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Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals 1st Edition Federica
Bueti Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Federica Bueti
ISBN(s): 9781032198521, 1032198524
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 6.90 MB
Year: 2022
Language: english
Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals

Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals renders a vivid portrait of the intergenera­

tional and intersectional dialogue between influential feminist writers on how to
say no to the conditions of oppression, exclusion, and exploitation imposed by
patriarchal and systemically racist capitalist societies. The book provides today’s
readers and writers access to the powerful inventory of concepts and techniques
that two generations of feminists have assembled for refusing domination and
constituting fugitive forms of sociability and writing. Drawing on examples from
feminist thinkers, Audre Lorde, Carla Lonzi, Hélène Cixous, Hortense Spillers,
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Anne Boyer, and Simone White, the book focuses on how
the power dynamics of recognition tie the uses of language to the material condi­
tions of discrimination in everyday life.

Federica Bueti is writer, editor, and independent scholar, and Writing Tutor
of the MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory

Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature

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Edited by Ana I. Simón-Alegre and Lou Charnon-Deutsch

Telling Details
Chinese Fiction, World Literature
Jiwei Xiao

Erich Auerbach and the Secular World

Literary Criticism, Historiography, Post-Colonial Theory and Beyond
Jon Nixon

Living with Monsters

A Study of the Art of Characterization in Aldous Huxley’s Novels
Indrani Deb

Trauma, Post-Traumatic Growth, and World Literature

Metamorphoses and a Literary Arts Praxis
Suzanne LaLonde

Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals

Voicing Dissent Across Differences
Federica Bueti

The Zimbabwean Maverick

Dambudzo Marechera and Utopian Thinking
Shun Man Emily CHOW-QUESADA

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Literary-Criticism-and-Cultural-Theory/book-series/LITCRITANDCULT
Critical Poetics of Feminist
Refusals
Voicing Dissent Across Differences

Federica Bueti
First published 2022
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Federica Bueti
The right of Federica Bueti to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
All reasonable efforts have been made to contact copyright holders.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-032-19852-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-29873-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26116-2 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003261162

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

Acknowledgements vi
Note vii

Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 1

1 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s
Writings 17
2 To Steal, to Fly Away Improperly: “Feminine” Lines of Flights
and Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity 46
3 Minor Endings 77
4 Making Inroads Toward an Unbounded Imagination 105

Bibliography 114
Index 137
Acknowledgements

I dedicate this work to my parents, Mariella Conti and Rocco Bueti, for
teaching me to stand up against injustices, for their inspiring commitment to
social justice. To my sister, Domenica, for her support and sisterly love; for
being an example of determination and creativity. During the time I was
working on this book, she gave birth to two beautiful children, Ludovico
and Alessandro— this work is dedicated to them, to the young generations,
because the stories that are told in this book might be a reminder of the
histories of displacement and resistance against the violence of European
modernity. I dedicate this book to Jan Verwoert, whose love and support
has helped me to continue and push through even in the most difficult times.
I dedicate this work to my colleagues at SAVVY Contemporary, for all the
teachings, the laughter, the tears, and all the moments spent in your com­
pany. To Nathalie Anguezomo, Agnieszka, Övül, Didem, Hera, Justine,
Monilola, Özlem, Bonaventure, Hamedine, Heiko, Rachel, Kathy-Ann,
Ramses, Shuruq, Vivian, Denise, Marco, Ibrahim, Mustafa, Gloria,
Katharina, Francesco, Javier, Oscar, Mirene, Patricia, Deborah, Dima and
Adham, Simone, Mehraneh, Papi, Shradda, the many artists, friends, and
colleagues, and many more strangers, I met on my path and who have con­
tributed with their presence and thoughts, directly or indirectly, to the pro­
cess of working on this book. I want to thank my PhD supervisors, Brian
Dillon and Nina Power, for their support throughout the process of writing.
I want to thank wholeheartedly Johannesburg-based artist Sandile Radebe,
for the loving and generous ways in which he has let me in his work and
life; for the endless days and nights of meaningful conversations and
exchanges; for having challenged the limitations of my Western imagination
of freedom and for having shared the possibility of ways out.
Note

The word “Black” is capitalized throughout this book. Thanks to the work
of Black writers, the convention is that the word Black is capitalized when it
refers to Black people and lowercase when it refers to black as colour or
adjective. But I am also aware that the word “Blackness” is much more
expansive than its definition within the context of this study. Blackness, as
Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes in the Undrowned, “is more expansive than the
human. And there is no symbolic or descriptive reference to the term Black
in this society that does not also impact Black lives. So Black is Black.”1

Note
1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned. Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mam­
mals (Chicago: AK Press, 2020).
Introduction
Crossing Paths of Refusal

refusal: a rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibility
in the face of negation (i.e., a refusal to recognize a system that renders you
fundamentally illegible and unintelligible); the decision to reject the terms of
diminished subjecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a
generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility
of living otherwise.
Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,” 20181

