Wandering towards Liberation: noam keim’s Exploration of Place and Personhood
When you are born of—and implicated in—violent structures of colonization, how do you pursue liberation? In The Land is Holy, an essay collection published by Radix Printing & Publishing, noam keim embarks on a journey through language, memory, and natural landscapes to reclaim a sense of kinship and belonging against the inherited violence of settler-colonialism. An Arab Jew born into a settler family in occupied Palestine, keim reimagines what it means to be “at home” in a world remapped by historical trauma, taking the reader on a journey exploring inherited and chosen relationships, revealing a radical redefinition of what it means to belong to a land, to a people, and to oneself.
Selected for the 2023 Megaphone Prize by poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib, The Land is Holy shares Abdurraqib’s spirit of narrative intimacy and cultural interrogation. While Abdurraqib often looks to music, keim turns to nature, weaving autobiography and geopolitics into an intricate landscape and a genealogy comprised of new generations of ancestors from both the human and more-than-human world, exploring the vast lives they have all experienced across various colonized lands. The book begins with its title, The Land is Holy, establishing its central meditation on land as more than territory—it is memory, identity, and a site of resistance. In an epigraph from the song “Immigrant” by Belly and M.I.A., the lyric, Our land is holy, our land is history, becomes an invocation, and the song’s outro is comprised of found audio fragments talking about immigrants; it ends with the phrase, We are all immigrants. Referencing the song and its ethos in the title grounds keim’s narrative of displacement and inheritance in a shared struggle for belonging and justice.
Early in the collection keim declares, “When I think about home, I don’t want you to think that I believe Palestine to be my home, I need you to know that Palestine should be free from the river to the sea without me in it. I want you to know that all our freedoms depend on it, because there isn’t a home for anybody without a free Palestine.” This is the crux of keim’s project; for Palestine to be free, we must redefine what home is and what belonging means. In understanding this interconnectedness, we can better appreciate how histories of struggle, resilience, and cultural legacy shape not only the physical land but also the people who inhabit it. This view of unity also underscores the importance of shared responsibility; if each part is linked to the whole, then liberation, healing, and justice must be approached collectively. It suggests that our work toward a just and sustainable world requires honoring the full spectrum of what makes a place or community “whole,” acknowledging that liberation for one part cannot exist without liberation for all. It suggests we take the necessary steps to build a world that changes our relationship to land.
The Land is Holy unfolds as a nonlinear essay collection, a structure that reflects the fluidity of memory and the interconnectedness of keim’s experiences. This form allows keim to weave kinship across time, reconstructing kinship as an expansive, dynamic practice—one that includes chosen communities in California’s punk scene, resilient plants, and even displaced Moroccan aoudads. Many of the essays are braided essays—both within individual essays that bring together multiple timelines or stories, and across the collection, with one throughline being keim’s lived experience while another references their family history. The first essay, “A Life in Flight,” begins with a stork in flight migrating back to its home in the Alsatian villages, “Soon, she’ll be back, perched on the top of the church. Home for the spring.” The next paragraph follows Hassida, keim’s mother, as she lands in her new home of Alsace; what comes after is an unpacking of their own name alongside their mother’s and father’s names: “all three of us named in the tradition of our people, tradition meant to help us find our way home.” The rest of the chapter, like the rest of the book, toggles between ecology, geopolitics, personal memory, and family history. keim reconstructs their relationship with kin and home, with the human and more than human world, by naming those who offered them the space for self-discovery and expression. Kin is the queer and punk community in California. Kin are the aoudads on Turtle Island, animals that share their Moroccan origins with keim but had been displaced to the US. By paying attention to plants, their properties, and their histories, keim uncovers new ancestors and reveals how their healing powers extend to our trauma.
“Monster” candidly explores keim’s body and their transness, and it details their attempts to track a plant that defies naming because the plant’s context has shifted, both in language and location. They met the poleo plant at the top of a Zapotec mountain and found its cousin pennyroyal in Philadelphia. Further research revealed it is found around the Mediterranean and in North Africa, which “meant I had met an ancestor of mine on top of that mountain.” keim teaches us to heal by understanding our genealogy in a way beyond inherited blood family, expanding it to the realm of choice. Throughout the book, keim depicts their complex relationship to their biological family and the land they helped colonize. keim reveals how they all became inculcated in Zionism; how one side of their family tried to repair the trauma of the Holocaust and how the other side was caught in a historical moment when Arab Jews were manipulated to leave their homelands to populate the Zionist state. keim didn’t choose to be born into this lineage, but they chose to walk away from all their lineage. In doing so, keim tells a different story of home and kin, modeling a practice for liberation. The persona in these essays grieves what they’ve lost even while celebrating the possibilities they gain both for themselves and others. They affirm Palestinians’ right to their land, they give Zionists a way out of their colonizing project by inviting them to build their own lineages and find new homes.
