Martyr!

These chapters further explore the theme of Modern Martyrdom as Performativity and Privilege. In this section, Zee calls out Cyrus’s obsession with martyrdom explicitly, pointing out his selfishness in wanting to die. While Orkideh, too, questions Cyrus’s motivations for martyrdom throughout their conversations, Zee’s matter-of-fact language in this section further calls out Cyrus’s behavior. Defending his fatalist outlook, Cyrus’s character is unable to acknowledge the selfishness of his behavior—further establishing key narrative tension between Zee and Cyrus.

Cyrus’s dream about Orkideh and President Invective is a symbolic exploration of her words to Cyrus, “I’m an artist. I give my life to art. That’s all there is” (180). Throughout, President Invective serves as the antithesis of this ideal, a figure whose values are shallow and eschew self-sacrifice. He is openly dismissive of Orkideh’s art historical knowledge, as Akbar writes, “He hated being condescended to, hated people who thought they could teach him. He hated Orkideh and Bruegel both” (235). Such strong loathing from President Invective illustrates the extreme opposition between their two ways of looking at art and, by extension, their worldviews.

Running parallel to the juxtaposition between Orkideh and President Invective is the juxtaposition of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Breugel’s Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. Though both paintings have significant art historical merit, the reasons that people are drawn to them are entirely different, as Orkideh outlines in her analysis. The Mona Lisa is a much more famous painting than the Fall of Icarus, and President Invective is drawn to this clout, telling Orkideh, “I’ve seen this one! I know this one. Fantastic painting. Beautiful painting, beautiful woman” (234). Unbothered by the work’s deeper meaning or artistic merit, he is attracted to what is most familiar to him and what will be familiar to others. Orkideh, by contrast, is repulsed by the shallow popularity of the Mona Lisa and is instead drawn to the more obscure Fall of Icarus. She is excited about the painting’s composition, which decenters Icarus within his own story, placing his legs falling into the sea at the margins. With its message of minimizing the individual, Fall of Icarus delivers the opposite message of da Vinci’s close-up portrait. Throughout the novel, Cyrus is preoccupied with the Insufficiency of Words. While Orkideh later makes a concerted effort to convey to Cyrus that poetry has the same potential for expressing ideas, the meaning that Orkideh receives here from Fall of Icarus serves as a key example of how artists manipulate physical materials to express ideas visually. This further cements the central role that art plays in the novel.

Although Orkideh discusses two pieces of art with President Invective, Akbar further establishes the ways that Orkideh’s beliefs serve as a contrast to Cyrus’s. Here, Orkideh is particularly drawn to how Fall of Icarus de-centers the individual—ideals that Cyrus does not yet embody. Notably, Zee’s call out of Cyrus’s self-centered behavior highlights how his character differs from Orkideh. The opposing ideals of Orkideh and President Invective additionally coexist within Cyrus. Throughout the book, he struggles to choose between the two of them. His vanity can be seen in the desire to turn himself into a martyr (despite his self-professed repulsion over President Invective), and his introspective love of art is demonstrated through his commitment to poetry. In this dream, therefore, he ingests Orkideh’s lessons through literal symbolism as a part of this ongoing internal conflict of values. President Invective’s presence in the dream is anomalous, as the book explicitly points out, “Cyrus didn’t typically cast characters who so repelled him in these dreams, but sometimes it just happened, unbidden” (232). However, the anomaly occurs precisely as a way of laying bare his internal struggles. As Cyrus finds himself challenged in the real world by Orkideh’s teachings, he finds President Invective challenged in the dream world by Orkideh’s teachings. Involuntarily, and against his firm political leanings, President Invective has become a stand-in for Cyrus in the dream.

Seeing himself in a man he despises, even a version of that man concocted by his psyche for the purposes of a dream, is a sign of Cyrus’s insecurity and turmoil over his moral character—further solidifying Akbar’s exploration of modern martyrdom as performativity and privilege. Whereas the dialogic dreams of the earlier stages of Martyr! were filled with comforting figures, this dream marks a turn toward the uncomfortable and, as exemplified by Orkideh’s dismembered fingers, the grotesque. On the path to resolving his internal conflicts, Cyrus must now face his dissatisfaction with himself head-on.