I have picked the stars from the midsummer nights in the Shiraz of my childhood and youth, and the jasmine blossoms from grandma’s prayer rug where she kept them.

—Fatemeh Keshavarz, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran

Hey all! I have been meaning to put something on this Substack other than my deepest fears and insecurities for quite some time, so hopefully this project I did for my literature seminar can be a nice change of pace. It’s more of a book review than anything (spoilers ahead!), but it’s also commentary about something bigger (as most things are). I also wrote this entire thing before the “ceasefire” between the U.S. and Iran was announced, but literally who knows what is real at this point?

In a period so heavily defined by Middle Eastern conflict, genocide in Palestine, and the conflict with Iran, some scholars have expressed concern over emerging “New Orientalist” narratives that flatten and oversimplify Middle Eastern cultures and peoples.

In this moment, Iranian people and culture are sometimes deemed synonymous with their authoritarian government, a rhetorical strategy that aims to make threats of nuking the country and that an “entire civilization will die” in the process somehow seem reasonable.

The political implications of this are daunting and are already affecting the Iranian-American diaspora (which just means a dispersion of people from their homeland). Kourosh Ziabari writes in an article for New Lines Magazine that just one week after the U.S. attacked Iran in June 2025, a year ago now, “183 Iranians were taken into custody by federal immigration authorities, whereas only five had been arrested a week prior.”

Ziabari speculates that the timing of the Iranian-American ICE arrests was not coincidental. He believes that it is “a bid to send a chilling message to the Iranian-American community, and not merely to the Iranian regime.”

In other words, Iranians and Iranian-Americans are not welcome in a country of mostly immigrants.

Therefore, positive representations of Iranian-Americans in the media to combat this narrative are crucial. And if you’re as chronically on Bookstagram as I pretend not to be, you might know that Kaveh Akbar has emerged as one of the most important writers in this space.

Akbar, born in Tehran, Iran and now the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa, probably wants the reader of his 2024 semi-autobiographical debut novel Martyr!1 to see the protagonist Cyrus Shams first and foremost as a man. He is a broken, hurting man, and his Iranian-American identity is just one aspect of that.

Cyrus is a first-generation immigrant, recent college graduate, and poet. He struggles with addiction recovery and questions of his larger purpose in life. He is obsessed (slight understatement) with the concept of martyrdom and is working on a long-form writing project exploring some of the most well-known martyrs in history. Joan of Arc. Malcolm X. Bobby Sands. Each person becomes a poem, a shrine, something more than themselves that Cyrus can grasp.

This fascination stems largely from unresolved grief and anger over the death of his mother. Supposedly, she was killed in 1988 in Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the U.S. Navy after misidentifying it as a fighter jet. (That part is not fiction at all, by the way. 290 people were killed and the United States never formally apologized or accepted legal accountability, though it occurred in the Iran-Iraq war.)

Akbar’s Martyr! depicts the Iranian-American diasporic experience as fragmented as a mosaic. Like other marginalized peoples, they are shaped by multiple intersecting identities, including the ever-present looming threat of political violence between the U.S. and Iran, a sense of national displacement, and in Cyrus’s case, queerness. Consequently, members of the diaspora are caught in an “in-between” state, feeling unwelcome in the country they immigrated from and the place they immigrated to.

However, Akbar reveals that a source of belonging for Iranian-Americans can be found through constructing a “self-narrative” – that is, writing about one’s own life experiences and retroactively finding meaning through the end result. In doing so, they can resist reductive New Orientalist narratives about their culture.

To begin, one must understand the current state of cultural and political tensions between the United States and Iran, which began long before 9/11. Maria Wagenknecht writes in Constructing Identity in Iranian-American Self-Narrative2 that after the American-imposed Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, many Iranians began immigrating to the United States in several waves consisting of everyone from academics to socialist revolutionaries to women and laborers due to further human rights abuses under the new regime. Although many of these immigrants have a neutral or even positive view of America, politicians still use rhetoric making them synonymous with the totalitarian Iranian regime (which came to be in part due to American colonialist tendencies).

Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars3 was written to dismantle many constructed “New Orientalist” narratives in literature that portray Iranian people and culture in stereotypical, Eurocentric ways, often from the perspective of an “insider” or a person who actually lived in Iran. Keshavarz argues that the emerging New Orientalist narrative, while not as overtly colonial as the original Orientalist movement, is equally destructive because it erases the nuance, complexity, and richness of local cultures in favor of sensationalized stories that Western readers (and publishers) gravitate towards. For instance, she argues that in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,4 “the book’s erasure of the voices of sanity reduces the entire culture to the behaviors of its extremists” and nearly every man who actively practices Islam is faceless, devoid of dialogue, and abusive towards one of the central female characters (111).

Keshavarz’s approach of more empathetically approaching Iranian culture and literature is a useful framework for examining Martyr! because it can be seen in many ways as an anti-New Orientalist novel. This is crucial for an Iranian-American’s sense of self and belonging to America because rejecting the New Orientalist narrative allows the protagonist Cyrus to exist independent of political violence, displacement, or stereotypes of Muslim men.

At the onset of the novel, Cyrus is described as a recovering alcoholic and addict stuck in a mundane job doing trivial work he hates (as most of us are right now, it feels like), pretending to be a dying patient for medical students. In any case, a college-age person going through an extreme depressive episode could relate to his dissatisfaction.

However, his personality is not exclusively limited to a being of suffering and internal torture. In between, the reader witnesses moments where the poet in Cyrus emerges, and he attends a weekly open mic at a coffee shop with his “roommate” Zee. Though the two have a somewhat complicated relationship that dips into romantic and sexual but never achieves a proper label, much to Zee’s chagrin, their open mic nights together are filled with laughter, live music, and poetry readings, “a healthy way to spend the time they were no longer using to get drunk or high” (72).

Cyrus’s childhood flashbacks, too, are laced with the pain of his mother’s supposed death on Iran Air Flight 655 and his father being chronically overworked and an alcoholic. However, there are glimmers of childhood and innocence throughout, such as his mistaking root beer at a school field trip to Chuck E. Cheese for actual beer and, fearing he is doomed to a life of alcoholism, spent “the rest of the week preparing to die” (52).

While moments like this may foreshadow Cyrus’s later obsession with death, here it is played more for humor: to let him be a naive, innocent child just for an instant. In all of these instances, Cyrus is depicted as more than just a suffering Iranian-American child or struggling gay man with no clear purpose or direction. This directly contrasts the narrative of faceless, voiceless Iranian men present in Reading Lolita in Tehran. We can nearly see the face of Cyrus, and certainly hear his voice.

So we, as readers, understand Cyrus to be more than a product of the politically tense moment he was born into—but how does he make sense of himself and see beyond the version of himself that’s been imposed upon him and internalized? So much of the novel is introspective, even circular, with his thoughts perpetually turning to the perceived “meaninglessness” of his parents’ death, his uncle’s irreversible war trauma, and his desire to give himself a meaningful death. He grapples with the duality of being Iranian and American, admitting that he fears becoming a cliché and being seen as just “another death-obsessed Iranian man” (101) but in another moment of anguish expresses that he wants “to be worthy of the great terror [his] existence implies” (216).

This obsession with meaning and meaninglessness, martyrdom of a holy or physical cause, culminates in a project that Cyrus tentatively titles “BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx”. Rather than allowing the death of his loved ones, and particularly his mother, to remain “meaningless,” he explores the concept of martyrdom through poetry alluding to famous historical figures like Joan of Arc or Hussain in addition to his family members, placing them on the same pedestal. In the file, Cyrus writes that “there is an unforgivable hubris in [his] imagining any part of their living, and presuming to write about it … [but] there is also hubris in writing about anything else” (106). This declaration—particularly the phrase “imagining any part of their living”—reveals the Book of Martyrs to be a kind of meaning-making, diasporic, critical fabulation project for Cyrus.

