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ALISA ROSENTHAL: Hey all what’s going on, you’re listening to Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio arm of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m Alisa Rosenthal, and today, I’m joined in the studio by Iranian-American poet, novelist, and scholar Kaveh Akbar, for a behind-the-scenes chat about his novel Martyr!, plus a brief preview of his live Chicago Humanities event on October 26th, in conversation with fellow Midwestern author John Green.

Tickets for Kaveh Akbar: Seeking Meaning in Faith, Art, and Others at Northwestern University are available at chicagohumanities.org. There are many other awesome programs that day including U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and legendary director Barry Sonnenfeld, of Men in Black, Get Shorty, and The Addams Family fame.

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran and teaches at the University of Iowa. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, and Best American Poetry among others. His debut novel Martyr! has just been announced on the 2024 National Book Award shortlist for fiction. Martyr! follows the protagonist Cyrus Shams, an Iranian-born nearly 30-year-old who struggles with addiction, sexuality, and being alive. While the novel is fiction, it’s centered around the real historical tragedy of Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger flight shot down by a US navy war ship in 1988 - all 290 passengers on board died instantly, including Cyrus’s young mother. Now living in Indiana, Cyrus becomes obsessed with the concept of martyrs. What was the point of his mother’s death, or anyone’s?

This conversation contains a brief reference to suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988 lifeline.org.

This is Kaveh Akbar with myself in September 2024.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Kaveh. Hi.

KAVEH AKBAR: Hi.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Thanks for joining.

KAVEH AKBAR: It’s nice to meet you, Alissa?

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Alisa, yeah.

KAVEH AKBAR: Alisa.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: I have your book. I finished it.

KAVEH AKBAR: Oh no way, thank you for the gift of your time.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Of course. I bought it from my neighborhood punk feminist bookshop of choice.

KAVEH AKBAR: Women and Children First?

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Women and Children First!

KAVEH AKBAR: So you're in Andersonville?

ALISA ROSENTHAL: I am in Andersonville. Ah so you know your Chicago.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. I grew up. I. I mean, I've been in the Midwest most of my life.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. And you're in Iowa City now. Which my alma mater. I went to University of Iowa.

KAVEH AKBAR: Oh no way! That's crazy.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: So you're the head of the creative writing department, which I believe started. Right? Right after I graduated.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. I've only been here two years, so I'm still, I'm still fairly new, but I love the city.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. I mean, I have obviously questions about your book, but I've so many questions about Iowa City.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I really like it. I really like it.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Is Oasis still the spot for falafel?

KAVEH AKBAR: Mmhmm mmhmm. My spouse is a vegan, so we eat a lot of falafel from there.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Good. And I think I've been feeling like, especially nostalgic for for college as, I mean, it's 80 degrees in Chicago today, but, like, it's really, really autumnal. And schools back in session yeah?

KAVEH AKBAR: Going to teach after this.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Good. What's on today's docket?

KAVEH AKBAR: I am teaching my Writing the Divine class, and I think we are talking about Gilgamesh today.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: A character name in your book.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You really read it. Yeah.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: I yeah, I mean, you know, I. I picked it up and I was like, Great. I'm reading it for this interview, and then I feel like I was on a race car into hell. I yeah, I really loved. I really love this book. I think it's going to stay with me for a really long time. And something I was really struck by was this book deals with big topics, identity and addiction, but also brings in characters that I really fell in love with and a lot of storytelling devices and narrative. Your background is in poetry. So what was the process of making a narrative, making narrative in poems versus making narrative in something like a novel?

