Planting Seeds for Other People

noam keim sat on the second floor of Lost City Books, a warm presence in a warm space, large windows framing them in front of a DC evening. I was late to the reading, out of breath and a little embarrassed by it. noam was being interviewed by Zein El-Amine. Both had recently debuted books through Radix Media, beautifully printed objects that sat on a table between them, and both spoke with a familiar ease. I slipped into an empty seat and let myself be soothed, their voices like the na3na3 they spoke of. 

The conversation ranged widely—from Jewish Morocco to the Zionist regime to MIA songs—but often returned to the non-human. “I do love a bird,” noam quipped, but there’s more to it than that. noam doesn’t love a bird as an object; they love the relationship a bird offers, the opportunity for deep observation, for slow understanding. So it is with a bird, and so it is with all things. noam’s patience runs deep.

Deep and slow is a refrain that would come up again when I later sat down with them for a one-on-one about their new collection The Land is Holy. Each essay circles a central metaphor: aoudads, the fruit of the prickly pear, and linden trees, to name a few. What emerges is a deeply moving project just as concerned with negative space as it is with text, abolition as it is with ancestry. Hope is a practice, it promises. And we all better get to work.  

—Luke Sutherland, November 2024

This interview was conducted over video in October 2024. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

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Luke Sutherland (LS):

I just finished The Land is Holy this morning, after spending two weeks with it, and something I’ve been thinking about is this idea of deepening what’s familiar. It’s a through line in several essays. What I noticed is a refrain of the slowness of relationship building. I’d love to hear what it means to you to practice relationship building with other humans, with plants, and beyond. 

noam keim (nk):

I grew up in an environment where I had to learn really early on to be alone. I was in an abusive household where I have the vivid memory of being ten years old and thinking: you will not affect me anymore. I spent many, many years of my life building walls and being like, the only person in the world that you can trust is yourself. I didn’t know that relationships were important because I had spent so long building independence. That shifted a lot for me, first when I moved to the US and estranged myself from family, and then when I started, weirdly enough, capitalizing on my ability to build relationships. 

I work as a social worker. I build relationships with people who don’t have community because they came out of dehumanizing prison systems. Working with people who have very similar trauma triggers as mine allowed me to heal a lot. I work with people who have experienced really intense, complex trauma starting way before their incarceration, and who are very hesitant to build relationships because they want to protect themselves. One of the beauties of my job is that I get to work small and deep. I am not funded by grants or anything, and that allows me to have really long relationships with people. Some of the people that I work with, I’ve been working with for six, seven, eight years, and we have weekly conversations, and we have built community with each other. 

One of the things that I often talk about with people is the idea that the human brain is fully able to shift. It has this ability called plasticity that allows us to build new, literal pathways in our brain to move towards healing. But it takes a long time and repetition, and you can’t do that if you don’t consistently practice it. Our brains develop in relationship with other brains. So being in long, sustained relationships that are also filled with unconditional love and accountability really shifted things for me and allowed me to heal. At the same time, I was working in the prison system, which is really disconnected from nature, and I feel like in nature, I find kinship that I don’t find in human relationships.  

A few years ago, I went to the Harriet Tubman National [Historical] Park down in Maryland, which is set in the landscape of the plantations where she grew up. One of the things that I learned there, that I think about all the time, is that the reason Harriet Tubman was able to free people is because she knew the landscape so well. She was an herbalist. She knew the landscape because the places from which she freed people were the plantations where her family members lived. On days when she wasn’t working, she would go visit them. So she knew really well how to navigate this space, and the people that she freed were people who were close to her. It wasn’t strangers, it was people who were close to her. Learning about that, as somebody who often feels the pressure of capitalism, of doing things fast and big, that really gave me permission to think about how slow and deep is actually a way of moving towards liberation, because we’re planting seeds for other people. It’s like, if I do what I do really well, in my small lane, I am building the seeds for people to free other people.

