Martyr!: Dua & Kaveh Akbar On Addiction, Art & Exile

Service95 Book Club With Dua Lipa

Dua Lipa hosts poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar in a heartfelt conversation about his debut novel, Martyr!, exploring themes of addiction, iden

Key takeaways

• The exclamation mark in 'Martyr!' symbolizes a defiant, vibrant tone that contrasts with the book's heavy themes of suicide and loss.
• Addiction is portrayed not just as a personal struggle but as a metaphor for seeking meaning through extreme acts.

Main topics

• Addiction and recovery
• Identity and exile

Notable quotes

"My sense is that the appropriate response to grace is gratitude, because survivor's guilt... It doesn't help anyone get free."

Conclusion

Through intimate storytelling and candid reflection, Dua Lipa and Kaveh Akbar

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Bumble has partnered with Service95 for a special issue called On Connection, a series of live events and a dedicated newsletter exploring romantic connections in modern life. We're also creating spaces to make that happen. A book tasting themed around love, a curated reading list, and a supper club for those who believe the best conversations happen face to face. Because if you're listening to this, you know books and Bumble are where real connections begin. On Connection, brought to you by Bumble and Service95. Today I'm talking to the astonishingly talented Kaveh Akbar about his debut novel, Speaker 2 (0:37) Martyr. Already an award-winning poet, now he's also an award-winning novelist. Martyr follows Cyrus Shams, a young Iranian-American man who grows up in the shadow of his mother's death on an Iran air flight that's shot down by the U.S. Navy. Cyrus is adrift when he struggles with addiction and is suicidally sad. He becomes obsessed with one idea, giving his death meaning. Then he meets a dying artist who is living out her final days on display in a museum. Cyrus begins tracing his family's history and starts finding answers. Answers to questions he didn't even know he had. This novel is profound, it's poignant, and often funny. My conversation with Kaveh, coming up. Cyrus has this kind of form of, I don't know, survivor's guilt in a way? Speaker 3 (1:18) My sense is that the appropriate response to grace is gratitude, because survivor's guilt... It doesn't help anyone get free. It doesn't help anyone stay sober. It doesn't actually do anything. Someone expects a book written by a person with a name like mine to be all pomegranates and hummus and stuff. And like, I really like the fact that Cyrus is like me. He's an addict and he likes Sonic Youth. And sometimes he sleeps with boys and sometimes he sleeps with not boys. And he's not just this one little box, right? You know, I think that he's as big as the world around him. Speaker 2 (1:55) morning. How are you doing? I'm Speaker 3 (1:58) well. Thank you for asking. How are you? Speaker 2 (1:59) Yeah, really good. Thank you. Where are you right now? Speaker 3 (2:02) I'm in sexy, sunny, beautiful Iowa. Speaker 2 (2:05) Iowa City, Speaker 3 (2:05) Iowa, United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you live there? That's Speaker 2 (2:09) the Speaker 3 (2:09) destination. I do. I teach at the university. It's like a big teaching university here for creative writing. It's like the big creative writing university. Speaker 2 (2:18) Amazing. Speaker 3 (2:19) Where are you? Speaker 2 (2:19) I'm in New York right now. Oh, cool. Sweaty Speaker 3 (2:22) New York. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. Hot, sweaty, smoggy New York. Yeah, I'm in Speaker 2 (2:26) Manhattan right now, but I've been spending a lot of time down in Brooklyn because it just feels cooler. More trees, more stuff, less buildings, less... Speaker 3 (2:35) More neighborhood-y. Speaker 2 (2:36) Yeah, more neighborhood-y. Feels better. I'm so glad to speak to you. It's so great to meet you. Yeah, it's my Speaker 3 (2:47) luck. It's my luck. Thank you so much for... Giving a shit. Speaker 2 (2:50) Of course. No, my friend Mustafa has been raving about your poetry to me for years. Speaker 3 (2:56) Oh, amazing. Amazing. Speaker 2 (2:58) And Speaker 3 (2:58) he Speaker 2 (2:58) is the one who actually recommended I Read Martyr. And I read it while I was on my honeymoon. And actually what was so crazy was I was in Italy and I was reading your book and right next to me there was another couple from Australia. Like I could hear their accents. I just turned around and I was like, she's also got a yellow book. And so like I peer over and I was like, oh my God, she's also reading Marta. And Speaker 1 (3:25) so I just go, yes, Speaker 2 (3:26) it was fucking nuts. I just kind of went, I was like, I went, oh my God, we're reading the same book. And she had just started it. I was a little bit further along. Speaker 3 (3:35) But Speaker 2 (3:35) it really felt like a Marta summer. I was like, yeah, well, it's a takeover. Yeah, that's wild. That's wild. Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:44) I saw the picture. There was a picture of you reading it. And yeah, I got a trillion gajillion texts from beloveds. And yeah, people I hadn't heard from since middle school were hitting me up. And it was really cool. It was really cool. I'm grateful to have gotten to spend that time with you. Speaker 2 (4:00) Yeah, no, thank you so much. I really loved it because I really felt Cyrus's deep, need for his life to have meaning and it's kind of his search for his place in his community and i don't know i felt like i was just really rooting for him the whole time and there's you know there's so much i want to ask you about it so should we just should we just get stuck in yeah Speaker 3 (4:25) so Speaker 2 (4:25) there's a lot to unpack with this book and in terms of it having so many themes of exile, identity, sexuality, faith, art, and of course martyrdom. How would you describe this book? You know, who do we meet? Where is it set? What is it about? Speaker 3 (4:45) Yeah, yeah, it's a hard question. I had to do in the sort of elevator pitch or how do you describe this book sort of thing? And again, first of all, thank you so much for giving a shit and for taking the time and for it's not a passive thing to read a book well. And, and you've clearly read it well enough to be able to have questions and think about it. And also you just do a lot Speaker 2 (5:06) of Speaker 3 (5:06) great books like you did you did my friend Tommy oranges book Speaker 2 (5:09) He's Speaker 3 (5:12) one of my best friends in the world and in fact, we we trade Friday pages every week every week he and I are We trade weekly pages and so amazing I wrote martyr in Weekly pages to him and he wrote the book called wandering stars, which is the sequel to they're there. Oh my god and they came out like months apart. Speaker 2 (5:32) That's so funny because I actually have a question for you coming up in something to do with you and Tommy and your friendship. Speaker 3 (5:40) Oh, amazing. Amazing. Perfect. So the book follows Cyrus, who is a recently sober addict. He's also a poet. He's also semi-recently orphaned. uh feeling kind of driftless doesn't feel particularly attached to remaining alive in the world but because he doesn't feel attached to remaining alive in the world he's interested in the kind of ethics of suicidality he's like if i do kill myself if i do remove myself from the world how do i do so in a way that is meaningful right like i don't want to just waste it right like if you know and so he's thinking about should i you know kill myself in a hospital so I can donate all my organs? Should I jump through the window of a Bank of America? Should I kidnap a conservative Supreme Court justice? Like, what does it look like for me to die usefully? Right. And and and he becomes obsessed with historical martyrs, especially secular historical martyrs as a way of researching people who have made their deaths meaningful. And in so doing, he kind of finds his way to this artist who is doing a Marina Abramovich-esque performance of her own dying in the Brooklyn Museum near Prospect Park. And so he and his best friend slash sometimes lover, Z, head out to New York to meet this artist and sort of interview her. Speaker 2 (7:09) I want to get a bit more into it, but I'm really curious about the exclamation mark in the title. Speaker 3 (7:14) Yeah, sure, sure. Tell me about that. Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, it's like, it's sort of, I think if it was just called Martyr without the exclamation point, I think it would seem quite dour, right? It would seem quite, I don't know, a book called Martyr with my very ethnic name underneath, I think would seem sort of, I don't know, relentless, maybe you expect it to be kind of one of those vegetable books where you read it, and you know that it's good for you to read it, but it's not a good time to read, you know, and, and I hope that that's not the book that I've written. I mean, it's obviously about serious stuff and suicidality and martyrdom and orphan is an orphan, orphanism, orphanhood, um, and, uh, and legacy and whatever. But, um, you know, it's also about Sonic youth and Erica Padu and, um, and, and love and, you know, um, and so I think that the exclamation point tonally communicate something like that. I also think, you know, the Cyrus is an addict and, uh, and I'm a sober addict. I've been sober for 13 years. And, um, and the, the idea that you can just like press a button and create meaning for your life, right? Like you press this meaningful death button and retroactively your entire life becomes cast in the relief of this kind of big death, right? Like the death defines the life and thus, um, the death imbues the life with meaning feels very addict to me. It's like it's like I press this button and I feel good. I press this button and I get meaning. I mean, Speaker 2 (8:50) it's Speaker 3 (8:50) exactly exactly. I ingest this chemical and and I achieve the stillness in my higher brain that would otherwise take years of meditation or whatever to achieve. Whereas, you know, I think the way that most of us create meanings in our lives are quite incremental, right? You know, we're kind to a person that we meet on the street, we call our elderly parents to give them the cognitive reps that will keep them. You know, we take socks and undershirts and maxi pads to the mission to ensure that, you know, the unhoused among us are taken care of. And like, these are all sort of unsexy, uninstagrammable things that create these tiny, tiny little pebbles of meaning that over the course of a life accrue, right? And so the exclamation point feels to me a kind of very addict-y, like staccato burst of meaning versus the sort of rolling ellipses that most of us actually end up creating with our lives, right? Speaker 2 (9:55) Yeah, I love that. Let's actually, let's dig into the central character. for a second, Cyrus. He was born in Iran and his life changed really drastically, you know, for his family, you know, when his mother died on Iran Air Flight 655, which was shot down by the US Navy in 1988. Now, this is a fictionalized account of something that really, really happened. Can you tell us about that? Speaker 3 (10:26) Yeah, I mean, I've always been obsessed with the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, which, again, was a civilian airliner shot out of the sky July 3rd, 1988. You know, the same plane that I took to come home to Iowa City a few days ago. I'm going to Mexico City tomorrow, and it's the same sort of plane that I'll be taking to get to Mexico City, right? Just like regular-degular plane full of regular-degular people. 