To free oneself of the dependency on a repressive narrative, a false cultural

myth, a narrow idea of identity, a one-sided and repressive narrative of the self,
and elaborate a philosophy of life and of writing that insists on a vital and
unbounded expression of womanhood is one of the aspirations of the poetics
discussed in this book. The feminist critical and creative writing discussed here
challenged the stability of literary and artistic canons. These writers have
plunged into the opacities of the world to which they have access—the realities
of their bodies, their lived experiences, and their communities. They conceive
of their works as open and porous form, which assumes the limits of an
embodied perspective and invites others into this dialogical space where the
person struggling for freedom gives birth to her self-in-relation.
The feminist writings discussed here contest a patriarchal, colonial, white
supremacist, sexist, and capitalist worldview that in the wake of the emer­
gence of second-wave feminist movements in the mid-1970s, Hélène Cixous
suggestively called the L’Empire du Propre [“Empire of the Proper”]2—the
masculine “history of phallocentrism, history of propriation”—which she
identifies as a political and moral, semantic, ontological, and sexual
“empire” that is ubiquitous and functions through appropriation, presence,
control. In the famous essay manifesto “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975),
Cixous writes, “Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the
history of reason […] It has been one with the phallocentric tradition.”3
This heterosocial monosexual hegemonic patriarchal Empire of the Proper,
she argues, gives rise to a system defined by binary oppositions and a specific
“masculine” economy that values return, unity, self-presence, self-possession,
and a desire to assimilate “foreign and threatening” others.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003261162-1
2 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
This book examines the ways in which feminist refusal informs important
works by several writers, artists, and poets. Far from being new, refusal as
an ethico-political-poetic concern has a distinct history in the practices of
feminist writers, artists, and poets who created works that defy genre and
categorization; who, through an attentive scrutiny of the conditions of their
lives and creative work, have challenged the status quo of culture, conceiv­
ing of art and writing as “a springboard for subversive thoughts.”4 What
form might writing take when the writer is concerned with the scrutiny of
the conditions of her life and work to insist upon vital, unbound woman­
hood? How does the writer assemble her language for the demands of such
scrutiny? What can we learn from the experiences of feminist writers and
their call for a radical imagination? The book brings together the works of a
transgenerational and transnational cohort of feminist critics and poets
whose works think with “difference”.
Carla Lonzi, Audre Lorde, Hélène Cixous, Hortense J. Spillers, Anne
Boyer, and Simone White attempt to disrupt the frame and representational
thinking that makes a certain framing of female subjectivity possible within
the Westerner “discourse of culture.” Their works unsettle the assurance of
propositions and the solutions offered to them to the question of women’s
freedom and liberation. The writing and thinking of Italian feminist Carla
Lonzi, Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, French poststructuralist fem­
inist literary critic and writer Hélène Cixous, and Black feminist theorist
Hortense Spillers are concerned with modes of being and writing for which,
as we shall see, “escape” and “flight” are the primary modalities. Their cri­
tical works trouble the concept of a monolithic “womanhood” and take as
their point of departure the ways in which the female and feminine have been
represented in Western cultural discourse as absence, alienation, abstraction.
By addressing the flaws and biases of Western literary and philoso­
phical discourse, these feminist critical thinkers embrace the potential of
speaking from this position of “lack,” of alienation that is conceptualized
as the given condition of the subordinated subject, outside the order of
proper grammar—in the space of the improper, the “interstice” as always
already outside. Speaking, writing, reading, and theorizing from this
space of impropriety, makes it possible to imagine a different inhabita­
tion of language and subjectivity—one that is attuned to the realities of
“lived experience.” This study is concerned with the ways in which these
writers have inhabited writing improperly, developing a critical inhabi­
tation of their identity and their “differences” that troubles given ideas of
womanhood, autonomy, liberation. What is this gesture of trouble-
making that feminisms promise, when the writer/poet is concerned with
the scrutiny of her life, with an account of the scene of encounter
between singularities, and the ways in which she has experienced her life
and work in an atmosphere of oppression and violence? How does the
feminist poet account for the ways in which emotions are constructed
across the lines of race, class, sexuality, gender, and age?
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 3
Historically, the attempt at disclosing the enclosures operated by the
foundational violence of the modern world-system, its logic and grammar
of “otherness,” produced a new form of writing of the self. This act of
(self-)disclosure implies a new beginning, an act of (self)-creation that
enables what, in paraphrasing Fanon, Achille Mbembe describes as “dis­
enclosure of the world.”5 The “I” of the colonized and oppressed sub­
jects of history takes down barriers and speaks for itself, in a way that
makes it possible to negotiate a different relation between the interior
and external realities of the self, the body, language, affects, relations. In
recording, elaborating, displacing their “lived experiences” into the space
of writing, the works of this cohort of unruly women feminist critics
expose the “enclosures,” the “folds” that wrap the white and black
female subject positions, across the lines of colour and sexuality and
class, marking the relation of positions that are genuinely different from
each other. A difference between black and white subjectivities’ appre­
hension of intimacy and sexuality, that is reified by Lorde and Spillers’
critical and poetic interventions.
Critical Poetics of Feminist Refusals: Voicing Dissent Across Differences
delves into the histories of feminist refusals — plural! to examine the works
of a group of feminist critics and poets whose works productively intervene,
by producing a series of internal differentiations, in the discourse of cultural
identity; and inhabit, the in-between, the passage, the interstice of the dis­
course of cultural difference. Through a close reading of some crucial pas­
sages from essays, poems, and other texts written by this cohort of feminist
writers, the book reconstructs a trajectory of feminist thinking and theoriz­
ing refusal as a practice of reading and writing the self that questions and
address the problem of “differences.”
This book is an inventory of feminist poetics of refusals. It brings
together the critical-poet tools that a group of unruly women, poets,
critics, warriors, impossible women, killjoys, refusalists have developed
to make a space for a different inhabitation of theory and criticism that
writes in the intervals, in-between. In this book, I write and read in the
gaps between the words of Lonzi, Lorde, Cixous, Spillers, in their ana­
lysis of the intimacies of power relations, where their philosophies of life
and writing meet, recording the sound they make when they touch, when
they speak in tongues.
I decided to structure the book in three chapters that consider the act of
“speaking out,” of “escape and Black fugitivity,” and of “endings.” Each
chapter contains within itself two sections each dedicated to a close reading
of the work of one writer/poet; and is structured in a way that reflects the
internal differentiation, that the works of these unruly women perform
within the feminist discourse on “differences.”
Chapters 1 and 2 are dedicated to the “mothers” of an “improper femi­
nine”—Lonzi, Lorde, Cixous, Spillers. In Chapter 3, I discuss the poetry of
Anne Boyer and Simone White, as they draw and speak back to the histories
4 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
of feminist writings and grapple with the realities of their creative-critical
work in the present, when the erotic power of emotions does not necessarily
serve the purpose of their liberation in a present characterized by emotional,
physical, social, political, economic exhaustion. If a “feminist” poem exists,
what would look like today, and how does the poet prepare herself for this
act of scrutiny of her life and work? The journey begins in the space
