Lotus Notes: Part Two A

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The second time I met Michael C. Vazquez was the first time I heard that Lotus, the Journal of Afro-Asian Writings, had been published out of Cairo.

It was the summer of 2011. We were at a café called Downtown 34 sitting beside a wall of windows that looked out onto the fortified synagogue on Adly Street. To put it plainly, our talk was like a time warp. What I recall is being hurled into a universe in which the island of Cyprus, that said haven for hijackers, had transformed itself into a portal for an unpredicted past.

Mike remembers more. We came to the same place with different magazines in our heads that were the same magazine, is how he puts it. What he means to say is that while he had known Lotus as a Cairo-based publication, I had thought it to be of Beirut. There was a reason why this was not trivial. His coherence complements my cause, which is that of dizziness.

Mike was chronologically correct. The periodical did start off in Cairo, and was edited out of here for a good ten years. Initially titled Afro-Asian Writings, its inaugural edition ostensibly appeared in March 1968, in Arabic and English, followed by the French. By its sixth issue, which came out in October 1970, the trilingual quarterly had acquired the name Lotus. The Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), and its over-arching affiliate, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), both had headquarters that hailed from this interface of Africa and Asia, the capital of Egypt. During those days of hey, these institutions had been granted mansions that operate till date, through some sort of leftover mandate, in their names. As it turns out, the prudence of Mike’s account stood firmly on the floor. 

Then one day Lotus moved. It went from Cairo to Beirut.

Lotus Notes is a monthly series for 2014 that is part of a writing project by Nida Ghouse called Inner States, with images by Jenifer Evans.