290 civilians on board. killed including 66 children um this event is you know if if americans remember it at all it's just a blip of a blip of a blip Speaker 1 (11:04) right um Speaker 3 (11:05) but iran has like minted it into posted stamps and you know it's like this event that is used to stoke anti-american sentiment you know sort of understandably right i mean it was this just shot out of the sky for no reason and the naval um, warship was, America never admitted liability. Um, then vice president George H.W. Bush said, I don't care what the facts are. I'm not an apologize for America sort of guy, um, which is sort of chilling in the way that it reverberates into the present. Right. Um, and I think that what strikes me most about this event is that I don't think that America's ignorance of it is an indictment of all Americans necessarily, because there's so much of our history that we're ignorant of, right? These events are so legion in empire that, you know, there's a new one every day, right? There's a new event like that, you know, and we see them and we just sort of accept them as the unpleasant but necessary operating cost of a military superpower, right? Speaker 2 (12:14) Of Speaker 3 (12:15) having a military superpower, right? And so what... What I'm interested in is that when I say a number like 290, it's cold, right? Like if it was 293 or 287, my brain, like my somatically, I wouldn't be able to perceive a difference between those values, right? I intellectually understand those are different numbers, but somatically they feel identical. It's a middle large number. It's bigger than three. It's smaller than a million, right? Speaker 3 (12:46) every one of those people, like the difference between 289 and 290 is a being with an interiority as unprecedented and irreplaceable and complex as my own, right? That's a person who had a heart that could fit inside my chest, right? Every one of those people was loved and loves as much as I am loved and love, right? And I think that what narrative art can do, what I hope that fiction can do, what I hope that what I hope to be able to do with fiction is to tell the story of one person, right? This entire book is the story of one person being on that flight and the fallout from that, right? Like we go sort of 30 years into the future ish and see. That every person Cyrus talks to every person he sleeps with every drug that he doesn't doesn't take is a consequence of one person being on that flight. Right. And when you see that, then you can begin to extrapolate. Oh, like if this is the magnitude of one person, if this is the fallout, if this is the reverberation of one person. Yeah. Then. you know, extend that out times 200 times 290 and then also extend that out, you know, to everything else that's happening in the world, right? Everything else that's happening, you know, the multiple concurrent ongoing genocides and the rising specter of fascism across the globe. And, you know, like like you can extend that outwards. Right. And so the the power of narrative art to restore. to the abstraction of casualty data, something of the somatic obliteration of individual loss feels very potent to me. That's what I'm interested in. Speaker 2 (14:24) Yeah, it's really interesting hearing you say that because it is like the reverberation, how that affects then people in our society, you know, for so long. I mean, it really strikes me that Cyrus has this kind of form of, I don't know, survivor's guilt in a way. Speaker 3 (14:41) You Speaker 2 (14:41) know, 290 people died on that flight. 66 of them children, like you said. You know, he's obsessed with finding this like meaning to his life through his death. And I wonder if he's like, if he's trying to fulfill his destiny as like child number 67, you know, on flight 655. You know, I don't know. There's such a dedication almost to his. I don't know, plight for finding his martyrdom or his reason. And Speaker 3 (15:08) that rhymes with being a sober addict, too, because any sober addict can tell you that we've seen a trillion people who made the, you know, I made the exact same decisions that every other addict makes, right? Like I've driven blackout dozens, if not hundreds of times, you know, and. While I rolled sevens, other people rolled snake eyes, right? You know, like I got the gift of sobriety and other people didn't. It wasn't because I was ethically pure, morally superior, smarter, anything, you know, it's just I got lucky. And my sense is that, you know, and I hope that Cyrus maybe comes to this sense by the end of the book, but my sense is that the appropriate response to grace, grace being that which is unearned but freely given, is gratitude. That's the only appropriate response, right? Because survivor's guilt doesn't help anyone get free. It doesn't help anyone stay sober. It doesn't Speaker 1 (16:04) actually Speaker 3 (16:05) do anything, right? It doesn't open you