In non-academic speech: he’s trying to recapture the voices of his mother, father, and uncle to make sense of their lives and what they were like.

There is a precedent for this in Iranian-American literature and history. Wagenknecht argues that “autobiographical texts have emancipatory impact: they lend voice and agency to ethnic Americans and help further a positive self-imagination and group history” (9). This echoes the sentiment of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,5 which implies that controlling one’s own written narrative is a potent way of resisting the narrative written by an outside force.

Interestingly, Wagenknecht points out that this is an especially recurring theme in Iranian literature. She says that Iranian autobiographical writings have a “tendency toward fiction, whereas fictional writing often appears to be autobiographically influenced” (12). Rather than using traditional western literary terms such as “autobiography” or “memoir,” Wagenknecht employs the phrase “life-writing” as an umbrella term for nonfiction and fiction that is directly inspired by an author’s culture and life experiences.

This “life-writing” framework brings a whole new interpretation to many sections of the novel that are written in perspectives from the past. For instance, chapters devoted to Roya, Cyrus’s mother, are written in first person (in contrast to the third-person perspective of Cyrus’s chapters) though there is no truly realistic way that she might have written them herself, and Orkideh (which Roya changes her name to after she arrives in the U.S.) never tells Cyrus any of this. Considering the “imagining any part of their living” phrase used by Cyrus in the Book of Martyrs, I propose that these chapters could be, within the world of the novel, written by Cyrus himself and are part of his project. If this were true, Cyrus is “emancipating” his mother, father, and uncle’s stories and lending them agency that they were not given in their own life. This retroactively gives their deaths meaning; or more specifically, it allows him to give them meaning beyond just an unfortunate tragedy, in the case of his mother.

Particular emphasis should be placed on the role that life-writing plays for Cyrus’s intersecting identities beyond just being Iranian-American. For instance, writing from the perspective of his mother—who he discovered preferred women and was in love with a woman named Leila—may have helped them bond, if indirectly, over their shared queerness. Imagining how his mother must have felt, trapped in a loveless marriage when the woman she loved was within reach, could have played a role in Cyrus coming to terms with his feelings for Zee. Knowing that his mother had somewhat similar experiences could make him feel less alone.

Here, again, Akbar refuses to conform to the New Orientalist narrative of every Muslim in the Middle East being homophobic and every man being abusive towards his wife. Though Roya felt confined in her marriage with Cyrus’s father Ali, she bade him no ill will. Cyrus learns from a woman named Sang, who was briefly married to Orkideh later in her life, that his father likely knew about the affair, but it was “Leila’s husband finding out” that caused them to leave, and not any action of Ali’s (301). Though indirect, this indicates the diversity of opinions towards lesbian couples by Iranians, with not every citizen believing the same thing. Roya states too, in the chapter that may or may not be written by her, that “[she] felt guilty for hardly thinking about Ali,” heavily implying that they had a genuinely respectful relationship (282).

After learning from Sang that Roya had survived, switching identification papers with Leila and having her board the doomed plane before escaping to the U.S. and renaming herself Orkideh, Cyrus understandably feels conflicted. After all, he had been speaking to her all along, and she knew perfectly well who he was and had never told him or sought him out.

It is through the life-writing as his mother, however, that he comes to terms with the fact that she was forever changed by Leila’s death; he imagines her as “happy. Not always, not even mostly. But [she] did know real, deep joy. Maybe everyone gets a certain amount to use up over a lifetime, and [she] just used [her] lifetime’s allotment especially quickly, with Leila” (294).

Under this theory, Cyrus writes from the perspective of his mother to see the value, the richness of her life, seeing beyond her tragedies and martyrdom. He uses this “life-writing” to reframe a tragically short (or, what he thought was short) life as one spent full of passion, burning fiercely before being snuffed out, like a faraway supernova. This retelling of his mother’s story makes her absence in his life a bit easier to bear, as Cyrus knows Roya had achieved her allotted joy.