This liberation of self from the harmful ideology of Zionism is also juxtaposed against their social worker role with incarcerated people. In “The Mallards,” an essay wherein keim chronicles the experiences of two incarcerated people and their own relationship to birds, plants, and liberation, keim sits with their client Kai, who explains he’ll come back as a bird in his next life “and shit on everybody who was mean to [him].” This call for freedom isn’t just from the carceral system; it is also the freedom to retaliate against its harm. Speaking of their brief birding hobby, keim says, “There’s a simplicity in watching a bird, a simplicity that hides webs of complex relationships that define the world.” But keim doesn’t allow for this commonly practiced obfuscation; they instead show how threads of that web come together and become intertwined, across time and geography. Meanwhile, in “Fruits of the Desert,” keim details the power of metaphor with the cactus fruit: Native to the land in Palestine, Zionists appropriated it as “sabra” to symbolize Jews born within the Zionist state. keim describes how Mahmoud Al-Ardah and five other men escaped from a Zionist prison where they were spending a life sentence because they resisted the occupation of their home. Al-Ardah’s blissful reaction to the taste of cactus fruit after twenty-two years of incarceration is a brief moment of joyful reclamation.
keim continues this thread between incarceration and occupation: “[P]rison in all its cruelty,” they say, “reproduces the abomination of colonialism by taking land away, by disconnecting us from plants and ecosystems and ancestral practices. The purpose of prison is to take us so far away from land and community and relationship that we forget that we belong to each other, and to the seeds, the birds, the sun, the sky.” A light tap at one end of the web causes vibrations across the whole, and keim brings these anecdotes together in a two-page chapter, “A Small Correction About Birds and Spoons,” which describes the effects of the carceral system on both Kai and Al-Ardah.
At the start of the penultimate essay, “To Walter,” they share that the first tattoo they give themself is the final tear from their mother. They inscribe the word “Flâne’’ onto their skin with needle, thread, and ink. “Every dot on my skin another step towards the embodiment of myself. Flâne, as the injunction, the imperative tense, and the invitation to walk (away).” Later, keim recalls their mother asking them what they were running away from, and in this essay keim finally responds: They are fleeing their mother’s grip and running towards the life they desire and deserve. In this essay, they also juxtapose their journey leaving their childhood home against Walter Benjamin’s flight from the Nazis. In 1940, Walter Benjamin fled Nazi-occupied France, attempting to cross into Spain and escape to the U.S.; denied entry and facing deportation, he died by suicide in the border town of Portbou.
As an essay, “To Walter” is a form of being, a sort of guide to do as Walter Benjamin does, to wander. In explicating the word wandering, as keim does in this essay, keim refuses the commonly held perception of the flâneur as privileged. Instead, they draw the reader back to Benjamin’s definition of wandering: “[to slow] down [and] embrace the street of the city [which] disrupts the forces of capitalism, [so] that those of us who practice the sacred art of walking the streets and letting their life take over are engaging in a radical practice.” Although keim first encountered Benjamin in an art class in 2003, it is not until we reach near the end of the book that they reveal this understanding of themself: They are engaged in a radical practice, one that started in their early childhood explorations of their neighborhood. One that, despite their flight from and to cities across the world, is rooted in those places as spaces for “possibilities and reinvention.” Further, the collection’s nonlinear structure becomes an extended metaphor for that wandering and enacts on the page what keim practices in life, whether following plants and animals across continents or moving from France to the U.S. They drift between memory, lineage, and ecology, refusing the fixed arc of a chronological memoir. This form mirrors keim’s refusal of their inherited role and refuses complicity with Zionist nation-building. Each detour and each return remaps the self through their journey rather than any fixed destination. They codify their wandering.
At the time of this review, we are over a year into the Zionist state’s current genocide in Gaza, and more than seventy-five years into its systematic efforts to occupy Palestinian lands and subjugate the Palestinian people. For over a year the violence has been documented live by Gazans and is accessible to all of us. We are being called to witness and act. Millions of protestors across the world have marched in opposition to and have stood in solidarity against this oppressive regime, chanting, “We are all Palestinians.” In their steadfast sense of belonging, Palestinians have transformed our collective understanding of home and kinship, showing us that these bonds transcend borders and are forged through shared struggles for justice and liberation. And ultimately, The Land is Holy is an invitation—to wander, to unearth, and to reimagine what home could be when we choose solidarity over blood ties and possession. In keim’s hands, land, kin, and justice coalesce into a radical act of self-definition and a collective call to action. The journey is one of reclaiming what it means to belong to a place and to a people—a path toward wholeness that starts with letting go.
Barrak Alzaid (@barrakstar) is a writer of poetry, prose, and creative nonfiction whose memoir, Fabulous: A Story of Family Fracture and Healing, is forthcoming. Excerpts of his memoir are anthologized in The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human and New Moons. His poetry is published in El Ghourabaa: A queer and trans collection of oddities. His work was awarded a first runner-up prize and published in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal as part of the Barjeel Art Foundation’s Mudun Short Story Prize. He has been awarded fellowships and residencies through The Corporation of Yaddo, La Napoule Art Foundation, and 100 West—Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency. More at barrakalzaid.com.
noam keim (they/them) (@noamkeim) is a trauma worker, medicine maker, and flâneur freak based on stolen Lenni-Lenape land known as Philadelphia where they create webs of support for communities impacted by the legal system. Their nonfiction writing weaves themes close to their heart: antizionism, reverence to the land, healing, queerness, colonialism, plants. Their essays can be found in ALOCASIA, The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review and others. Their work was named Notable in The Best American Essays 2024. Their debut essay collection, The Land is Holy, was published in 2024 via Radix Coop. Connect at noamkeim.com.