Ali Shams Character Analysis in Martyr!

Overview of Ali Shams in Martyr! (2024) by Kaveh Akbar — Character Analysis of Cyrus's Father, the Iranian Immigrant Who Raised Him Alone in Indiana, and the Quiet Counterpoint to the Novel's Obsession with Martyrs and Meaningful Deaths. This guide covers Ali's plot role, motivations, chronological arc, relationships, key decisions, and thematic significance, with five book-specific questions and answers. It distinguishes what the text explicitly states from interpretive readings, and includes links to related themes and the ending explained page. Ali Shams is Cyrus's father and the novel's most grounded figure of endurance. He appears directly in only a handful of chapters, but his presence shapes the entire narrative: Cyrus's grief, his questions about martyrdom, his relationship to Iran, and his understanding of what it means to survive loss. Ali is an Iranian immigrant who works at a chicken breeder farm in Fort Wayne, Indiana, raising Cyrus alone after Roya's presumed death on the downed flight. He dies of a stroke during Cyrus's sophomore year of college, leaving Cyrus to reckon with a life built almost entirely around his son's survival. Where Cyrus obsesses over martyrs—people whose deaths carry dramatic meaning—Ali's life is defined by the opposite: repetitive labor, small rituals, and the quiet work of raising a child. His chapters (17, 39, and the flashbacks in 6 and 9) provide the domestic texture of Cyrus's childhood and the specific conditions of their immigrant life in Indiana. In the dream sequence of Chapter 39, Ali appears to Cyrus after death, meeting Rumi outside a music venue. This chapter is crucial because it allows Ali to voice his private doubts—his suspicion that Roya may have been unfaithful, his uncertainty about whether Cyrus will survive his own darkness—and to receive reassurance from Rumi that Cyrus will write a great book and will not necessarily kill himself. The dream gives Cyrus (and the reader) access to Ali's inner life in a way his living chapters never quite do. Ali's primary motivation is Cyrus's survival and well-being. This is shown through a series of concrete actions: He wakes at 4:30 a.m. to arrive at the chicken farm by 5:30, six days a week, for nineteen years. He comes in an hour earlier than his coworkers for an extra $1.25 an hour, which he tells Cyrus about frequently. He cooks big pots of stew on Saturdays so they can eat through the week. He quits smoking on arriving in America as a cost-saving measure. He buys gin in bulk to help himself sleep, framing his drinking as controlled and pharmaceutical rather than recreational. He cautions Cyrus to answer where-are-you-from questions with I don't remember, believing that announcing Iranianness invites violence. Ali's traits emerge through these actions: discipline, sacrifice, stoicism, and a deep, often unspoken love for his son. He is not demonstrative—Cyrus notes that Ali rarely expressed deep joy about anything and that his granite features seemed to operate only out of resignation to necessity, obligation. But his care is evident in the routines he maintains and the small pleasures he creates: Friday-night pizza and movies, Pacers games, the Big Mouth Billy Bass he buys with his extra earnings. Ali is also defined by a kind of emotional inarticulacy. He reflects that he used to think slow, slower than language moved, and that by the time he settled into an idea, the moment for him to say something had passed. Roya used to call him a good listener, but he admits he was mostly just a bad talker. This trait explains much about his relationship with Cyrus—the silences, the unspoken grief, the way he shares facts and stories but rarely his feelings. Ali's arc moves from Tehran to Fort Wayne to death, and the novel traces it in fragments. In Iran, Ali served in the military in a desk job managing supply-line logistics during the Iran-Iraq War. The narrative notes this left him with no small amount of survivor's guilt. He married Roya, and they had Cyrus. After Roya's death on the downed flight (Flight 655, shot down by the USS Vincennes in July 1988), Ali's grief turned to a ravenous, almost supernatural anger. He stopped eating, stopped answering the phone, began buying jugs of homemade wine, and applied for a visa. Ali saw a flyer from a U.S. chicken company advertising farm jobs in Indiana—no English required. He took the flyer down, folded it into his pocket, and a month later he and Cyrus moved to Fort Wayne, bringing only what fit in a single trunk. He did not cry when the plane took off from Tehran but wept a little, silently, as it landed in Detroit. Ali worked at the chicken breeder farm for nineteen years. He raised Cyrus alone, maintaining the routines described above. He called Arash once a year on Nowruz. He drank gin at night. He watched Cyrus grow into an independent boy who read, taught himself chess, and wrote for his school newspaper. Ali died from a sudden stroke at the start of Cyrus's sophomore year in college. The narrative suggests he had been living only to ensure his son's safe passage into adulthood and that once Cyrus was in college, perhaps it seemed to him, consciously or unconsciously, that his long and difficult journey on earth could be finished. This is the novel's central relationship. Ali raises Cyrus alone, and the two share a life of small rituals: Friday-night pizza and movies, Pacers games, the singing fish. Ali tells Cyrus about his mother and uncle when asked, but Cyrus mostly didn't ask. Ali's love is expressed through provision and routine rather than words. After Ali's death, Cyrus keeps the Big Mouth