The revelation that Roya did not die in the plane does, admittedly, complicate the project built around her martyrdom. If she chose to disappear, what becomes of every poem Cyrus wrote in her name? He had anticipated this kind of failure himself, even calling it “unforgivable hubris,” and the twist proves him right in ways he couldn’t have predicted. Yet it also clarifies what life-writing can and cannot do. Sang provides the facts: Roya survived, she loved Leila, and she became Orkideh. But facts alone cannot restore a soul. Roya’s voice, the guilt she felt about Ali, and her finding “real, deep joy” is something that was lost and reinvented by Cyrus. Though the hubris was real, it was also necessary, because no other mode of knowing could have reached her true self. It is through the BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx and these perspective chapters that Cyrus gains a better sense of himself and his family.

But ultimately, Martyr! does not offer a clean resolution. It’s not satisfying at all, and that is literally the point, as much as it hurts.

In the novel’s dream-like final few pages, everything seems a bit blurred and out of focus. NYC ripples and changes around him like a pond in pouring rain. Look up the Reddit discourse surrounding the ending and nobody can agree on what it means. Does Cyrus actually reunite with Zee? Does he die of hypothermia, finally alone? Maybe the best story is the one you choose yourself.

Akbar, himself an Iranian-American poet, performs the same “life-writing” act in creating the novel. He restores interiority and complexity to Iranian-American lives that the dominant political narrative would prefer to keep flat, yet threatening. As Ziabari’s reporting makes clear, the stakes of that narrative are not abstract.

Martyr! insists that in order to resist being written by others—reduced to a threat, a statistic, a civilization that the so-called “President Invective” (a thinly-veiled codename for the current one) could arbitrarily choose to erase—you must write yourself, messily and presumptuously, into existence. You must dare to title a novel Martyr! with an exclamation point, as if insisting upon yourself, shouting from a rooftop towards ever-listening stars.

Thanks for making it this far. From here, I’d highly, highly recommend getting the book yourself, even if I kinda spoiled the whole thing—it won a bunch of fancy awards and it genuinely changed my life on top of that because it’s insanely well-written (I have never seen someone write so closely to the weird way I think). Bookshop.org links to everything I mentioned are below!

I truly, truly believe and can only just now articulate that the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is definitive proof of everything wrong with this country. I pray I will live to see it overturned in my lifetime (and believe that some of the people closest to me can play a role in seeing it happen, if American law schools weren’t some of the most abusive schools in the world). And everyone knows it but not everyone will admit it, because to say something that is not human doesn’t deserve freedom of speech feels, sometimes, like idolatry. Some of us have just been raised to believe it, and it is hard to let go of the past, I know.

I will never just say “AI” like it is a person, like that is a name. Artificial fucking intelligence is something of an oxymoron, and generative artificial intelligence is not real. It will never, ever be real. If that makes you uncomfortable, then sorry. But maybe just delete your Substack account. It might make you happier.

I do believe in the American dream, but it is a dream.

Do not ever decide to keep your head in a cloud because they tell you to; they want you to forget that we weren’t born with wings.

How often do you think about us, when it was just us and not you and me?

How often do you think about the notebooks? Notebooks that we strapped with duct tape decorated with stars and rubber bands? They would hold mythical spells and the latest chapter of our new fantasy novel and elaborate plans for an eight-episode season of a TV show about magic musicians that we planned to both film and star in, which would never materialize.

Do you hear the notes like I do, a chord that feels unfinished, hanging in the air?

You said it yourself so eloquently so many years ago. I think it was maybe 2019, the edge of a growingly distant reality. Why do we talk so normally over the phone, but whenever we’re together in real life, we’re, well, awkward?

I want to go back to that pre-2020s clarity of mind, that clarity we lost through the pandemic of teenagerhood. I find myself, seemingly against my own will, reaching for my phone and scrolling through the scattered gallery of my post-thirteen-year-old life. I took so few photos for so long because a part of me was convinced it was a waste of time. Looking back at this era is like looking at the memories of a different person.