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, yeah. That's a perceptive and generous question. I don't know that my poems are a super narrative. I think what propulsivity lives there is a kind of rhythmic propulsivity, a lyrical propulsivity more than the expectation of a resolving narrative. Which is different, obviously, than a novel. Most novels. So all of that, I mean, learning narrative at all was something that I had to educate myself about. I mean, the whole time I was writing the novel, I was I've spoken about this elsewhere, but I was reading two novels a week and watching a movie a day just sort of walk while ducking narrative into myself, you know, and and reading and watching utterly kleptomanaically. You know, just just, you know, when you read Bluest Eye, you see how Morrison gives you these extraordinary sentences that could be hung up in a museum next to still life by Cézanne and also within them is giving you say the floor plan of people of Breedlove's house. You know what I mean? Like you like you you feel like you could walk through that house by the end of it because you understand so well where everything is. And and that's just marbled through the prose, right? It's not like here's three paragraphs of exposition about that, you know, and that sort of gesture, you know, writ large, you know, when you read James's Portrait of a Lady. You know, I, I have a better understanding of those characters finances than I do with my own finances. You know, really, really, you know, and and the way again, he marbles that through the prose in a way that doesn't feel sort of cudgeled in you know in a way that feels truly organic is remarkable and again something I had no experiential referent for in my creative life.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, I can imagine learning by doing taking it all in, the book hits a lot of things you'd expect from a novel in that there's a lot of drive and there's a lot of people I'm rooting for. But it also got kind of weird and off the rails at various points. And I'm curious in what makes this book so weird and what drew you to making something kind of weird?

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I mean, there are no isolated zones of contemplation within my psycho spiritual experience, right? There's no I don't have one lobe of my brain for being in love with my spouse and another lobe of my brain for feeling sad about Gaza. And I don't have one lobe of my brain for feeling rapturously delighted by my dog who's asleep here by my feet and another lobe of my brain for thinking about the Iran Air Flight 655 massacre. Right. I mean, it's all in there sloshing around. Right. And so the same me who feels extent rage 36 years after the Iran Air Flight 655 massacre is also the me who loves and quotes The Simpsons constantly and watches NBA basketball religiously. You know what I mean? And there's no partition between those things. And to artificially represent consciousness otherwise to create characters who walk around thinking these grand monolithic thoughts that eclipse all other thinking is just I mean, if that's anyone's experience of the world, it's certainly not mind, you know. And so I wanted to make a book. I want to make books. I want to make poems that feel consistent with that experience of everything all the time at id-ness.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. And I think in in your protagonist Cyrus Shams that you refer to him as, he's between all of these different worlds, between all these different identities, between being, you know, Iranian and American and gay and straight. But at the same time, it's really representing all of these identities pretty fully. So I'm curious, as you've been on a really large book tour, have you had any experiences from audience members or people coming up to you who feel really represented in this character, in these characters?

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, of course. I mean, the miracle of art is that the more singular you get to your unprecedented existence, the more universal it becomes. Right. Like ostensibly the most universal art one could make, would just be, you know, a sheet of paper that said, I am sad. Right.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

KAVEH AKBAR: Right. But no one that's not going to move anyone. You know what I mean? Like, that's not going to because it's so general. And one thinks that generality imply, you know, goes with universality. But for whatever reason, the inverse is true with art. Right. Like, this is a book that orbits Muslim-ish, Iranian American, recently sober addict, alcoholic who's kind of gay, kind of queer, kind of a writer. Driftless, you know, obsessed with suicidality. Right. Like if if you did that identity checkbox Venn diagram, right? The population is one, you know what I mean? Like, and you're talking to that person, right? And so that anyone can see themselves in this work is reflects that fundamental miracle of art. Right. Like you know I've never been. I mean, I've never been a whaler, right? But when I read Moby Dick, you know, I feel profound simpaticos and amongnesses and divergences, you know, and I mean, this is this is how literature works. How art works.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. And you brought up another concept that I really loved, which is a bit of a turn, but the use of 90s nostalgia. Lisa Simpson is a character who pops up. And I was really interested in how those kind of interplay.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I mean, again, like I'm indelibly shaped by my environment. I don't just, you know, sit on a mountaintop reading Proust with a falcon on my shoulder, you know, I mean, like, I watch the NBA. I'm obsessed with The Simpsons. I mean, I met my spouse because of The Simpsons. It's like I. It's a huge part of my life. It was my introduction to I mean, I knew the plot of Hamlet before I ever read Hamlet because of The Simpsons. You know, I knew all the Kubrick films if I ever saw Kubrick because of The Simpsons, you know what I mean? Like, it was my introduction to so much of the high art that has that has animated me, you know, in adulthood, right? The idioms of my language are indelibly inflected by it, but so are the algorithms of my thinking. Right? My humor right is, you know, there are few influences on me creatively that are more significant than The Simpsons, right? And so, again, I can't just write a book where I only talk about Rumi and Hafez, as you know, I mean, like this was I mean, this is a huge influence on me. And I wanted to I wanted to make a book that feels consistent with the experience of being alive on the planet Earth. And my experience of being alive on the planet Earth is being a person who reads Virginia Woolf and Nabokov and Morrison and Borges and also watches a crap ton of The Simpsons and also, you know, loves Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And and you know, all of this stuff is in there, you know.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. And I think the way you take dreams really seriously to play out some of these conversations and ideas I thought was really interesting and felt really cinematic. What was the process like of visualizing better, playing out those scenes?