opened by feminists of sexual difference’s examination of the construction
of “differences,” in a way that questions the universal category of
“Woman” and the feminists of difference’s theory’s exclusionary logic.
It begins with the misrecognition, displacement, and dislocation of the
location of womanhood on the map of white patriarchal culture, their mis­
placement which is a source of terror but also becomes the possibility of
articulating a different viewpoint on the world, a new form of writing that
recovers the total value of life in all its forms. The historical feminist
“improper” gesture of writing the self is one that affirms life by refusing to
frame and be framed, tapping into the wild self, in the depth of a self that is
not reducible to a series of categories of being. It is conceptualized by the
cohort of critics, artists, poets as a gesture of rupture—what Carla Lonzi
calls “female revolt”; Lorde describes as “standing upon the constant edges
of decision”; Cixous calls the act of “breaking partitions”; and is Spillers’
“interstice”.
These “breakers of automatisms” created works that defy genders, genres,
and categorization, and grappled with the identitarian forces of language,
resisting the grip of Identity and Subjectivity as modern categories; finding
ways out from a representation and an image of “femininity,” the “femi­
nine” of “womanhood” in which they did not feel represented. This act of
“disenclosure” through a disclosure of the conditions and lived experience of
the writer/poet in writing implies what Fred Moten refers to as “sexual cut,”
in terms of the point “where eros meets ontology,”6 and where a series of
differentiations internal to, as we shall see, both the “feminine” and
“Blackness” take place. The “sexual cut” opens a space for the invocation of
an ensemble of bodily metaphors and surrogates that figure around the
convergence of race, sex, memory, and history.
In this book, I set a confrontation, a critical dialogue between unruly feminist
thinkers of refusal, across differences, boundaries, histories, and geographies,
tracing a series of interwoven concerns and consenting reactions; of different
aesthetic practices of desire—of “flights” as the movement between places, of
the “interstice” as the inhabitation of enclosures; of the improper use these
writers and poets make of writing of desire and of the desire for recognition. It
is this improper overlapping, collapsing of spaces, the junctures and cracks
between different female inhabitations of theory and culture, and the challenge
they pose to the modern construction of subjectivity, to the identitarian forces of
language, and to each other, that represent the focus of this research. By setting
up this dialogue between radical feminists of sexual difference such as Carla
Lonzi and Hélène Cixous and the Black feminist Audre Lorde and Hortense
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 5
Spillers, the aim of this book is to “think with” the histories of feminists
refusals, conceived as a quotidian gesture of subversion and intervention into
what is the given of truth and freedom, of the tradition of culture they have
inherited, or what is given of their “lived experience.”
Throughout this book, I revisit the sites of desire in their writing and the
concepts-forms that are generated within that site of improper desiring, through
an engagement with Lonzi’s revolt and Cioxus’ post-structualist theory of an
écriture féminine, Lorde’s elaboration of differences in her Black lesbian writing;
and Spillers’ Black feminist’s poetics inhabitation of the interstice of the Western
discourse through the theory of the flesh female ungendered. Apart from the
obvious differences and incompatibilities that characterize their works, what
these thinkers seem to have in common is the rejection of the terms of dimin­
ished subjecthood in their critical and poetic work.
What they seem to have in common is also their refusal of the repre­
sentation of the encounter between singularities as it is given in the Hegelian
theory of recognition, of the emergence of a political subjectivity, which is
narrated as a battle, a struggle for recognition between consciousnesses.
Their refusal of this scene of the encounter between the self and the world
that is grounded on an idea of violent overcoming might be understood as
the affirmation of life in the face of death in and through a self-writing that
aims to restore the total value and agency to the dispossessed subjectivity.
The works of this cohort of unruly women poets and critics insist on the
power of imagination to tear down walls, to make rooms for the multiple
dimensions of a non-alienated existence, and the possibility of imagining
forms of poetic justice. They have conceived of their poetic and critical
work in terms of a refusal of the proper function of cultural reproduction,
the work of maintenance of the dominant values system and hegemonic
order through given cultural models,7 and a racist and sexist politics of
representation.
Against a politics of representation that “keeps apart what belong toge­
ther,” the critical writers and poets discussed in this book have con­
ceptualized writing as a practice of paying attention to what is absent,
silenced, unspoken, and unsaid of their “lived experience,”. The relationship
between the quotidian, the unsaid, overlooked, unrecognized, the absent,
and refusal is the book’s defining tension. “Refusals” is in this book declined
in the plural, for we cannot speak of a single strategy or tradition, but of a
multiplicity of forms and interventions into Western modern discourse on
the subject and the space of theory. If these unruly women clearly have a
common “enemy” in the Western white colonial philosophical and cultural
order of the world and its extractive logic, which, as Lorde insists, keeps the
universe of women apart, their analysis and tools of liberation greatly differ,
making it impossible to speak of and think with the idea of a “common”
language.
The flight that both Lonzi and Cixous theorize as the gesture of a
“feminine” writer—in a language that remains close to lived experience
6 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
and to the body, while at the same time attentive to the unsaid and
unspoken, the invisible conditions that are not immediately present in
experience—belongs and stays, as we shall see, in the dominative mode,
in relation to the dominative space of culture and discourse on the body
and sexuality. Both Lonzi and Cixous’ work, which emphasize a knowl­
edge that comes from the body and from the lived experience of women,
conceptualize and experiment with a language of “female revolt” and of
the “feminine” that, at least in its ambition of generating an embodied
knowledge of female being, remains silent about the positionality of the
female speaking subject.
Although both Lonzi and Cixous locate their writing in the body the
body remains a metaphor to construct a “common” language of sexuality
and of sexual liberation that, however, remains silent about the location
from which the body, as a privileged site of a woman’s speech, speaks its
truth. This point is made clear by lesbian feminist poet and writer
Adrienne Rich, who, in her well-known address, Notes Toward a Politics
of Location (1985), writes that to locate oneself in the body means “more
than understanding what it has meant to me to have a vulva and clitoris
and uterus and breasts. It means recognizing this white skin, the places it
has taken me and the places it has not let me go.”8 Indeed, if there is a
clear and immediate objection to be made to Lonzi’s radical feminism
and Cixous’ feminism of sexual difference, as they set themselves apart
yet also have something that is common to many white feminist writing,
it is the too often unacknowledged location from which they speak, the
space of white privilege, the position of the already liberated subject, of
the white European middle-class women’s life and work, and their place
within the White Father’s house.
In seeking a language of the “feminine” that speaks in multiple non-uni­
fied voices, Cixous rejects what she believes is the “dialectical scheme of
thought, where difference or otherness played a constitutive role, marking
off the sexualized other (woman).”9 In her writing, however, Lorde chal­
lenged white feminist critics to pay attention and engage not only with the
symbolic, but also and more importantly with the material realities of
women who are poor, Black, lesbian, in a way that, instead of denying dif­
ferences in identity, permits them to transform feminist praxis: “difference,”
Lorde famously writes in the “Master’s Tools,” “must be not merely toler­
ated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity
can spark like a dialectic.”10 These different orientations toward dialectics of
recognition, as we shall see, mark their writing differently, producing dif­
ferent forms and analysis of the intimacy of power relations.