Suddenly I am transported to a summer evening in 2018—a lemonade stand propped up in front of my home. Me, my brother, sister, and you.

It’s funny, the way we don’t see the people around us age as we progress through time. You simply believe that you had always looked like that, with your pink tank top and mildly annoyed smile. We looked so alike on that summer evening in 2018 when we were so convinced we could get people to pull over on the side of the road and buy a red Solo cup filled with lemonade that we didn’t even make ourselves that’s been sitting in the Texas heat for probably two hours at least.

We were so in love with making those flimsy little Rainbow Loom bracelets out of vibrantly colored little rubber bands, the ones we could take and twist into our own patterns and designs. They’d fall apart with the slightest nudge but we were so proud of them, handing them to family friends and neighbors “at no extra charge” with their lemonade because we were growing worried at how many extras we’d have to give away before the sun fully set. We were so convinced we could make strangers listen to us, care about us, stop for us and buy what we were selling. Convinced we could get people to listen.

Pouches of flavored Zyn stuffed into McDonalds french fry baskets. Shiny new cars that will probably be wrecked by the year’s end. Photos of a shadow lounging in an eerie red glow. Images carefully curated on an internet shelf that part of me wants to knock over and let shatter at our feet to prove just how fragile it all really is. Is this all we are now, “L”? Photos to be seen from far away as if we weren’t the closest of friends, did everything together, as if we don’t live like fifteen miles from each other.

I miss us, I miss ours, I miss our notebooks when they were filled with sloppy colors and drawings and pages we numbered because we assumed we’d eventually write up to that page but we never did and now it’s just notebooks with page numbers scribbled in the corner that are otherwise empty, that will always be empty.

Do you also feel like you numbered the pages of your life before you could write them, or am I truly alone?

Sunken Ships & Glowing Gods

imagine our world
without the masts of shipwrecked cities.

they rise into the swirling soup of our sky 
and laughing at us like wine-drunk gods 
as we drown in their illusions,
caught in their wiry webs
of insidiously inviting glow.

imagine everything 
that reaches its hands to the sky 
as if to touch something. 

the trees rise up to face the sun, 
towards their god. 
the people lift up to see beyond the sun,
towards our god.

but what is the god of the concrete claws on the horizon? 
do they need anything but to tower over us?

imagine Jesus
crucified on a telephone pole.

excavatum

Dear God:

before I was born, did you plant
gold in my mother’s womb?
put treasure in my chest?

did it shine so brightly
that you hid it in me
so no one would see?

or, to you, is burying your love
too deep to ever show
a worse sin than hate?

has my body become
a self-conscious love letter
folded, hidden words of honey,

sweet sticky secrets that slowly spill
over strawberry-milk skies as i
wake from another dream i’ll forget?

bottle it up quickly, you tell me
to plant it into the dirt
and hope it grows a golden heart

but i beg you remember that
gold will never bloom:
it can only be unearthed. so

go ahead, excavate me.
find my treasure and kill me, too.
lift me from this earth and closer to you.

originally published in eleven40seven Fall 2025 edition

Do you remember the colors & how soft they were?

I remember blue, fading blue.

I remember stacks of worn-down blue classroom chairs in the corner of a musty old classroom lit with fluorescent lights. 

I remember hiding under the chairs as other kids danced and skipped in circles, shaking maracas and banging tambourines to the beat over some educational song for toddlers playing over the CD player Ms. Morley had on. 

I remember that I found their unbridled, unconfined joy alien and terrifying.

I remember orange, green, and yellow little pills giving way to deep, chocolatey brown.

I remember Grandpa Miller and the way the paper of his fun-sized M&M pouches he always brought would crinkle and tear in my tiny hands.

I remember the little strength I have nearly failing me on his funeral day, and worrying about how shameful it would be for a pallbearer to drop his casket.