One of the beauties of my job is that I get to work small and deep. […] It’s like, if I do what I do really well, in my small lane, I am building the seeds for people to free other people.

LS: This feeling of slow and deep comes up not only thematically, but it’s also reflected structurally in your writing. I’m really interested in the fragment as method. Most of these essays are in a fragmented form. I wonder, with this idea of slow and deep, these longitudinal relationships—do you see that reflected in the form you use in your writing, like with the fragment?

nk: Because I’m trying to write about a lot of different places, a lot of different timelines, I take a metaphor and then connect all these different threads to it. Linear narrative doesn’t work for me. When I was starting out writing, I would go into workshops, and people would try to push me towards the braided essay or narrative form. They were like, “there’s no resolution to what you’re saying,” and I was like, actually, this is how I want to write this, for a few reasons. 

One of them is that the fragment allows me to hold a lot of negative space, a lot of silence and a lot of shadows, and I really wanted to do that as a gift to myself, to preserve some dignity. Writing about trauma and the worst things that have ever happened to you should come with a sense of agency. I don’t have to tell you everything. I don’t have to show you how I bleed for you to hear my story. There’s a lot of shadows in the text, and I think that the fragment allowed me to do that. I also really wanted to place myself on a timeline that transcends my human life. That goes back to this idea of slowness. I need to believe that there was life before me and there will be life after me. That allows me to relinquish ego as both the writer and the subject of the text. Whenever I feel despair or hopelessness, I have to remind myself that there will be life after me. And the fragment allows me to do that by jumping timelines. 

As somebody who does live with complex PTSD, there’s a lot of memories that I don’t have. If I look at my childhood, I can’t tell you what happened. There’s years and years and years of just absolute blankness. And same with my twenties. There’s many years of my twenties I have no recollection of, and the fragment allows me to not have to tell everything. 

The last thing is that the fragment allows me to bring in things that maybe don’t quite make logical sense when you see them individually. When I put them all together, it brings the reader in as an active participant in the book. You have to make those leaps for yourself and understand the connection. I’m a Capricorn with very high expectations, and I feel like it’s kind of a Capricorn thing. I will hold my reader to an expectation that you will not passively read this, that I want you to actually engage with the text in a way where you have to struggle with me.

I will hold my reader to an expectation that you will not passively read this, that I want you to actually engage with the text in a way where you have to struggle with me.

LS: I love that. I want to come back to the idea of juxtaposition and the way the fragment allows that, but one thing I want to touch on first is the essay “The Mallards.” There’s this moment of you looking through a telescope at ducks. You describe viewing these vignettes, these zoomed-in snippets of the mallards’ lives, and you posit that being able to engage with small vignettes like this creates space for healing, for safety. That echoes what you’re saying in general about fragment as method. So there’s a narrative element with the telescope, then when you zoom out, the fragment, structurally, is doing the same thing. 

nk: The project itself and the political project that is attached to it is overwhelming. I’m trying to talk about my family’s complicity with Zionism, and at the same time their own subjection to colonialism, and at the same time tying that to abolition. Zionism and abolition are both really big concepts, and just to be clear, Zionism is a really, really giant genocidal idea, right? And so the vignette, the fragment, allows me to not be overwhelmed by what I’m trying to say. I can write in little sequences and not feel like I have to say everything. 

I’m turning 40 this year, and I would never have been able to write something like this when I was younger, because I was terrified of not having something to say, and of this idea of your idea being put on the page. When I read Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride, I read the new edition that has addendums where Eli is correcting the original text, because Eli transitioned since the first edition and also has really sharpened their ideas on race, for example. When I read that book, I was like: Holy shit, yes, this is true. The only constant is change, and I, as a writer, should not feel petrified about saying things that maybe tomorrow I will think are not true. 