From the “Empire of the Proper” to the “Culture of Relations”

In “Let’s Spit on Hegel” (1971) and “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975),
Lonzi and Cixous respectively disengage with Hegel’s theory of
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 7
recognition. They refuse to think with the recognition as a “life-and-death
11

struggle” that attempts to incorporate the other through an act of oblitera­

tion. By “spitting and laughing” at the absurdity of Hegel’s theory as an act
of intellectual disobedience and rebellion, they revolt against the idea of a
world split into two cultures—those who are “enlightened” and those who,
as de Beauvoir observes, “mark time hopelessly in order merely to support
the collectivity.”12
In contesting the psychoanalytic discourse of the White Fathers, Freud
and Lacan, in Sorties Cixous explains that the concept of “woman” is “kept
alive by lack, is maintained by absence”13 and fear. If the Western world,
has internalized the fear of darkness, across the lines of race, sexuality,
class, and has produced a world in which to be “human” is identified with
the white heteronormative male, Lonzi and Cixous conclude that the way
for the colonized subjectivity to change her condition is by revolting against
the continuity of power,14 and the reproduction of its narratives and forms
of representation.
Lonzi assumes that a “culture of relations” is what differentiates a female
sensibility, where relations involve mutual acknowledgement and transfor­
mation: “The images men have of themselves are outside the relation, while
women see themselves within it. Hence the latter are aware of their need for
the other, while the former […] only see their own growth.”15 If mutual
recognition is impossible in a “male” culture, the relational practice in the
feminist group, the process of coming to consciousness through the analysis
of interpersonal relations is seen by Lonzi as the possibility of constructing a
collective political subjectivity.
The activity in the feminist collective was intimately linked to Lonzi’s
writing and constituted the ground of her theorizing. But the culture of rela­
tions that Lonzi envisions was also limited by emphasis on “authenticity” of
the relation, which, as we shall see in Chapter 1, generated many conflicts
among the women of the feminist group. As the Combahee River Collective,
to which Audre Lorde greatly contributed, in their manifesto published in
1977, asserts, the liberation of women could not be separated from the larger
struggle against racism and capitalism. CRC questions whether “Lesbian
separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even
for those who practice it since it so completely denies any but the sexual
sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race.”16
As we shall see in Chapter 1, in the second section dedicated to a close
reading of some passages from Audre Lorde’s writing and poetry, unlike
Lonzi’s “culture of relations” Lorde believed in the political possibilities of
coalition building across the African Diaspora and between Black and
women of Colour and allies. Lorde’s writing has a larger scope; it is the
means of a coalition building that is anti-racist and transnational in its
character. In her writing and poetry, Audre Lorde has contested the posi­
tivity of feminist theories and criticism. As she writes, in “The Master’s
Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1984):
8 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place
and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place
of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any
difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as
the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.17