I remember the dirty golds & greens of elementary school sandboxes.

I remember hiding with Kelsey in the playground tube slides. The sun filtered through the red and yellow plastic, setting our skin and hair aflame as we pretended to be dogs who were also spies infiltrating a secret base. 

I remember that Kelsey was held back in first grade and we slid apart; I’d reached the end of the slide and emerged in the daylight, but she was still playing in the colors and shadows.

I remember seeing my name on a poster in the corner of Ms. Davidson’s kindergarten classroom saying I was one of the select group of students who got to ride the bus home from school.

I remember I was so elated to finally be able to ride home with Brinley every day that I burst into tears when the teacher told me it was a mistake, even though it wasn’t.

I remember screeching streaks of yellow breaking through the fog.

I remember turning around on the bus to see Brinley poking her head over the seat, calling my name out coyly. “Over here, Sam.” I turned back around, and back again. Her face had advanced three seats closer to mine. “Hello, Sammy-Dammy.” I turned around again, trying not to laugh. Then she appeared next to me like a magician.

I remember that a few years later, she disappeared just as easily.

I remember in first grade a girl named Anastasia on that bus who punched me in the stomach when I couldn’t guess what the thing was that decorated her water bottle and started with the letter “E.” (Looking back, it might have been elephants.) 

I remember feeling a keen sense of injustice when all the teacher did was tell her “not to hit.” Not only was she not punished, but she was accused of the wrong thing, which felt just as bad.

I remember staring at the dragon boss in one of the video games I played the most and imagining him eating me. I don’t remember why I did that—I was, like, eight.

I remember asking my mom if men can marry other men after thinking for sure the phrase “Harold and his husband” was a misprint in my brand-new Captain Underpants book. She told me that God doesn’t approve of it and I shut up immediately.

I remember bursting into tears when my next-door neighbor Naya’s mother yelled at me when she found out that her daughter had given me what was probably an emotionally priceless family heirloom. I don’t even remember what it was, exactly; it was some kind of circular box that fit in the palm of her hand. I think she let me take it anyways. I feel bad to this day.

I remember water, grey instead of blue.

I remember bursting into tears when the swim instructor told me that my mother had explicitly forbidden me from eating the skittles the other students were entitled to after doing a good job in the pool, and that I was to have the jelly-beans they provided instead. I don’t remember why they were so special or what the big deal was. Give me my skittles, dammit, I might’ve said if given the vocabulary; I’d earned them, after all!

I remember being afraid of the holes in the edge of the pool that blasted bubbles, thinking they looked and sounded scary when I was under the water, like the mouths of little demons screaming at me.

I remember Travis and Wesley.

I remember being at someone’s house watching Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. I think it was Avery, the girl who Lexi said had a crush on me in kindergarten. We live in the same apartment at the same university now and I don’t think I’ve seen her once. Would we recognize each other if I did?

I remember in middle school being so surprised and flustered when this giant football player (who I thought was cute) smiled and waved hi to me in middle school when I didn’t think he knew who I was. So much so that I don’t think I said anything back. I must have looked antisocial or rude.

I remember hating who I was back then.

I remember all of these colors and more.

I feel my past falling around me now in the November rain that patters my shoulders like God’s tears of joy, and imagine for a second that I am the same way today, the colors just as gentle. I drink & drown myself in this delusion while wondering if it might be prudent to hold an umbrella.

momentary beauty, 
ephemeral bliss
i’d like to soak in the sun
and to always have this

yet 
time 
scatters
into the wind 
like dandelion seeds, 
a thousand never-ending 
promises 
that might someday 
grow and
bloom and
live all over again.

Maybe my mother is right
and this life is worth living.

i pray my days 
have sown 
a thousand seeds, 
touched a thousand lives, 
have spiderwebbed 
across the world,
a gossamer
of silk and snow 
i’ll never know

but 
in the end, 
i want to see 
my life’s 
shattered mirror 
bloom into 
a glass tapestry 
of everyone 
i hope to have saved