Steven Modee

“Cyrus went on: “W. E. B. Du Bois, the American sociologist, do you know his work?” “I don’t,” said Orkideh. “Tell me about it.” “I’m not an expert. I just read a bunch of his stuff in school. He wrote about civil rights, racism. And I remember he had this idea of double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how that applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to see themselves through the eyes of the folks who hate them. And being an Iranian vaguely Muslim man in a country that hates those things, each of those things, and then also writing about martyrdom, obsessing honestly over what that word might mean for me in my own life or in my own death…It’s just hard not to think about, like, ‘what would a person who hates me think about this.’ ” “Why”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!