Making her comments at the Second Sex Conference, attended, among

others, by Cixous in 1979, Lorde challenged white feminist critics not
only to pay attention and engage with the symbolic and sexual dimen­
sion of a woman’s life, but to develop the sensibility and capacity to
listen to and be attuned to the material realities of women who are
poor, Black, lesbian. In her writing, Lorde exhorts feminists to conceive
of differences among women (differences of race, gender, sexuality, class,
age) as a source of illumination, and to use the insights offered by dif­
ferences to bring about changes in their lives and habits. At the same
time, as Lorde spoke to white feminist of their unchecked privilege and
the pervasiveness of racism even among feminist academics, she addres­
sed Black women’s reticence to talk about sexuality and lesbianism in
the Black nationalist movement and exhorted them to see and acknowl­
edge the sources of distortions in their lives and relationship to one
another.
Her double register of writing addresses two “we” simultaneously,
moving in multiple directions, across differences, in that mode of coalition
building that is the signature of Lorde’s work, the ability to speak and build
communities among women from different backgrounds; to cultivate joy and
being together, while at the same time being aware that someone else is
looking. This act of improper writing is conceived by Lorde as a moment of
hyperawareness, the intimacy of scrutiny that can become a source of “illu­
mination” for the Black lesbian poet. Not unlike Lonzi, Lorde conceived of a
Black lesbian writing and poetry as a “revelatory distillation of experience;”
a form of paying attention to the insignificant details in their experience of
everyday interactions; to the many ways in which she has survived different
instances of oppression.
The “primary scene” of Cixous’ writing, is a scene that shows the inti­
macy of power relation in the life of the young poet and writer. It is a scene
of writing shaped by the memories of colonial relations in occupied Algeria.
Cixous’ reading of the colonial scene in the key of the “feminine” highlights
the colonial’s regime desire for and obsession with dividing, conquering,
categorizing, producing what she describes as “the realm of the eye,”. The
“feminine” poet thus engages reading as the work of making rooms within
oneself for a different apprehension of the relationship self/other; one that is
not indebted to the “masculine” extractivist economies by which Algeria
was not France, but became “French”18—that is possessed, seen through the
eyes of the colonizer, according to the libidinal economy of the “masculine”
desire for appropriation, possession.
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 9
So conceived, écriture féminine becomes invested with the power of a
libidinal differential marked as sexual, where the “feminine” becomes the
expression of an interior multiple, polyvocal, and opaque subjectivity,
which, however, does not seem to be touched by the generative violence of
“difference,” thus making it difficult to see and address how the racialization
of the colonized is a structural condition that affects the subject’s experience
of desire and intimacy in the shadow of colonial violence. If the economies
of the “masculine” are linked to the obsession with recognition and with the
violence of being seen and framed, Cixous’ “feminine,” as we shall see,
seems to renounce to the possibility of conceiving the act of seeing as inte­
gral part of her “feminine” imagination. Instead, the emphasis lies in the act
of hearing and singing, of restoring the vocal cords to writing. Her écriture
féminine orients attention toward the phonic and sonic substance of a
“feminine,” and thus her “feminine” does not really see properly, but listens
for the expressions of the “improper” in language, the French language that
she refuses to use in the “proper” manner as measure of her “assimilation”
into the properness of the French identity and French citizenship.
Of the French language, Glissant writes, “Neither its humanizing func­
tion, however (the famous universality of French as the bearer of human­
ism), nor its concordant predestination to be clear (its pleasurable
rationality) stand up to examination.” For Glissant, the idea of the “right”
or “proper” way of speaking and writing French, sustained by universalistic
humanist arguments (such as that French is the language of rights, that is
the language of enlightenment), only serves to reinforce linguistic hier­
archies, resulting in the deprivation of people’s cultural identities, which are
all “lump[ed] together as la francophonie,”19 a notion which, according to
Glissant, puts French as the bearer of civilization and culture, which, in its
humanizing function, “could help remedy the anarchistic tendencies of the
various cultures that are, completely or partially, a product of its expres­
sion.”20 He writes:

An attentive observer will notice that such windbags are anxiously

intent on confining themselves to the false transparency of a world they
used to run; they do not want to enter into the penetrable opacity of a
world in which one exists or agrees to exist, with and among others. In
the history of language, the claim that the conciseness of French is
consecutive and noncontradictory is the veil obscuring and justifying
this refusal.21