That’s one of my contradictions: I love the small and the contained, and at the same time, I’m grappling with really big ideas. I’m still trying to figure out, how do we win? How do we win freedom? That’s the big question of the book: What does it take to find freedom, individually and collectively? I don’t think that I would have been able to do that if I sat down and was like, “Alright, let me write a linear narrative.”

The only constant is change, and I, as a writer, should not feel petrified about saying things that maybe tomorrow I will think are not true.

LS: Absolutely. Thinking about the strengths of the fragment, juxtaposition is a really powerful one. When I saw you read in person at Lost City Books, I asked you a question about metaphor, and I’d love to touch on that again. I feel like the juxtapositions that fragments allow create these rich associations that are just a playground for metaphor. So this is really broad, but I want to know what you think a metaphor can do.

nk: Each one of the essays is centered around a metaphor. It’s pretty constant in this particular project, and I am an obsessive researcher who has access to an academic library, which is really bad for me. That means that I will be thinking about, for example, storks. Storks are really important to me for a number of reasons. The stork is the symbol of the region of France I grew up in. My mother’s name means stork in Hebrew. Usually when I think about the metaphor, I get really obsessive about it, and I read everything that I can find about a specific thing. I knew the cliches of the stork, but I wanted to understand better the stork, and its meaning in other cultures, and also try to complexify my understanding of it. That’s my favorite thing in the world, that we always have to hold many truths at once. No offense to an American audience, but it’s something that’s hard for an American brain to understand, that many contradictory truths exist at the same time in the world. Through the fragment and through the metaphor, I can kind of express that, because the same image in different cultures means really different things. 

In “Fruits of the Desert,” I’m talking about the prickly pear. It is both a symbol of Palestinian indigeneity and resistance, and has been appropriated by a Zionist ethno-state to describe its citizens. Those two things are true at the same time. Talking about the prickly pear allows me to talk about that, and allows me to talk about colonialism. The metaphor that I have found to be the most useful is when, in an essay called “The Aoudads,” I’m thinking about the Barbary sheep, which originates in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where my people are from. It was brought into the US pretty randomly, first to zoos, and then moved to Texas, where it’s an invasive species. I learned about it when I was in Texas, a Ranger was talking to me like, “yeah, people take them off public land and kill them, and it’s totally legal.”

When I was researching it, I learned that in Morocco, they’re disappearing. Learning more about the aoudad and the way they are distributed in the world, and the way the herds function, allowed me to really process my own feelings around diaspora and belonging to land. There’s no closure to it, but it allows me to bring in really contradictory ideas of, like—Yes, I belong to that land, and also I don’t belong to that land. And those two truths exist at the same time. That’s just an absolute reality of anybody who lives in this world at this moment.

Yes, I belong to that land, and also I don’t belong to that land. And those two truths exist at the same time. That’s just an absolute reality of anybody who lives in this world at this moment.

LS: Yeah, I was going to ask you specifically about the prickly pear and the stickiness that it brings to metaphor, the same symbol being so diametrically different depending on whose mouth it’s coming out of. The broader idea, too, of making the desert bloom, the eco-fascist aspect of the Zionist project, that really touches on what you’re saying about holding these multiple truths and these contradictory metaphors. In “Fruits of the Desert,” you write that settler colonialism feeds on the idea of back-to-the-land models, right? At the same time, this book is asking: how can we authentically reconnect with the land in ways that aren’t part and parcel with genocide? How can we hold those contradictions and build relationships with land in a way that’s genuine?

nk: I’m still trying to figure it out for myself, especially living on Turtle Island. I think it goes back to your first question. It has to do with relationships. Settler colonialism moves from a place of extraction of the land, and even the back-to-the-land model is extractive. It’s like, what can the land do for me? And that is not quite how I understand relationships, at least for myself. In herbalism, there’s this belief that, if you’re growing a plant, you should only harvest what you need, and you have to ask the plant for permission before taking. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks a lot about it in Braiding Sweetgrass, but it is also part of my herbalism practice. I have a wild garden in my backyard, and most of it I do not touch. It is not for me. It is for pollinators. It is for the animals. I have a groundhog that shows up sometimes, which is a little bonkers in the middle of the city. But I think that the plants deserve to have their life without me taking it. I grow them for a reason, but also I don’t need to take from them all the time. 

