Grief, State Violence, and Historical Accountability in Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

The Thematic Claim: Grief as a Contested Archive of State Violence in Martyr!

(Note: The novel's title is Martyr! with an exclamation point.)

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! argues that state violence creates a double wound: the immediate loss of life and the subsequent struggle over how that loss will be named, remembered, and held accountable. The novel centers on the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes, which killed 290 people including Cyrus Shams's mother, Roya. Through Cyrus's obsessive research into martyrdom, the novel shows how grief becomes entangled with national narratives of blame—narratives that often serve political self-justification more than they serve the dead.

The novel's central question is not simply who is responsible, but what accountability even means when the institutions responsible for violence control the language used to describe it. The book suggests that historical accountability is not a settled record but an ongoing contest between official documents, personal memory, and the stories families tell themselves to survive.

The Documentary Record: Competing Narratives of Blame

The novel intersperses its fictional narrative with real historical documents about the Flight 655 disaster. These documents form a counter-narrative that runs beneath Cyrus's personal story. The Joint Chiefs chairman William J. Crow Jr. is quoted arguing that Iran's actions were the proximate cause of the accident and that Iran must bear principal responsibility. The Iranian foreign minister, by contrast, calls the downing a barbaric massacre of innocent passengers. The novel even includes the etymology of barbaric, tracing it to the Greek word for foreigners from lands beyond moral influence—a reminder that the language of blame has always been used to dehumanize enemies.

The official US investigation documents and the New York Times coverage show how the American government framed the disaster. One presidential adviser is quoted saying things sometimes go wrong when sophisticated machines and young soldiers operate under hard conditions. The novel presents these documents without commentary, letting the bureaucratic language speak for itself. The effect is chilling: the deaths of 290 people become a matter of inaccuracies that the investigation was not able in every case to reconcile.

What the novel makes visible is how these official narratives shape what can be mourned. When the US government describes the downing as an accident with shared blame, it forecloses the possibility of apology or restitution. The vice president's reported statement—I don't care what the facts are—becomes a kind of thesis for the novel's critique of American exceptionalism.

Cyrus's Grief and the Search for a Usable Martyrdom

Cyrus's personal grief is inseparable from this political context. His mother Roya was one of the 290 killed, and Cyrus's entire adult life has been shaped by the question of whether her death meant anything. In chapter 13, he tells Zee and Sad James that his mother's death was meaningless at the level of empire—not legible to the United States or to Iran. The difference between 290 dead and 289 is actuarial, not tragic. He wants to find a definition of the word martyr that can accommodate her.

This search drives his BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx, which the novel excerpts throughout. The document lists what might compel a martyr: god, beauty, family, land, love, history, justice, desire, sex. It also contains Cyrus's rawest rage: I want to die killing the president. Ours and everyone's. This is the grief speaking—the desire to make his mother's death legible through violence, to be worthy of the great terror his existence inspires.

Cyrus's martyr project is also a way of connecting his mother's death to a longer history of state violence and religious sacrifice. In chapter 20, he reflects on Ashura, the Shia day of mourning for Imam Hussain, killed at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us, Iranians say. Cyrus connects this to Gilles Deleuze's idea of elegy as la grande plainte—the great complaint, a way of saying what is happening is too much for me. This is the novel's model for how grief becomes historical: not by resolving pain but by keeping it alive across generations.

The novel also shows Cyrus's grief manifesting in his daily life. In the opening chapter, he lies on a mattress that smells of urine and Febreze, asking God for a sign, drinking Old Crow bourbon. He has spent twenty-seven years without hearing from God. The flickering light bulb—real or imagined—becomes a test of whether the universe will acknowledge him. Two years later, working as a medical actor at Keady University Hospital, he breaks character while portraying a dying woman to describe his own past suicidal episode, when he nearly set himself on fire with Everclear. The shame he feels afterward suggests that his grief has not been processed but merely managed.

The Family Aftermath: Ali and Arash

The novel also traces how grief transforms those left behind. Ali Shams, Cyrus's father, is consumed by an anger that the novel describes as a moon that grows so vast it scares him. He resents the condolences and covered dishes from well-meaning relatives, and he hates when people curse the United States—what did they know? The United States had shot his wife out of the sky, not theirs. This is a crucial complication: even the solidarity of shared grief feels inadequate to Ali because it cannot capture the specific, intimate nature of his loss.

Roya's brother Arash, already unwell from his service in the Iran-Iraq War, is destroyed by his sister's death. He howls as a wounded animal when he learns what happened, and for months he does not speak. The novel presents Arash's breakdown as honest in a way that stock condolences are not. His grief is the raw, unprocessed version of what Cyrus will spend his life trying to understand.

