Art as a Response to Mortality and Trauma in Martyr!

The Thematic Claim

In Martyr!, art functions as a survival strategy for confronting mortality and processing trauma. The novel's central claim—articulated through Cyrus Shams's elegy project and Orkideh's paintings—is that creative acts allow people to preserve memory, transform suffering into meaning, and assert presence in the face of death. The book opens with a Clarice Lispector epigraph—My God, I just remembered that we die—and spends its remaining pages exploring what humans do with that sudden, startling awareness. The answer, for the novel's artists, is to make something: a poem, a painting, an installation, a book of elegies for people never met.

Cyrus's Elegy Project: Writing Against Meaningless Death

Cyrus's central artistic project is BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, a manuscript of elegies for martyrs he never knew. In chapter 16, he declares: I am setting out to write a book of elegies for people I've never met. He acknowledges the unforgivable hubris in imagining their lives, but insists there is also hubris in writing about anything else. This is the novel's first articulation of art as a response to mortality: writing about death is the only honest subject.

The project emerges from Cyrus's obsession with his mother's death on a plane shot down over the Persian Gulf. In chapter 13, he tells Zee and Sad James that his mother's death was meaningless. Without meaning. The difference between 290 dead and 289. It's actuarial. He wants a definition of martyrdom that can accommodate her. His artistic project is thus an attempt to rescue meaning from a death that the world has rendered statistically insignificant.

Cyrus's method is telling. He tapes printouts of martyrs' faces above his bed—Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc, the Tank Man—half believing it would work like those tapes that promised to teach you Spanish while you slept, that somehow their lived wisdoms would pass into him as he dreamt. He wants the martyrs' deaths to teach him something about his mother's death, and his own. The project is also a way of keeping his mother present: the only picture he has of her hangs on that wall.

In chapter 20, Cyrus's manuscript reflects on Gilles Deleuze's term for elegy, la grande plainte (the great complaint), a way of saying what is happening is too much for me. He connects this to Ashura, the day of mourning for Imam Hussain's martyrdom at Karbala. What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us, Iranians say. It is in our blood, la grande plainte. Shekayat bazorg. We remember. Of course we remember. This is the novel's clearest statement of what elegy does: it holds grief across centuries, making the distant dead present and the old pain current.

Performing Death: Cyrus's Medical Acting

Before his elegy project takes shape, Cyrus works as a paid medical actor at Keady University Hospital, simulating dying patients and their relatives for medical students. He plays a bereaved mother, a football coach, a diabetic accountant. The work is a kind of performance art: he acts out death and grief so that future doctors can learn to face them. Zee warns that the work may be unhealthy for him, and the warning proves apt. In one session, Cyrus breaks character to describe his own past suicidal episode, when he nearly set himself on fire with Everclear. The performance becomes confession, and Cyrus leaves the hospital feeling ashamed. The episode suggests that performing death can be a way of approaching one's own mortality—but also that the performance can crack open, revealing the performer's unprocessed trauma.

Orkideh's Paintings: The Abyss Gives Art

Orkideh's artistic journey offers a parallel and more extreme version of the same theme. She comes to the U.S. from Iran after the revolution, with no family, no art education, no connections. She paints in grief—painting and weeping, weeping and painting—in a studio so small she could smell her neighbor's farts. She describes her sacrifice in stark terms: I killed myself. I killed my love. I forced myself to forget my husband, my brother. My country. My son. And then: I sacrificed my entire life; I sold it to the abyss. And the abyss gave me art.

Her first painting to reach a gallery is Dudusch, a battlefield scene of child soldiers with Byzantine features, mustached faces on pudgy child bodies, strewn across bloody soil like noodles. At the center is a frightened child on horseback holding a flashlight under his head—her brother Arash, pretending to be an angel in that cloak, in that war. The painting transforms childhood trauma into art, making the war's horror visible and legible. A Times critic calls it arresting and radically human.

Orkideh's relationship to her work is not romantic. Painting saved me, but I can't say I loved painting, she says. I painted because I needed to. What I really loved, what I love, is having-painted. The act of making is a compulsion born of necessity, and the reward is the finished object—something that would never have existed in the entirety of humanity had I not been there at that specific moment to make it. This is art as a bulwark against mortality: the painting outlasts the painter.

Death-Speak: Being Present at the End

Orkideh's final installation, Death-Speak, takes the theme to its logical extreme. Dying of cancer, she arranges to live in the Brooklyn Museum and die there, on display, as her last work of art. She describes it as a way of being in the room, literally being in the room as it happens. The first time she died—when her partner Leila was on the plane that was shot down—she wasn't present for it. I was left with all the loss, none of the reward. Death-Speak is her attempt to be present for her own death.

