Martyr!

In the novel’s final chapters, Akbar continues to establish the themes of Modern Martyrdom as Performativity and Privilege, Internal Dissonance and the Iranian American Experience, and The Insufficiency of Words. Notably, when Orkideh recounts the death of her identity as Roya and her newfound life as an artist in New York, she highlights her struggles with cultural assimilation—many of the same challenges that her family members experienced when living in Indiana and that Cyrus continues to experience in the present. Orkideh’s self-written obituary marks a key turning point for Cyrus’s character development and recalibrates his obsession with self-centered conceptions of martyrdom. Orkideh’s emphasis that her death was “unremarkable” and that the most important thing was how she lived as an Iranian artist shows Cyrus that he should focus on living his life rather than being preoccupied with death and provides him with clarity about the validity of his Iranian American identity and creative expression. Previously questioning the insufficiency of words in his artistic practice, words are ultimately what allow Cyrus to apologize to and profess his love for Zee. After this reconciliation, the two characters are ready to take on the world together—even as it devolves into surrealist chaos before their eyes.

The conversation between Ali and Rumi is the final dialogic dream of the novel. Throughout their discussion, Akbar makes multiple allusions to the afterlife. Ali tells Rumi, “I thought this all would be different […] Rivers of honey, eternal sunshine, all that” (254), suggesting that the setting of Chapter 25 is not a dream world but heaven. Additionally, they refer to the goings-on of the mortal world as if they can observe it from afar. Ali also tells Rumi, “You’re still so beloved on earth anyway, it makes sense you’d want to stay near it” (254). The suggestion that Rumi has agency over his presence in the dream characterizes him more as a spirit than as a figment of Cyrus’s imagination and distinguishes him from prior figures in Cyrus’s dreams, like Lisa Simpson and Beethoven Shams, who have been physically warped within the dream world.

There are several factors, however, that suggest that the scene is a product of Cyrus’s consciousness. The Rumi portrayed here is highly anachronistic and resembles Cyrus himself in some key ways. He drinks wine from a plastic cup and speaks modern colloquial English. His enigmatic question for Ali, “Martyrs, man. We just can’t escape it, can we?” (255), mirrors Cyrus’s casual manner of speaking (“I don’t know, man […] I’m just sad”; 224). Details such as these characterize Rumi as a more modern figure than a realistically medieval one, and this anachronism suggests that he may not be the actual spirit of the 13th-century poet. For his part, Ali is confused by the poet’s presentation: “He noticed suddenly that Rumi’s arms were covered with colorful tattoos depicting negargari […] Ali hated tattoos, thought they were the stamp of low people, but as with the marijuana, for some reason, it didn’t offend him so much on Rumi” (254-55). The illogic of the dream, therefore, is apparent even to its inhabitants.

Another factor that complicates the interpretation of this dream is Zee’s presence in it. Though many of Cyrus’s dreams feature individuals who are still alive, this dream’s particular setting in the afterlife makes Zee’s appearance inexplicable. Zee has disappeared from Cyrus’s life at this point in the novel, and when he returns to console Cyrus outside the Brooklyn Museum, the world begins to physically devolve in ways that resemble the dream world. The fluid dissolution of Rumi’s robes—“The poet’s robes were flowing now too, fluorescent rivers of deep oranges, yellow-blues emptying into each other” (255)—is echoed by the colorful fluidity of Prospect Park devolving into chaos in the book’s final pages. “Golden light cracking through the ground had gathered into a vast and deep pool,” Akbar writes, “warm and gurgling absently like an unattended infant” (324).

Chapter 25 ends the subplot of Cyrus’s dreams in Martyr! by opening the possibility of physical interconnection between the world of his dreams and the everyday world. The surrealist streak that Akbar introduced very simply through the form of Lisa Simpson’s cartoon body has expanded to consume the entirety of Cyrus’s existence. The question of what exactly happens to Cyrus and Zee at the end of the book is left unanswered by Akbar. There is, however, an undoubted connection between the devolution of the physical world in each dream and the devolution of the physical world at the end of the book. The meaning of these connections remains enigmatic.