There’s this other idea in herbalism that I think about a lot, which is that the plants that might be of benefit to you will find you. In my backyard, the weeds are very specific. There are plants that my friends try to grow and cannot. One of them is lemon balm, for example, which is a plant that’s really good for mild depression and nervous energy. And I have a ton of it in my backyard. Like it never stops growing. I really believe that when we spend time in connection with a piece of land and start to learn about it, and start seeing it season after season, and see what it needs and how it grows, there is this point where I don’t need to take from it. I can just observe it, and I can just be in awe of that, because it is miraculous. Anybody who grows any plant from seed knows how miraculous it is to have this tiny speck turn into a wildflower.

I am very aware that I will never understand how it works. There’s all those ideas of science, but most of it, we don’t know how it works. People are trying, but we don’t understand how a forest works. There’s parts of ecosystems that our human brains cannot understand. And so if I show up from a place of humility—of being like, “I do not get how it works”—I can be in awe, and I can not extract. I think that that’s the best I can do in this moment. 

LS: I’m really glad you brought up this idea of observing, because I think another through line of the essay collection is bearing witness. And there’s two sides to that. You talk a lot about how plants can bear witness to our personal, collective, and ancestral experiences. And then in turn, people can bear witness to plants, like in your garden. Some of the examples from the collection of plants witnessing us are linden trees, the Bialowieza forest of Poland, the trees planted over Treblinka. You also bring up how there’s only about 1% of old growth forests left on the East Coast, and the lack of urban canopies in most American cities. I was really compelled by the idea that, if trees can bear witness to us and our trauma and our ancestry, what does it mean to lose those witnesses? If trees are witnesses, what does it mean to lose them?

nk: I was writing that specific piece, “Freedom Trees,” at a time of deep despair. I was trying to capture that moment in June or July of 2020, when there were uprisings all over the US and in my city. It was in front of my house constantly, the psyop of all the fireworks and helicopters that were happening all night, all the time. Because I work with people who are incarcerated, or who have been incarcerated, it was a horrible time. People who were out were super triggered, people were on lockdown. My dear, dear, late friend Dawud, who was at the time incarcerated, would call me three times a day, because I was the only person he knew would pick up. I was constantly in this loop of trauma and trying to extract myself from it. 

And for me, it’s trees. It’s this idea that trees have been there, they will be there. But then there is this reality that the trees are not there. The trees are disappearing, and that, for me, is like the most profound despair that I have. If the witnesses are gone, if the holders of our future are gone—I believe that humans will not exist. Trees will figure out a way for a continued life, and they will not have to witness our bullshit, because clearly, we don’t deserve them. You don’t deserve the trees. We’re not treating them right. Thinking about the trees being gone just destroys me every time I think about it. 

LS: That makes me think of how you end the collection on the piece “Heavenly Tree,” about the Tree of Heaven. In it, you imagine this future where the Tree of Heaven is tearing apart all the penitentiaries and prisons across the land. It’s another contradiction, this idea that what we consider an invasive species and associate with words of destruction could potentially be a portal to liberation. I would love to hear your thoughts about the ways we think and talk about invasives.

nk: I grew up an immigrant. I’ve been an immigrant multiple times in my life, in different contexts. In France, I was heavily racialized as an Arab person, which is really ironic, because my family did everything that they could to not be Arabs in the world. Invasive—when I think about that, I think about the way you as an immigrant, especially an immigrant that’s being perceived as not worthy of the land that you live on, you are invasive. Biologists will even use terms like immigrant species to talk about invasive species. It’s literally a species that is growing outside of its ecosystem, that’s taking over. In France, specifically, North African people, Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccans, Egyptian people who were colonized by the French are considered to be destroying the bullshit French Republic.