The installation required enormous legal maneuvering: waivers, DNRs, liability releases. Orkideh had to sign papers saying the museum wouldn't be responsible if a patron got her sick, accidentally or on purpose. The absurdity of the paperwork underscores how radically her project departs from conventional art. She is not making something about death; she is making death itself the artwork.

Orkideh's artistic philosophy, articulated in chapter 51, rejects the idea of art as ornament. She cites the poet Forough Farrokhzad: I won't see spring, / these lines are all that will remain. For Orkideh, this is the model: art as desperate, urgent communication from the edge of death. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other's, she says—a way of passing knowledge and feeling across the gap of mortality. Death-Speak is her attempt to say it plain: I'm dying. Here I am. It's ugly.

The installation's aftermath is devastating. In chapter 37, Cyrus arrives at the museum to find Death-Speak closed, a laminated note announcing Orkideh's death. The note carries her epitaph: Art is where what we survive survives. Cyrus collapses. The line is the novel's most compressed statement of the theme: art is the vessel in which the dead continue to exist.

The Epigraphs: Framing Mortality

The book's two Lispector epigraphs frame the theme. The first, in chapter 1, is the startling recollection: My God, I just remembered that we die. The second, in chapter 55, extends the thought with a question and then a strange, mundane detail: strawberry season is underway. The juxtaposition of mortality and strawberries is itself an artistic gesture—the insistence that life's small pleasures continue alongside death's certainty. The epigraphs bracket the novel, reminding readers that everything between them is an attempt to respond to that initial shock of remembering.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not present art as an unproblematic solution to mortality. Cyrus doubts his project constantly. In chapter 13, he tells Zee: What could I possibly say about the martyrdom of Hussain or Joan of Arc or whoever that hasn't already been said? Or that's worth saying? The elegy project risks being corny, redundant, presumptuous. And yet he continues, because the alternative—silence—is worse.

Orkideh voices a similar doubt. Sometimes the bigness of the thing is too much for language, for paint, for art, she says. You just have to say it plain. Death-Speak is her attempt to strip art down to presence, to being there. But even that fails in a sense: she dies alone in her room, and Cyrus arrives a day too late. The installation is closed. The art that was supposed to make her death present to others becomes a memorial to her absence.

There is also the question of whether art can truly rescue meaning from meaningless death. Cyrus's mother's death remains actuarial at the level of empire, no matter how many elegies he writes. Orkideh's paintings do not bring back Leila or Arash or her country. What art offers, the novel suggests, is not redemption but continuation—a way of keeping the dead present, of storing our brains in each other's, of saying we remember.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Cyrus's BOOKOFMARTYRS project function as a response to his mother's death?

Cyrus's manuscript of elegies for martyrs he never met is an attempt to find a definition of martyrdom that can accommodate his mother, whose death on a plane was actuarial and meaningless at the level of empire. By writing about martyrs, he hopes to learn how to make meaning from death—and to keep his mother present, as the only photograph of her hangs among the martyrs' faces above his bed.

2. What does Orkideh mean when she says the abyss gave me art?

Orkideh describes sacrificing her entire life—her family, her country, her son—to her art, and receiving art in return. The abyss is the totality of her losses and grief. Her statement suggests that art emerges from suffering, that the creative act is a way of transforming trauma into something that endures.

3. How does Death-Speak differ from Orkideh's earlier paintings as a response to mortality?

Her paintings, like Dudusch, transform past trauma into visual art—they are representations of suffering. Death-Speak is not a representation but a presentation: Orkideh herself, dying, on display. She describes it as being in the room, literally being in the room as it happens. It is an attempt to make her own death legible to others in real time, rather than through the mediation of paint.

4. What does the novel suggest about the limits of art in confronting death?

The novel acknowledges that art cannot fully capture or redeem death. Cyrus doubts whether he can say anything new about martyrdom; Orkideh admits that sometimes the bigness of the thing is too much for language, for paint, for art. And yet the novel insists that the attempt matters. Orkideh's epitaph—Art is where what we survive survives—suggests that art's power lies not in explaining death but in preserving what survives it.

5. How do the Lispector epigraphs frame the novel's treatment of art and mortality?

The first epigraph—My God, I just remembered that we die—opens the novel with the shock of mortal awareness. The second epigraph extends that awareness with a question and then notes that strawberry season is underway. Together they frame the novel's argument: the sudden knowledge of death demands a response, and the novel's artists respond by making things—poems, paintings, installations—that hold meaning against the certainty of loss.