The novel also emphasizes the sheer contingency of the loss. Roya had told Ali that their son was too young to fly, that she had earned a break from childcare. Otherwise. Otherwise. Cyrus was born in March 1988, just months before the flight was shot down in July. The novel makes clear that sixty-six children were killed on the flight—it would have been sixty-seven if Roya had brought her infant son. This otherwise haunts the entire book: Cyrus's existence is itself a product of a decision that also, in a sense, saved his life.

A brief scene from Roya's life before the tragedy complicates the picture. In chapter 54, at the gallery of Orkideh's third exhibition, Roya jokes about buying a Cadillac car door so she could roll down the window when the world ended. The dark humor is prophetic—she will die within months—but it also shows her as a living person with wit and irreverence, not merely a victim. The novel insists on this fullness of life even as it documents the violence that cut it short.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel refuses to offer a clean moral framework. Cyrus's desire to die killing the president is itself a form of the violence he condemns—a mirror of the state's logic of retaliation. The novel's meditation on suicide versus martyrdom complicates any easy celebration of sacrifice: if suicide is greed (hoarding stillness while dispersing pain to survivors), then martyrdom is pride—the hubris of believing your death could mean more than your living.

The novel also shows how grief can be instrumentalized by both sides. The Iranian government calls the downing a barbaric massacre; the US government calls it a tragic accident. Neither framing can accommodate the specific, human loss that Ali feels or that Cyrus carries. The novel's answer to this impasse is not a resolution but a persistence: We remember. Of course we remember.

Symbols: Old Crow and the Epigraphs

The Old Crow bourbon that Cyrus drinks in the novel's opening chapter is a symbol of his self-medication and his stalled life. He lies on a mattress that smells of urine and Febreze, asking God for a sign, drinking from the bottle. The bourbon connects his present-day addiction to his past—he reflects on the drugs he consumed that day and wonders whether the flickering light bulb was real or imagined. The bottle is both a comfort and a trap, a way of numbing the grief that his martyr project is trying, in its own way, to process.

The two Lispector epigraphs that frame the novel establish the book's central preoccupation with mortality. The first epigraph expresses a sudden, startled recollection that human beings die. The second extends that awareness to the speaker and closes with a reminder that strawberry season is underway. The juxtaposition of mortality and ordinary life—death and strawberries—captures the novel's insistence that grief and living are always intertwined.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the novel use real historical documents about the downing of Flight 655 to complicate Cyrus's personal grief?

The documents—official investigations, news reports, and government statements—present competing narratives of blame. The US claims Iran was the proximate cause; Iran calls it a barbaric massacre. By placing these documents alongside Cyrus's intimate grief, the novel shows that his mother's death was never allowed to be simply personal. It was always already a political event, claimed by both nations for their own narratives. Cyrus's struggle is to find a way to mourn within—or against—these competing frameworks.

1. Cyrus says his mother's death was meaningless at the level of empire. What does he mean, and how does his martyr project respond?

He means that her death was not legible to the political institutions that could have acknowledged it. The difference between 290 dead and 289 is actuarial—a statistic, not a tragedy. His martyr project is an attempt to find a framework that can make her death meaningful, to find a definition of the word that can accommodate her. By researching martyrs across history and religion, he is trying to give his mother's death the weight that empire denied it.

1. Compare Ali's anger with Arash's breakdown. What does the novel suggest about different ways of grieving state violence?

Ali's anger is described as vast and terrifying, a moon that grows until it scares him. He rejects both pity and political solidarity because neither captures the specific nature of his loss. Arash, already traumatized by war, howls like a wounded animal and then falls silent for months. The novel presents Arash's breakdown as honest in a way that conventional condolences are not. Both responses suggest that grief from state violence is too large for the available language—it either becomes rage or becomes silence.

1. Cyrus fantasizes about dying killing the president. How does this desire complicate the novel's critique of state violence?

Cyrus's fantasy is a mirror of the state's own logic—retaliation through violence. The novel does not endorse this desire; it presents it as part of Cyrus's raw grief, his wish to be worthy of the great terror his existence inspires. But the fantasy also shows how state violence reproduces itself: the victim's child imagines becoming a perpetrator. The novel's meditation on suicide versus martyrdom further complicates this, suggesting that both self-destruction and self-sacrifice are attempts to give death meaning—attempts that may be doomed.

1. What role does Ashura and la grande plainte play in the novel's understanding of historical memory?

Cyrus reflects that Ashura, the Shia mourning for Imam Hussain, keeps a thirteenth-century death alive in the present. What happened thirteen centuries ago is still too much for us, Iranians say. This is the novel's model for historical accountability: not resolving grief but carrying it forward. The great complaint is a way of saying what is happening is too much for me—and the novel suggests that this complaint, repeated across generations, is how communities hold states accountable for violence. Memory itself becomes a form of resistance.