The unfolding of historical subjectivity of culture and language into uni­

versality fundamentally obscures the erasure and negation of people’s cul­
tural identities. These erasures are, according to Glissant, based on a false
sense of superiority and a deadly monolingualism that attempts to reduce
differences, the multiplicities contained within each language, and the pos­
sible articulations of the living, to one single way of being that approximate
10 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
whiteness. But, in this world of relationalities, both Cixous and Glissant
emphasize the already plural, multiple, and polyphonic, opaque ways of
being in and of this world. However, Cixous’ focus on the marks and scars
of sexual difference in language, which disclose the infinite possibilities of
signification, of multiple polyphonic worlds, while being an important
intervention in the conceptualization of writing the self, also unames the
problem of racial subjugation and how it affects subjectivity and imagina­
tion of both the colonized and colonizer's subjectivities. The inscription of
race and the possibility to talk about race are here occluded by a language
that continuously defers and runs away from the violence of the desire for
recognition, and the act of seeing. Instead, the “feminine” writer sees with
closed eyes, for the realities of her skin colour do not seem to matter.
By transposing the body into a sonorous substance that “restores writing
its vocal cords,” the “feminine” dissolves the body into a metaphor, into the
body of writing, an abstract form that while extending and expanding the
possibilities of the “feminine” writer’s speech seems also to render it
immune to the distortions produced by the historical violence of difference
on the body, and in particular on the colonized and racialized body. Chapter
2 sheds light on the significance of Cixous’ écriture féminine as a writing
that attempts a positive inhabitation of the position of lack and non-being as
“feminine.” I examine the conceptualization of the process of de-selfing/de­
egoing as tools to inhabit subjectivity and writing the self improperly.
In reading closely with Cixous’ elaboration of her philosophy of writing and
life in her early texts such as “Sortie,” “The Laugh of the Medusa,” “Coming to
Writing,” “The Author in Truth,” and “My Algerians” among others, one of
the aims of Chapter 2 is to address the limitations of a libidinal economy of the
“feminine” in which reading and writing are of the order of an interiority
which remains intangible, always escaping the moment of seeing. A writing
that, while attuned to how sexual difference operates to constrain imagination,
remains silent about the location of this feminine speaking subject.

In the Shadow of Desire, Improperly Writing

Difference notwithstanding, Lonzi, Lorde, and Cixous all seem to rely on
the power of “feminine” female desire, emotions and feelings to bring
happiness and satisfaction, to be a source of autonomy for the feminist
writer and poet. But the “culture of relations” as Lonzi, and Cixous had
imagined, has failed to materialize, not least because it tends to offer a
positive definition of desire, intimacy, touch which seems to remain untou­
ched and oblivious to the histories of touch and the intimacy of colonial
power relations that complicates any claims to the subversive power of
sexuality and of emotions. if what connects and causes an emotional
response is shaped, as Sara Ahmed observed, “by longer histories of con­
tact,” and when contact becomes extraction and abuse in the atmosphere of
violence and profound crisis, if something like a feminist writing exists,
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 11
where does the poet find her tools for this act of scrutiny of her life and
work? Once we have acknowledged that, as Achille Mbembe beautifully put
it, it “is no longer to act autonomously but to share agency with other
subjects that have also lost their autonomy,” how does this act of writing
reflect on the possibility of practising refusal in the present?
Hortense J. Spillers’ ungendering of the Black female subject, which is
here discussed in Chapter 2, alongside Cixous, represents a fundamental
intervention in the discourse on sexual difference and the discourse of cri­
tical race theory, challenging, on the one hand, the feminist theories of
sexuality’s emphasis on desire and intimacy as liberatory. And, on the other
hand, she contests the ways in which the Black female subject’s sexuality is
represented in the tradition of Black theory and literature. Spillers’ frustra­
tion with the history of representing Black female sexuality, both in histor­
ical discourse and in “the people’s” oral poetry, is expressed in Interstices,
where she writes, “[Black women’s] sexual experiences are depicted, but not
often by them, and if and when by the subject herself, often in the guise of
vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and sheer romance of the
blues.”22
My discussion of Spillers’ work in Chapter 2 revolves around the ways in
which she makes possible an inhabitation for the Black subject in the inter­
stices of the discourses of sexuality and Blackness. In attending to the
internal differentiation of Blackness, Spillers argues that there is no “degree
of difference” which corresponds to the idea of Black female subject posi­
tion. Pointing to the improper way in which the term “Black woman” has
been represented, Spillers turns to a different spatial metaphor—“inter­
stice”—to describe the lexical gaps for which the term—always impro­
perly—substitutes itself. The interstice is “that which allows us to speak
about and that which enables us to speak at all,”23 Spillers writes.
Spillers’ theory of female flesh ungendered, as da Silva has noted, “hacks”
the subject of feminism, developing a “confrontational device” that exceeds
feminists’ rendering of patriarchal subjugation, by arguing that the cate­
gories that we use to describe and make sense of social life—for instance,
the category of family, of gender, kinship, property—“lose meaning” in
relation to the history of African-American women, to the histories of slav­
ery, the condition of captivity in which social life “can be invaded at any
given and arbitrary moment by the property relations.” This requires the
development of a different aesthetic practice of desire, a different analysis
and comprehension of how African-American women experience intimacy,
the body, and sexuality in proximity to whiteness.
The histories of touch that define the relationship between desire and
attachment in the case of the Black female subject, are not the same as those
of white American women. Spillers argues that Blackness remains so rooted

in the originating metaphors of captivity that it is as if neither time nor

history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the
12 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a
bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise.25

