PROYECTO ARTISTA
LOTUS NOTES
NIDA GHOUSE IN COLLABORATION WITH
SHREYAS KARLE AND SACHIN KONDHALKAR
“Lotus Notes” began in 2014 as a monthly series of texts for the online
platform Mada Masr. It traces a partial biography of a forgotten Afro-
Asian trilingual literary quarterly from a bygone, bipolar world and its
interrupted historical networks. Riddled with chance encounters and
missing links, the fragmented form of the series simultaneously
charts a contemporary biography of research. Written from outside the
archives of Lotus with little access to its chronological evolution, “Lotus
Notes” draws out an improbable story that may otherwise not have
been told. It brings into memory signs of a time that has been obscured
by a post–Cold War, neoliberal order.
covertly by an anticommunist advocacy group called the Congress for
Cultural Freedom. En 1966, The New York Times revealed that the
Congress was a front organization established and bankrolled by the
United States’ espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency.
The scandal, which exposed the ideological implications of
American cultural imperialism, sent ripples across the literary world—
editors resigned, magazines folded. In the wake of this news, and car-
rying out the recommendations of a counteractive directive,2 the fi rst
issue of Afro-Asian Writings appeared in March 1968 in Arabic and
Inglés, followed a few months later by the French edition. Publicado
by the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, sponsored by the Soviet Union,
printed in the German Democratic Republic,3 and housed initially in
Egypt and eventually by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, el
journal would acquire the name Lotus.
En años recientes, interest in this literary landscape has been growing,
and more copies of Lotus have been found in second-hand bookstores in
Cairo, Beirut, and Tunis, as well as in reference libraries in Berlin,
Londres, and New York, whose catalogs had them listed all along.
This project in ARTMargins carries the same title as the earlier
series in Mada Masr, but deals with the magazine differently: a través de
its very material content. It isolates visual and textual elements from
scanned pages of Lotus and juxtaposes them to construct evidence of a
concealed cultural infrastructure and an uneven political trajectory.
Each set of images explores a movement across languages of produc-
tion and territories of translation and comes together with the writing
to offset a revivalist impulse that celebrates Lotus on its own terms.
“Periodical diplomacy,” as Michael Vazquez has called it, was at its
N O T E Copyright permission for the elements from the pages of Lotus used in “Lotus
height in the 1960s, when “an array of state-sponsored international
magazines fought pitched battles—against imperialism or commu-
nism and/or their own governments—across the entire length of the
fi rst, segundo, and third worlds.”1 Often founded independently by non-
communist leftist intellectuals, many of these journals—such as
London-based Encounter, Paris Review, Kampala-based Transition,
Bombay-based Quest, and Beirut-based Hiwar—were in fact funded
1 miguel c.. Vazquez, “The Periodical Cold War: Tales from the Bidoun Library," (conferencia,
Sackler Centre of Arts Education, Londres, Agosto 13, 2011).
82
© 2016 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00159
Notes” was granted by Mohamed Salmawy, Secretary General of the Writers Union of
África, Asia, and Latin America and member of the committee for the revival of the Afro-
Asian Writers’ Association. The author thanks Annett Busch, Jenifer Evans, and Rosette
Francis for the various ways in which they helped make this project happen.
2
3
The directive, titled “On the Counter-Action to the Imperialist and Neo-Colonialist
Infi ltration in the Cultural Field,” was formulated at the third conference of the Afro-
Asian Writers’ Association, which was held in Beirut in 1967. It appears in the closing
pages of the inaugural issue of Afro-Asian Writings and makes mention of the Congress
for Cultural Freedom and its disguised imperialist activities.
The fi rst issue of the journal was printed in Cairo. Por 1971, the English and French edi-
tions were printed in the GDR, whereas the Arabic edition continued to be printed locally.
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Lotus was, if anything, an operation in translation, on a supranational
escala. Not only did texts move across English, Arábica, and French in each
issue of the quarterly, but over the course of its history, essays, stories, plays,
and poems made their way into these three languages from the multitongued
literatures of more than seventy African and Asian countries.
In a review of the fourth conference of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association,
held in New Delhi in November 1970, the literary critic R. k. Kaushik reported:
But this toy sputnik which was fired with so much fanfare to spotlight the
Red Star on the Indian horizon failed to go into a viable orbit and came down
like a damp squib, raising more stink than shock waves.1
The crux of his account is this: the “babel of rabid anti-U.S., anti-Israel hysteria”
and “blatant anti-West propaganda” bogged down a literary conference
with “extra-literary issues.” Save for the inaugural address, delivered by the
chairman of the Indian organizational committee, Suniti Kumar Chatterjee,
who cautioned against transforming the event into “a mere political forum,"
the speeches made by the other leaders of the conference—V. k. Krishna
menón, Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer, Kamil Yashen, and Youssef El-Sebai—
peddled a Kremlin-sponsored agenda. Besides endless platitudes of
resistance against neo-imperialism and easy celebrations of the inherent
greatness of the shared Afro-Asian condition, not much was said. A few of
the delegates staged a walkout, and many others, feeling humiliated for
being treated like “morons,” simply stopped attending. For Kaushik,
Chatterjee’s was “a lone cry in the wilderness.” His words gestured to the
limitations of espousing ideological positions that risked reducing the
relationship between the two continents to nothing but geography.
1 R. k. Kaushik, “Tin Hawks and Clay Gods,” Mahfil 8, No. 2/3 (Summer/Fall 1972): 237–45.
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After the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the editorial offices of Lotus
shut down for a while. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was bombed
out of Beirut that summer and its headquarters moved over to Tunis. Faiz
Ahmed Faiz was granted safe passage through Damascus, via Tripoli and
Homs. He went to London, then stayed in Moscow working on Lotus, antes
returning eventually to Lahore. He died two years later, but carried on as
editor-in-chief posthumously for the single issue that came out in 1985.
The PLO continued to house the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association until the
Soviet Union collapsed and funding dissipated. But it took a bit of time for
the editorial structure to reconstitute itself, and during that transition the
colophon ceased to carry a postal code or cable address. Where were
submissions being mailed? Eventualmente, a location emerged: Villa 94 en
Manar 3 on Route X in Tunis. But between 1983 y 1984, Lotus appeared
only when it did, as if out of nowhere.
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En 1986, while the position of editor-in-chief was still vacant, the graphic
identity of Lotus changed. The following year, Ziad Abdel Fattah, the head of
the Palestinian news agency WAFA, was promoted from his role as first
deputy. In an interview published in an Arabic magazine in Paris on the
occasion of his appointment, Fattah recounted the history and significance of
the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and declared plans to extend the trilingual
quarterly to a fourth language—Russian. Was delusion at play? Or were there
real aspirations in the air? Ambos, maybe. En 1991, the Soviet Union would break
up and the PLO would lose its base in Tunis; but two years prior to that, el
editorial staff reprinted Fattah’s interview in what was (most likely) el ultimo
issue of Lotus.
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