10 Questions for noam keim
- By Franchesca Viaud
Late spring and early summer belongs to the delicate smell of lindens in bloom, covering the stench of violence and death in the city of Philadelphia. Every year, as the temperatures rise, so does the litany of guns at night, the refrain of a city intent on breaking your heart. Never enough branches and trunks to cover all the cries.
In the dramatic sun of a Philadelphia spring morning, I walk one mile east from my home to my office without the shade of a tree. My body hasn’t adjusted yet to the cruelty of their absence; I grew up under the cover of linden trees lining up our boulevards and populating the parks of my childhood. Trees I have always known as tilleul in my French home. In this new life, under the canopy of the American Empire, trees only grow where money lives.
—from "Freedom Trees," Volume 65, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first pieces I wrote were attempts at articulating my identities as an Arab Jew who wants a liberated, decolonized Palestine in this lifetime. I started writing a zine, called The Land is Holy, in which I examined my family’s complicity with the Zionist State, while also digging into the ways our lineage had been fractured by it. I wanted to write into the silences of the archives which required me to lean into the fragmentation and lyrical that have become my style, to make sense of my experiences of the world.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Where do you find language to talk about the unnamable? How do we construct narratives from the silence of trauma? Those are questions I often went back to, as I turned my zine into an essay collection and as I built the world of The Land is Holy. I constantly return to some of my early loves, the French poets, the diasporic novelists, the revolutionaries, but as I tried to build a nonfiction muscle, I looked up to writers such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Lily Hoang, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Claudia Rankine. People who are able to hold the poetic and the narrative at once. I also was shaped by the teachings of my dearly beloved ancestor Dawud Lee, who wrote countless essays while incarcerated, and who showed me the ways radical love can change the fabric of this world.
What other professions have you worked in?
My work life is shaped by my commitment to being of service to Black and Brown liberation. I have lived many lives, and worn many hats, including teacher, bookseller, organizer. But there is a common thread of wanting to utilize my specific gifts towards freeing as many people as possible from the structures that cage us both figuratively and literally. These days, that looks like supporting men into spaces of vulnerability after experiences of incarceration, through trauma work, program design and advocacy.
What did you want to be when you were young?
As a kid, I was a dreamer: I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha when I was eleven years old, and I became a vegetarian, started meditating, and dreamed of pilgrimages, lives dedicated to others. Later, I decided I wanted to be Sigmund Freud, but that didn’t last very long. All I ever wanted to do in this life, is live in big, vibrant cities and find kinship in relationships, which I am grateful to have achieved to a certain degree.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Capitalism is a blip in the timeline of the universe, and spending time with trees reminds me of that. When I walk in a forest, when I caress the bark of a tree, I am reminded that there was life well before me and that there will be life well after me. Freedom Trees is about that.
In this piece I tried to capture the hopelessness I felt in the summer of 2020, the compounded trauma of the pandemic and of the police state, while also returning to the many apocalypses that my ancestors, our ancestors experienced before us. What can trees teach us about surviving a world that wants us dead? How can I, learn to move through this world at the speed of a tree? How can I plant seeds that will blossom only after I have left this plane? Is that enough to find hope?
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
My internal world is filled with all the cities I have lived in, and I often spend time navigating them from the confines of my imagination. As an immigrant to this country, writing in my acquired language rather than my native ones, I often think about the ways living within the American empire influences my writing. The stories I tell in English are not the ones I could tell in French or in Hebrew. I have been an immigrant my entire life, my identity fractured between many homelands, so diasporic melancholy often permeates my writing.
But at heart, I am a flâneur, a lover of the Parisian streets and the exploration of urban center, and my writing often reflects my wandering nature. I just spent a month in Kathmandu last September, and sometimes, when the grey of an American city just feel impossibly boring, I return to the alleyways and the tiny bridges that pedestrians share with mopeds, the queer parties inside medieval houses.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I first learned to speak English via cassette tapes called “L’anglais par le rap”, which were short hip-hop songs geared towards children. My understanding of the English language is still very tied to the specific rhythm and diction of songs, and I have learned to write prose by listening to songwriters. When I am in the creative writing process, I will listen to certain records on a loop until I am fully immersed in the sonic and lyrical world of that album. For this particular piece and essay collection, I spent an ungodly amount of time listening to Mount Eerie, Blood Orange and Jazmine Sullivan, to only name a few. In the editing process, I will read out loud and follow my ear to make sense of the pacing and prose of an essay.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
If it wasn’t clear to you yet, I understand writing as a spiritual practice, and I approach it in the same way as others would approach religion. I dedicate large amounts of my daily time to it, and that includes my daily practice of long walks, in clockwise circles, around my neighborhood. Every day that I actually put words to the page, I spend a few hours trying to embody whatever metaphor or feeling I am trying to convey and will turn to herbal allies to access deeper emotions, often in the form of dreams.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I am trained as a visual artist, and these days I practice miniature painting on wood, which requires deep concentration and forces me to slow down. I am a big fan of folk art in general, practices of art that are discarded by the academy, and one of my main influences is Howard Finster, the Southern Baptist preacher/ prolific painter and sculptor. I understand us as trying to achieve a similar goal: create a world of holy intricacy for others to enter. If I had to take another turn in this life, I would probably be building a large garden filled with millions of tiny structures and sculptures or building cathedrals out of discarded materials.
What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings and it has made me want to reenter Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Last week, I woke up at 3 in the morning and bought poetry books online including Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s Something about Living, Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward and Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit.
NOAM KEIM (they/them) is a Jewish Arab trauma worker, medicine maker and flâneur currently living on Lenni-Lenape land known as Philadelphia. They have received fellowships from Lambda Literary, Roots.Wounds.Words, Tin House and Sewanee. Their debut essay collection The Land is Holy, winner of the Megaphone Prize 2022, is forthcoming from Radix Media in 2024.