In an American society which sells the false image of progress and post-
racialism despite its preoccupation with racialized and sexualized brutality,
Spillers’ work taps into the archive of African-American histories, which, in
its peculiarity, shapes her reading and definition of the African-American
“Black” experience. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Gram­
mar Book,” Spillers asks a question about the representation of historical
violence; of how “high crimes against the flesh” produce dominant regimes
of signification which gloss over acts of brutality. By reference to the vio­
lence of the captive subject, Spillers’ work does not argue and tends to a
horizon of unrepresentability. Rather, in “Mama’s Baby,” as M. Ly
observes, “she makes legible the manifold and recursive ways in which ren­
dering racialised violence imperceivable becomes the very occasion for (the­
oretical) discourse’s proliferation.”26
The essay does not establish a genesis but offers an account of how dis­
possession continues to exist despite having been repeatedly pronounced to
be over. It offers a better understanding of violence beyond the event of
violence, the non-apparent persistence of violence, its transformation into a
systemic force, which, according to Spillers, sustains heterogenous dis­
courses that are paramount to the institution of Theory. In contesting the
separation between physical and symbolic violence, unlike Cixous’ rendering
of the scene of colonial encounter, Spillers moves toward a thinking of their
continuity—where beyond the violating hand that “laid on the stigmata of a
recognition that was misrecognition, or the regard that was disregard,”
there was a whole system, a semiosis of procedures that has enabled such an
event in the first place.
In her acccount of the flesh ungendered, Spillers breaks from a notion of
bodily dispossession that is based, as Cixous and Lonzi insist, on the inter-
subjective encounter between unique individualities, and instead she centres
dispossession and racialized violence as the ordering principles of the social,
in a way that makes it possible to account for the persistence of normalized
violence against racial and sexual minorities in the United States well after
the abolition of slavery.
Where Cixous had insisted on the unspeakability and unrepresentability
of the violence of physical dispossession, Spillers makes it possible to name
this violence and disclose how it operates at all levels of social life. Spillers’
writing does not take force through the articulation of positive essence or
giving too much authority to a set of differential terms. Much of Spillers’
work involves retraining the ear to listen and discern what she refers to as
the “Ur-text” written on the flesh, whose obfuscation sustains cultural pre­
dication. How does one theorize “race” given the Western conception of
history and theory, in this specific case, white feminist theory, and its pre­
dilection for erasure of knowledges that do not conform to the canon of
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 13
Western culture? Can naming become an insurgent ground for the Black
feminist? Spillers insists on the reclamation and disruption of the prerogative
of naming, to which the captive subject is chronically subjected. She imagi­
nes empowerment through the claiming of the “monstrosity” of a “female
with the potential to ‘name.’”
This potential to name points to the possibilities of the semantic field
beyond the legal infrastructure of entitlement and its syntax of ruination.
Spillers’ insights call for the necessity of a reading practice that M. Ty
describes as one of “recall,” understood as “a recollection of the forgotten
historical ground of captivity that is forcibly expropriated for the figuration
of (theoretical) value; and a radical re-appellation—a naming that would
discompose the life-destroying order of naming that secures white supre­
macy over the flesh-turned-thing.”27 to remain a viable mode of critical
thinking, theory would have to address its complicity with the violence of
exclusion and interrupt dispossession’s reproduction through semantically
occlusions, questioning the primacy of abstraction whenever it serves extra­
ctivist ends and whenever it works to consolidate Theory at the expense of
the historical nexus of dispossession, the ground zero of conceptualization
and figuration—the flesh.
Spillers’ work has influenced younger generations of scholars, critical
thinkers, poets, inciting a new and improper way of naming as a way to
restore value to the female flesh ungendered, allowing the emergence of a
theory of sexuality for the African-American woman in which the experi­
ence of desire, intimacy, and sexuality cannot be dissociated from the his­
tories of exploitation and dispossession and their continuation in the present.
In their unique ways, these contemporary writers and poets have given
voice to the materialities of their lives, connected with ghosts and ancestral
voices, and inhabited the space of writing in that improper manner, by
playing with words, at upsetting the structure and grammar of language, by
“breaking apart, to rupture violently” the order of signification that, sustains
dispossession, in order to find a way toward restoration of figurative possi­
bilities. In grappling with their respective traditions of liberation and with
the persistence of conditions of unfreedom these writers have found a lan­
guage to speak of how they experience their freedom’s drive in their writing,
as a potentiality which requires a lot of negativity.
In Chapter 3, I do a close reading of the works of poets Anne Boyer and
Simone White, by specifically examining the ways in which they have con­
ceptualized poetry conceptualized poetry as a way of recording the event of
refusal. If, as we shall see, on the one hand, Boyer’s Garments Against
Women (2016) reads like an inventory of ways in which the poet has refused
the literature and poetry that is meant to “kill,” White’s poems “or, on
being the other woman” (2019) refuses the poet’s desire and authority of
making a “linguistic proposal” about how to attain freedom or autonomy,
and instead orients reading toward the conditions that construct certain
emotions and the events of refusal. Drawing on the works of Spillers and
14 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
Lorde, among others, in her poem, White presents a series of scenes of
intimate encounter in which desire is experienced both as pleasure and
punishment simultaneously in her struggle for autonomy. What if emotions
are not only what gets out there, but what gets in—what moves or immo­
bilizes someone in the face of another person’s desire? What if “my” plea­
sure will inevitably result in someone’s unhappiness? What if, poet Simone
White asks, “my brokenness is the law”? How, then, does the “feminist”
poet and writer reconstitute the wholeness of the subject in writing as an
improper space of freedom?
This book is in conversation with the radical traditions that the works of
Lonzi, Lorde, Cixous, and Spillers embody. It represents an attempt to write
in the gaps left open by their works, by the ways in which they refuse and
respond to the conditions of a subordinated existence in the Western ima­
gination of freedom. They articulate different ways of seeing, contesting, as
Lorde and Spillers do, the place of theorizing not only in relation to the
tradition of thinking they have inherited from the White Fathers, but also
from feminist given from feminist given ways of theorising liberation in
theorizing feminist liberation.
In the pages that follow, I look at and examine how this cohort of unruly
feminists and critical thinkers and poets have made possible a space for
conceptual and theoretical inhabitations of a negative existence, as a critical
site of intervention in the narratives of sexual and racial difference and the
imaginary this differences produce, in order to express and affirm life
beyond the limitations of socially constructed identities. While aware of the
limitations of concepts of “femininity” and “Blackness” in the horizon of
knowledges and practices of freedom, the writers discussed in this book
express the need to work through and deconstruct oppressive narratives and
the realities they produce and that continue to threaten the humanity of
those who have been marginalized and dispossessed.