KAVEH AKBAR: ]Yeah, I am fascinated by dreams. I love talking to people about their dreams. I know that some people roll their eyes or whatever, and it's like some people treat it like you're talking about your fantasy football team or something. But I always I always love I mean, it's like we spend a third of our lives, you know, with our brains putting on these elaborate productions for us cast with characters from our actual lives, you know, behaving in these sort of strange, gnomic terrifying ways, you know? And we're not supposed to talk about that. You know, Instead, we're supposed to talk about the weather, whatever, you know, like a a I think I'm right. I think I'm right to be really interested in dreams. You know, every morning when we wake up, ask my spouse if they've dreamt. Because if they have, I get to start the day with my best friend telling me a story. You know, like like this feels just objectively right. And so, again, I'm fascinated by dreams and I love art that is fascinated by dreams. You know, I love Marquez and Borges. And and so I wanted to figure out a way to make those a part of the art that I was making without it seeming like bloat or, you know, just like a distraction from the plot or whatever. And actually, one of the big influences on the way that I did it was The Sopranos. In The Sopranos, Tony, the a big part of the show is, you know, you see Tony's dreams and no one like rolls their eyes or fast forwards passed them. And I was like, why why does it work? You know? And and you realized that in The Sopranos, important load bearing narrative information is being revealed in the dreams. You know, like the dreams go out a little bit ahead of Tony's consciousness. And and so that's something that I stole, you know, like I tried to I tried to make it so that in the dreams that are in the book, I mean, there are some central mysteries in the novel that sort of unravel as the novel progresses and in the dreams in subtle and then less subtle ways as the book progresses, you see the dream sort of doing some of that unraveling a little bit more quickly than our protagonist Cyrus is really consciously aware of. You know, in his conscious life, he there are some things that he's trying to figure out that his dream self seems to allude to kind of obliquely, which was a really fun thing. I mean, I was reading a lot of like Agatha Christie and John Cheever when I was trying to write some of that part of the book, some of that element of the book to understand how to breadcrumb certain mysteries and the like without without making it seem obvious when it happens, and also without making it seem like just utter non-sequitur and unearned. Right? So yeah, yeah, they're they're a load bearing part of the book. Right? If you flip past them, I mean, you're welcome to read it however you want. And I'll be gratified by the fact that anyone reads it at all. But my sense of the experiences you had is that it would be diminished not just in some, you know, pinky in the air, like seasoning the characters or whatever, but like in real narrative ways.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I always find mystery is is such a magic trick to me. Everything I think you were laying down, I just was like, well, you know.

KAVEH AKBAR: That's wonderful. And now if you go back, hopefully you'll see some of those breadcrumbs.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. All right. Now, I got to read your book a second time.

KAVEH AKBAR: I mean, isn't that. Like, I mean, we love stuff that works that way, right? Like when you when you watch Memento and then you go back and watch it again or Sixth Sense or whatever, right?

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. Yeah. I guess, here's my weekend.

