Previous
Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Martyr!, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Martyrdom and the Meaning of Life
Addiction and Sobriety
Queer Love and Repression
Iranian Identity vs. American Identity
Summary
Analysis
Tehran, 1973. Roya is 10 years old and has been wetting her bed recently. Her 12-year-old brother Arash always makes fun of how bad she smells at breakfast. Roya feels like the shame of this smell must stick to her all day, even after she’s washed herself. Later in life, she will want a nose job. When, in school that day, the teacher asks her what her favorite word is, she says bini, Persian for nose, and everyone laughs at her. Roya goes to bed that night afraid of wetting herself again, and she listens to her parents whisper about the desperate things she’s heard other people have had to do to make ends meet. That night, she suddenly wakes up and sees Arash standing there, urinating on her.
The sense of shame that Roya feels about the way she thinks she smells connects to her obsession with how her nose looks. Notably, some of the shame that Roya feels about wetting her bed might be misplaced, as she learns at the end that sometimes it is in fact Arash who is urinating on her. The way that Roya is made to feel shame for something other people do reflects the repressive nature of Iranian society during this period, even before the revolution (although as Cyrus finds, living in the United States as an Iranian American comes with its own challenges).
Themes
