Afro–Asian Writers' Conferences (AAWC) were a series of transnational gatherings of literary figures from Asia, Middle East, and Africa that took place over two decades to counteract the mounting tensions of the Cold War, the effects of imperialism, colonial oppression, and to establish cross-cultural intellectual contacts and solidarities. The series emerged from the first large Afro–Asian Conference-also known as the Bandung Conference which took place on 18–24 April 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia. Inspired by the cross-cultural spirit of Bandung, Lotus was a trilingual journal published in Arabic, English, and French from the late 1960s by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association. It brought together creative works, short stories, and poems written by activists and intellectuals from Africa, Middle East, and Asia. By focusing on literary and artistic approaches that writers and public intellectuals (the first modernist Turkish playwright and poet Nazim Hikmet Ran, the prominent Turkish poet Ataol Behramoğlu, the widely known Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the Pakistani Marxist poet and author Faiz Ahmed Faiz) used in Lotus, this paper explores the entangled legacy of Afro-Asian memories as a transnational and an activist dynamic process rather than a static product. Here, I argue that Lotus engenders a creative zone of convergence for problematizing the claim that solidarity only emerges from a monolithic sympathetic engagement with trauma victim. Thereby, Lotus gives us a significant model not only for understanding how trauma of imperialism, and colonial oppression operates in literary discourse, but also for understanding the way we grasp the troubled and violent legacies through the emergent cross-cultural solidarityin dire social and political conditions Within this cross-cultural focus, I draw on transcultural memory studies such as the movement of mnemonic archives across spatial, temporal, and social, but also linguistic and medial borders (Erll 2011), the intersection of transnational activism and memory that does not see memory only as traumatic and hence the legacy of the past only negative (Rigney 2018) as well as recent scholarship on memory activism (Gutman 2017; Chidgey 2018). By building on these theoretical trajectories, I ultimately claim that Lotus refashions traumatic paradigm of memory that exclusively functions in terms of isolated individual suffering and victimhood. Lotus thus becomes a fruitful avenue for expanding and challenging the discussion of legacies of injustice and atrocity, such as racial and political violence, colonialism, and slavery.
Key words: Afro–Asian Writers' Conferences, Lotus, traumatic memory, mnemonic archives, convergence, cross-cultural solidarity.