KAVEH AKBAR: You should listen to the audiobook if you if you I mean there are a million books to read but like if you do read it again Arian Moayed, the actor who's in Succession and a lot of he's done a lot of things and is really just a incredible talent. I mean, it's it feels very like one of these things is not like the other when it says like me and him our name like.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: But that's incredible, great casting.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Well, I mean, and he had a brother and he served in the Iran-Iraq war. He speaks fluent Persian. I mean, like, it's the it's uncanny, frankly. But but he really his performance on the audiobook really feels transcendent to me. I mean, in that it transcends the material that I gave him and becomes sort of its own thing, right? If, you know, I've had a few people communicate to me that they wanted to reread it. And I always say that instead of, I mean, you can do whatever. Obviously I really think that his performance is pretty extraordinary and elevates the material and makes it new.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Wow, Wow. Wow. Yeah. Another experience I wasn't expecting to have when reading Martyr! is I am not not versed in poetry. And I found by the end of the book I was like, do I do I get poetry? Am I getting? And I felt like, you know, it's like you start reading Shakespeare and it feels totally foreign. And then by the end, it just fully makes sense.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: I yeah, I'm interested in your process in weaving in poetry.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, totally. Totally. I mean, I am a poet. That's. I've called myself a poet since I was, like, 15 years old. Right. That has been. I mean, I've had a million other jobs. I drove forklifts at a Subaru factory, and I have worked every sort of front of house back, a house restaurant job that you can imagine. And I've worked retail and I've substitute taught, but I've always called myself a poet. And it's just how it's how I've made meaning of the world, how I figured out what I thought about anything since I was a child, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, again, like, it's just, it's how I process things. And so I was processing things around the book, like trying to think about how Cyrus would think about the world. And one of the technologies that I have to do that is poetry and tires of the poet. And so I thought it would be cool to write poems in the voice of Cyrus, thinking about the things that Cyrus would be thinking about, Right? And and it was a I mean, I expected, my editor whenever I sold a book, if ever I sold the book to to ask me to take them out, my editor loved them. Jordan Pavlin at Knopf kind of really got them. Is a poetry lover herself and like understood what they were doing narratively. I'll also say, you know, I've a friend who's a vocal coach and she always jokes that, like, you know, no one picks up a cello, tries to play it, and then is like, Wow, I'm terrible at cello and tells everyone I can't play the cello. Right? But like, everyone is like, I can't really sing I don't have a good, you know. And it's like, well, of course you haven't trained it. You haven't done anything, you know, like you just you just tried to do it. And I feel like poetry is the same way, right? Like it's just. Of course, when you first read, you know, Shakespeare, when you first read Beowulf or whatever, you know, like it's going to feel inscrutable. And then you try and you try and then it opens up like you describe. And I think that, you know, that way that poetry is taught where it's kind of like strapped down. And it's like the moth in this poem represents a) the poet's mother b) the poet's exile, you know, like that sort of forensic reading of poetry. It feels so antithetical to the spirit of why I love poetry so much, which is to say, it's an encounter, you know, like, I mean, we're talking on Zoom right now. And like, if if a hawk flew in that window and like, came and landed here on the Zoom screen. Right. It wouldn't mean anything, right? It would be we would just both gasp because it's an extraordinary encounter with something beautiful that is not of us. That is like moving independently of us in the universe and is autonomous and not contingent upon our awareness. Know and we understand this with music, right? Like you can listen to Ave Maria and weep or you can listen to Future and get hyped for a rhyme. Right. But for whatever reason, we don't extend that to poetry. Right. It's just I mean, the way that I love it is as an encounter, you know, and I don't know that one has to freighted with much more than that.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. That's beautiful. We're so looking forward to having you in Chicago. We have you on October 26th at Northwestern University in a beautiful room. What are going to be your stops in Chicago?

KAVEH AKBAR: Well, I'd like to make a stop at Reza's restaurant in Andersonville, but it just closed down.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

KAVEH AKBAR: So I'll probably visit Women and Children First in Andersonville, which is my favorite bookstore in the city. And which used to be down the block from Reza's. And unfortunately, now Reza's is no longer there. Maybe I'll make the schlep out to another one of the Reza satellite locations.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah.