Billy Bass as one of the few relics of his father. Ali's marriage to Roya is presented through memory and dream. In the dream sequence with Rumi, Ali confesses he suspected Roya of infidelity, recalling her secretive phone calls and changed behavior during her pregnancy with Cyrus. He also reveals a deeper insecurity: that Roya never looked at him with desire, but rather with a combination of affection and pity, like a baby bird found and nursed back to health. This confession complicates the portrait of Ali as purely stoic—it reveals a man carrying private doubts and wounds. Ali maintains an annual Nowruz phone call with Roya's brother, Arash. He explains Arash's wartime role to Cyrus—how Arash dressed as an angel on horseback to comfort dying soldiers. Ali tells Cyrus that his uncle was an angel, literally, and that he helped a lot of people. At the farm, Ali and his immigrant coworkers discuss food but cannot share it due to biosecurity rules. They practice English together. Ali learns bits of Spanish and French. These relationships are described as functional but distant—the other guys rarely talked about home, a mercy. Ali's decision to take the chicken farm job and emigrate with Cyrus was driven by a desire to escape the performances of grief and rage around him in Iran. The consequence was a life of hard labor in Indiana, but also a safer, more stable environment for Cyrus. After Roya's death, Ali chose not to remarry or seek help, instead dedicating himself entirely to Cyrus's upbringing. The consequence was a deep, if unspoken, bond—and also a certain emotional isolation for both father and son. Ali's nightly gin drinking was framed as necessary for sleep, but it also served as a way of managing grief and trauma. The narrative draws a contrast between Ali's controlled drinking and the low people who drank because they wanted to. Ali's death from a stroke is presented as sudden but also, in retrospect, as something he may have unconsciously welcomed once Cyrus was launched into adulthood. Ali is the counterpoint to Cyrus's obsession with martyrs. His death is ordinary—a stroke, not a dramatic sacrifice. Yet the novel suggests his life was a kind of quiet martyrdom: nineteen years of six-day weeks, the sacrifice of his own desires and comforts for his son. The hadith of the starving man, which Ali recalls, frames this directly: God sent the starving man a baby to give him purpose, a reason to stay alive. Ali's life was shaped by the same logic—Cyrus gave him purpose. Ali's caution about Cyrus's where-are-you-from answers reflects the immigrant experience of managing identity for survival. He tells Cyrus to say I don't remember rather than announce Iranianness, believing this invites violence. His work at the farm, where immigrant coworkers practice English together and describe foods they cannot share, captures the isolation and solidarity of immigrant labor. Ali's grief over Roya's death is compounded by the state violence that caused it—the USS Vincennes shooting down a civilian airliner. His anger at the vice president's refusal to apologize shows how personal grief intersects with political accountability. Ali is not an artist, but his reflections on the copper tablet—an ancient complaint about substandard copper—become a meditation on the unchanging nature of human souls. He muses that science advances while souls remain the same: you could write a fact in a book and someone born five hundred years later could improve it, but you couldn't do that with soul-learning. Ali's drinking is presented as functional and controlled, in contrast to Cyrus's later substance use. The novel draws a complex portrait of addiction—Ali's gin is a coping mechanism, not a collapse, but it is still a form of self-medication. Ali believes that announcing Iranianness invites violence and harm. He insists on his own ignorance—however nonsensical—until people give up, as a survival strategy for an immigrant family in a hostile nation. Ali buys the singing fish with his extra $1.25-an-hour earnings from coming in early to the chicken farm. It becomes a shared joy for father and son—a ridiculous extravagance they both love with a chilling lack of irony. After Ali's death, Cyrus keeps it as one of the few relics of his father. Ali confesses that he long suspected Roya of infidelity, recalling her secretive phone calls and changed behavior during her pregnancy with Cyrus. He also reveals his deeper insecurity: that Roya looked at him with affection and pity rather than desire. Ali dies from a sudden stroke at the start of Cyrus's sophomore year. Cyrus is pulverized by the news, but quickly realizes his father had been living only to ensure his son's safe passage into adulthood. With Ali dead, Cyrus is alone in the world, feeling mostly emptiness—a crushing hollowness, which governed him. Ali recalls the hadith in which God sends a starving man a baby to care for, giving him purpose. Ali initially thinks the story doesn't make sense—why not just send food and water?—but his own life mirrors it: Cyrus became his reason to stay alive. The hadith frames Ali's understanding of his own existence as one defined by obligation and purpose rather than happiness. For a deeper look at how Ali's life and death connect to the novel's larger questions, see the themes of martyrdom and the meaning of death, immigrant identity and the burden of representation, grief, state violence, and historical accountability, art as a response to mortality and trauma, and addiction, sobriety, and the reconstruction of self. You can also read the ending explained page or browse questions and answers. Return to the book overview.