This is a little too on the nose as a metaphor, but it is something that really resonates for me with the Tree of Heaven. So again, there’s this idea that plants find you when you need them. One of the things about the Tree of Heaven is that it is a plant that has been used successfully to treat cancer. In my city of Philadelphia, there is a ton of Tree of Heaven. My entire neighborhood is covered in it. The problem of the Tree of Heaven is that if you pull it out, it grows roots that are stronger and can destroy concrete. I kept trying to think about this, right, that you have this plant that nobody wants, and it’s still there, and it’s very stubbornly there. What does that mean? The title of the essay collection is The Land is Holy. I do believe in some kind of divine. I don’t know what it is, but I do believe that there is a reason why the Tree of Heaven is stubbornly attaching itself to the soil that we live on. 

At the same time, when I’m thinking about invasive species and people who have been dehumanized, it’s hard for me not to think about the people that I am in community with daily, which are people who have been incarcerated, people who have been deemed by American society to not be worthy of living on the land, who need to be put in boxes, concrete boxes. I was teaching a trauma class in a prison, and it was at the time when the lantern flies were really intense in that specific area. It’s full of monocultures and that attracts the lantern flies. And I was teaching this six month class that I designed for people who are serving life sentences to get certified to be a trauma-competent peer, which they could use when they come out of prison. And that’s already wishful, hopeful, like the dream of them being able to come out. It’s like hope as a practice. 

When I would go to the prison, we would have to cross the yard to get to the education wing, and the lantern flies would fall on you. They don’t have boundaries, they will just jump on you. The men, all of them are serving life sentences because they allegedly committed homicide. The state believes that they need to die in a cage, that is the idea of life without the possibility of parole. And none of them were touching those fucking lantern flies. They were just covered in them. I was in a group with a bunch of guys, and I was like, what is happening? And they explained: “We can’t do that. We can’t kill a fucking bug. We have to hold ourselves to a different standard, because we can’t be murderers.” 

At the same time, in the media and everywhere in the city, other people were like, “Kill the lantern flies, kill the lantern flies, kill the lantern flies.” I kept thinking about that, this idea of who is deemed worthy of living on a land and who has permission to do certain things. We know that under racial capitalism in America, certain people get to do certain things, and other people get criminalized for it. That is the reality of living on Turtle Island. The invasive species is another metaphor that allows us to hold those contradictions, and really to sit with, like, what does it mean for me to live on this land? What does it mean for me to hold the privileges that I hold? Because I did kill lantern flies. I thought that that was what I was supposed to be doing. Sometimes bearing witness is one of the few things that you can do.

The invasive species is another metaphor that allows us to hold those contradictions, and really to sit with, like, what does it mean for me to live on this land? What does it mean for me to hold the privileges that I hold?

The end of this essay is about Henry Montgomery, who was sentenced to die in prison when he was a child and spent his life in Angola prison in Louisiana and fought the American government and went to the Supreme Court. It’s because of Henry Montgomery that life without the possibility of parole for children was struck down by the Supreme Court. That requires such an intense belief that we can free us, such stubbornness. This belief that even if you tell me that I am not worthy to live on this land, that I’m not worthy to be a human on this land, I will fight, not just for me, but for all the people behind me. 

Two years ago, I was in DC watching Henry Montgomery receive a standing ovation from 200 juvenile lifers who had come home because of his stubbornness, people who are some of my closest friends, who I met when they were in prison. We never thought that we would live with them here, out here as civilians on the street, and now I get to get coffee with them. Sometimes that allows me to believe in miracles. Not miracle in the religious sense, but like—we will take a lot of losses in our pursuit of freedom, but at some points, there will be portals of opening for all of us, and those are really precious. We have to hold onto them, because that’s what propels us towards continuing.