KAVEH AKBAR: But mostly I'm looking forward to seeing Women and Children First and also seeing my friends. You know, my one of my oldest friends, Lindsey, lives in Chicago and one of my best friends, Eve lives in Chicago. So I'm looking forward to seeing my pals. Seeing John Green, with whom I'm doing the event, is going to be really fun. And yeah.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. Oh yes, it's going to be. I had to quote this. It's going to be two charming speakers making the room completely disappear. You and John Green.

KAVEH AKBAR: I love John I mean, I could listen to John read the phone book. I think. I think he's one of the smartest people that I have ever met. I think he's extraordinarily intelligent and it's met with a real commitment to leveraging that on behalf of his species. Right. Which is not always the case among the ultra intelligent. You know, he really, really I mean, he does a lot that the world knows about, and he does even more that no one will ever find out about, you know? And I just I admire him so much.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: How did you guys meet?

KAVEH AKBAR: We were both Indiana people. I taught at Purdue for five years. You know, it's not a lot of. Well, I mean, we you know, Indiana is a small state.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: My admittedly, my very first question when I started reading your book that I wrote down was what Indiana do to you? No.

KAVEH AKBAR: I don't know. Indiana is. Yeah, I don't know, I. I mean, like, anywhere that you lived for a long time, there are things that you love and things that you resent. And there are things that you're allowed to say about the state that other people aren't allowed to say. You know what I mean? Like, it's like if another person said some of that stuff who'd never been there and leave it alone, you know, but that I feel a little bit more proprietary about.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: That makes absolute sense. Well, we. We can't wait to have you. It's going to be a really interesting chat. Congratulations on your National Book Award longlist.

KAVEH AKBAR: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It's gratifying to know that anyone cares.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah, well, it's a wonderful list and lots of lots of good recommended reading to to add.

KAVEH AKBAR: Totally. Totally. 100%. I'm reading. I'm reading Rejection right now off, which is an extraordinary new novel by Tony Tulathimutte. And I think it's I had never read him before and I am just rapturously like I'm rolling around laughing and then I'm like, my God, like this is like actually, you know, sneaks up on you because it's so funny that the heart, the heart of it sneaks up on you. Richard Pryor said he wanted to get you laughing so your mouth would be open when he poured the poison down. And I feel like that's really the project of that book, too.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. Wowow, and it seems like a here's the other thing I want to ask. It seems like a big project like this is putting you into discovery mode, too.

KAVEH AKBAR: Very permeable to the world writ large, which is honestly a dangerous way to move through this world. But but I found it. I mean, I hope. I hope the novel reflects that fullness.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Yeah. And my last question for you is, I'm someone who toils away of projects a lot, I find completing them is something I can do. But it's not easy and it's not necessarily pleasant. What does it feel like to be on the other side of a big project?

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I don't know that I'm on the other side of it. To be honest, I mean, I'm still sort of shepherding it through the world, which feels sort of part of it, right? You do your due diligence making good work, and then you do your due diligence getting the word out so that it might be able to find the people for whom it might be useful. And that's a different part of the Venn diagram, you know, But it's still, you know, I think it matters in terms of. Again, leveraging what you have and what you've made to do as much good as possible. But that said, I mean, I you know, every manuscript I've ever turned in has claw marks all over it. You know what I mean? Like I hang on to thing for the last possible second until, you know, whichever editor I'm working with rips it out of my hands.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: Well, you did it. Good job.

KAVEH AKBAR: Thank you so much. This is a real privilege.

ALISA ROSENTHAL: You got it. Thanks, Kaveh.

KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, thanks.

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ALISA ROSENTHAL: For more information on Kaveh Akbar and his live Chicago Humanities talk on October 26th, check out the show notes or head to chicagohumanities.org.

Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced, edited, and hosted by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with story editing and copywriting assistance from the team at Chicago Humanities.

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