personal heroes—his father speaking to Michael Jordan, his crush to Madonna, Batman to Emily Dickinson. Sometimes these dialogues would drift into actual dreams, and they became the only way he could hear his mother’s voice.

When Cyrus left for Keady University, he began drinking immediately. He got drunk for the first time at a party during freshman orientation, and within a month he was drinking nightly, experimenting with weed and benzodiazepines, and once trying heroin. He also started having sex and smoking cigarettes, describing the experience as being born into new feelings. His father died of a sudden stroke at the start of Cyrus’s sophomore year. The chicken farm workers made a memorial posterboard, which Cyrus later threw into a dumpster. He felt mostly empty rather than lonely, and he admitted to himself that he should have died on the plane with his mother, but he had been left home.

Cyrus managed his grief by drinking more and using more. He manipulated the university’s counseling services into prescriptions for Xanax, Adderall, Ambien, Neurontin, and Flexeril, then traded these drugs for street drugs and alcohol. He took a grief leave, deferred semesters, and cycled through lovers, friends, and counselors. Alcohol became his “true love,” faithful and predictable. During these years he slept easily, though sometimes the night terrors returned, and he would wake speaking gibberish or unconsciously drink from the fridge. He often wet himself and cleaned up with exasperated resolve.

After years of this, Cyrus got sober, but his insomnia became worse than ever. The only thing that helped was returning to the dream dialogue game. Sometimes he would jot down phrases for his writing, and occasionally the script would write itself, allowing him to reunite with his father and, after years of dreamless silence, to start talking with his mother again.

Key Events

  • Cyrus’s childhood night terrors are replaced by chronic insomnia, which he experiences consciously.
  • Ali buys a Big Mouth Billy Bass with his extra early-morning pay; the fish becomes a beloved family object.
  • The Shams men make annual Nowruz calls to Uncle Arash, a war veteran who posed as an angel on the battlefield and now suffers severe mental illness.
  • Ali explains Arash’s wartime role and its psychological aftermath.
  • Cyrus invents imaginary dialogues with heroes to occupy his mind during sleepless nights.
  • Cyrus leaves for Keady University and begins drinking and using drugs within his first month.
  • Ali dies of a stroke during Cyrus’s sophomore year.
  • Cyrus takes grief leave, obtains multiple prescriptions, and builds a drug-trading economy.
  • After years of heavy use, Cyrus gets sober, but his insomnia worsens.
  • Cyrus resumes his dream dialogues and eventually reconnects with his father and mother.

Character Development

Cyrus is shown as a child shaped by anxiety and fear—fear of deportation, of social missteps, of his father’s unpredictable violence. His insomnia becomes a lifelong companion, and his coping mechanisms evolve from meditation and bargaining to imaginary dialogues, then to alcohol and drugs, and finally back to the dialogues in sobriety. The chapter reveals his survivor’s guilt: he believes he should have died on the plane with his mother, and after his father’s death he feels a crushing emptiness rather than grief. His eventual return to the dream dialogues suggests a fragile path toward connection with the dead.

Ali is portrayed as a hardworking immigrant father who sacrifices sleep and health for his son. His nightly gin drinking is framed as a necessity, not a vice, and he draws a sharp line between his own controlled use and the “low people” who drink for pleasure. His death is presented as almost inevitable—he had lived only to ensure Cyrus’s safe passage into adulthood. The chapter also shows his tenderness through the singing fish and his attempts to explain Arash’s trauma.

Uncle Arash appears only through Ali’s stories and the annual phone calls, but he embodies the lasting cost of war. His role as a fake angel who watched hundreds of men die leaves him permanently haunted, and his grief is compounded by losing his entire family. He serves as a mirror to Cyrus’s own struggles with sleeplessness and visions.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

  • Insomnia as a state of heightened awareness: Cyrus’s sleeplessness forces him to confront his anxieties, but it also becomes a space for creativity and connection with the dead.
  • The singing fish symbolizes the small, absurd joys that bind father and son, and later becomes a relic of memory after Ali’s death.
  • The angel deception highlights the moral ambiguity of comforting lies—Arash’s performance gave dying men peace but destroyed him.
  • Immigrant anxiety and identity concealment: Ali’s instruction to say “I don’t remember” reflects the constant fear of violence and deportation.
  • Alcohol as a double-edged tool: Ali uses it as a pharmaceutical necessity, while Cyrus uses it as an escape; both are self-medicating.
  • Dream dialogues as a means of reconnecting with the dead: The game that began as a way to pass sleepless nights becomes the only way Cyrus can hear his mother’s voice again.
  • Survivor’s guilt and parentlessness: Cyrus’s belief that he should have died on the plane with his mother colors his grief and emptiness.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter provides the foundational backstory for Cyrus’s entire adult life. It explains his insomnia, his substance abuse, his survivor’s guilt, and his eventual turn to writing and dream dialogues. It also introduces Uncle Arash, whose wartime trauma and angelic deception resonate with the novel’s broader questions about martyrdom, faith, and the stories we tell to comfort the dying. The chapter establishes the father-son bond that Cyrus will spend much of the novel trying to understand and honor, and it sets up the emotional stakes for his later quest to find meaning in his own life.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Cyrus’s childhood insomnia shape his later coping mechanisms?

Cyrus’s insomnia forces him to develop internal strategies—meditation, bargaining with God, and imaginary dialogues—to occupy his restless mind. These strategies later fail him, and he turns to alcohol and drugs as more immediate escapes. After sobriety, he returns to the dream dialogues, which become the only way he can reconnect with his parents. The insomnia thus drives both his destructive and his creative paths.

2. What role does Uncle Arash play in the chapter, and how does his story connect to the novel’s themes?

Arash is a war veteran who posed as an angel to comfort dying soldiers, but the experience left him permanently mentally ill. His story introduces the theme of deception as a form of mercy, and it parallels Cyrus’s own attempts to create meaning through stories. Arash’s isolation and grief also mirror Cyrus’s parentlessness, and his annual Nowruz calls serve as a reminder of the family Cyrus has lost.

3. Why does Cyrus throw away the memorial posterboard from his father’s coworkers?

The posterboard, decorated with farm photographs and dollar-store letters, depresses Cyrus in a way he cannot name. It represents a version of Ali that Cyrus cannot reconcile with his own grief—a man defined by his labor and his quiet resignation. Throwing it away is an act of rejection, perhaps of the idea that Ali’s life can be reduced to a cheerful memorial, or of the painful reminder that his father is truly gone.

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