Author Kaveh Akbar visits Rutgers
On Monday, the Rutgers Institute for Women's Leadership partnered with the School of Communication and Information and the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies to host Kaveh Akbar, author of a new novel titled "Martyr!" at the Academic Building on the College Avenue campus.
The book follows the son of Iranian immigrants who meets a painter in Brooklyn after a long journey of self-exploration, according to an Instagram post from the Institute. Adam Dalva, an assistant teaching professor in the English Department, led the conversation with Akbar.
The discussion began with Akbar giving a live reading of the beginning of the book, and Dalva asked whether it was always how he intended to start the novel.
"Some writers start at the beginning of a story and move very beautifully chronologically through the story as it goes," Akbar said. "I am not one of those writers."
Akbar said his writing is rooted in exploring uncertainty in a literary and personal sense, including punctuation choice and moral questions such as the existence of a higher power.
Dalva then asked Akbar about his transition from writing poetry to writing narrative fiction. He said it was difficult to change his style of writing since poetry and narrative work are completely different styles with different components.
"Poetry did not prepare me in any way for (fiction writing)," he said. "There's no real book about that."
Later in the conversation, Dalva asked about the novel's reference to the real-life shootdown attack on the passenger plane Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 that resulted in 290 deaths.
Akbar referenced former President George H.W. Bush's stance against apologizing on behalf of the U.S. at a press conference, approximately one month after the attack. He said the main character of the novel experienced trauma from this tragedy 30 years later.
"From the vantage point of the actual families of those 290 people killed on Iran Air Flight 655, my outrage looks incredibly comfortable," he said. "From the vantage point of one person's moral terror and fear for their own and their beloveds' safety, your righteous indignation, your outrage, your insulted sense of justice is profound privilege."
The event concluded with a Q&A session between Akbar and the audience focusing on the former's obstacles when writing the novel. One audience member asked Akbar about his identity as an Iranian-American person and whether he felt anxiety about his presentation of these identities in his writing to avoid cultural displacement, to which Akbar replied he did not.
"The fact that data is utterly abstracted feels — it's not a moral failure … It is a moral crisis, right?" he said. "And I think that narrative art, one of the channels of action in all of this, is that narrative art presents the granular singular experience of an individual's subjectivity and then, when you see that, you can lay it over the abstraction of life and grief."