Notes
1 Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal” in Women & Perfor­
mance, February 2019, copyright © Women & Performance Project Inc., rep­
rinted by permission of Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of
Women & Performance Project Inc.
2 In French, propre means clean and also forms the root for propriety, appropriate,
appropriation. It is property (propriéte), possession, the self (mon propre), the
generally accepted meaning of a word (le sens propre), that which defines and
identifies something (the proper of the novel), the clean and the orderly, the
ethical proper.
3 Hèlène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen, Signs (Summer 1976), 879. The term phallocentrism combines the notion
of the “phallus” with the concept of “logocentrism.” Logocentrism emphasizes
the role of speech (“logos”) and claims that priority must be accorded to the role
of speech in Western tradition. Phallocentrism gives priority to logical language,
deeming any other language that is not articulated in a linear logic as
 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal 15
insignificant and marginal. Derrida calls Western discursive production phallo­
gocentric (a neologism composed of the word phallic and logocentric). He
describes it as “the attitude of metaphysical prevarication of the voice that brings
the truth into the conscience.” (Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (Chi­
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). This voice is masculine, and its logic is
one of opposition and sameness.
4 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” 877.
5 See Achille Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New
York/London: Columbia University Press, 2021).
6 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetic of the Black Radical Tradition (Min­
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 244.
7 Both Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu begin from this Marxian insight to
theorize the ways in which “ideological state apparatuses” (Althusser) and “cul­
tural capital” (Bourdieu) feature in the broader reproduction of capitalism. It is
around this same time that feminists develop their own theorization of social
reproduction—one that explores and explains the relationship between oppres­
sion and exploitation.
8 Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location” (1986), 216. Available
online through: https://people.unica.it/fiorenzoiuliano/files/2014/10/Adrienne-Rich­
Notes-Toward-a-Politics-of-Location.pdf.
9 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 28.
10 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press—Feminist
Series, 2013 [1984]), 111.
11 In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel introduces the idea of a “struggle for
recognition,” describing an encounter between two self-consciousnesses which
both seek to affirm the certainty of their being for themselves (Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, Arnold V. Miller, J.N. Findlay, and Johannes Hoffmeister,
Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, 232ff.). Such a conflict
is described as a life-and-death struggle insofar as each consciousness desires to
confirm its self-existence and independence through a negation or objectification
of the other. Feminists have problematized Hegel’s reliance on the impersonal
operation of the norm on the constitution of the subject, when in fact we come
into contact with these norms through living exchanges that imply a pre­
constitutive sociality, and not a dyad of the master and the slave. Judith Butler
explains Hegel’s theory of recognition as follows: “recognition is an act in which the
‘return to self’ becomes impossible. An encounter with another effects a transfor­
mation of the self from which there is no return.” It’s important to note that Butler
corrects feminists’ critique of Hegel’s theory of recognition, and affirms that
although Hegel is sometimes faulted for understanding recognition as a dyadic
structure, we can see that within the Phenomenology the struggle for recognition is
not the last word, but in it Hegel discloses the inadequacy of the dyad as a frame of
reference for understanding social life. See Judith Butler, Giving an Account of
Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 15–17.
12 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel Press, 1976),
35.
13 Cixous, “Sorties” in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born
Woman, trans. Betsy Wings, Intro. by Sandra M. Gilbert (Minnesota: University
Minnesota Press, 1986 [1975]), 67–70.
14 Here Beauvoir, Lonzi, and Fanon, each being the influential progenitors of fem­
inist theory and postcolonial studies, respectively, seem to show significant the­
oretical and critical affinities, in their appropriation and translation of the
Hegelian dialectics of master and slave and their views of the conceptual appre­
hension of relations of gender and race. In reading with Hegel, Beauvoir and
16 Introduction: Crossing Paths of Refusal
Fanon understood sexual and racial oppression respectively in terms of distor­
tions in human relations of recognition, arguing that women, in the case of
Beauvoir, and Black people, in the case of Fanon, have been excluded from their
participation into the struggle for recognition. Beauvoir held that women across
history have been unable to participate in the struggle for recognition. Fanon
advances the claim that under colonialism, Black people are precluded from
struggling for recognition. However, if, for Beauvoir, recognition is possible
when the oppressed seizes the means of production, and the possibilities of par­
ticipation in the achievements of power, for Fanon, the colonial system blocks
mutual recognition in absolute terms. If the “other fixes me,” as Fanon writes,
“through his gestures, attitudes, and looks, in the way that one fixes a preparation
with a dye,” then disclosing one’s own meaning, in the sense of a self-determinate
act, is not possible within the colonial system. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics
of Ambiguity, and Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press, 1952).
15 From Carla Lonzi, Vai pure (Milano: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1980) as
quoted in Lea Melandri, “Autonomy and the Need for Love: Carla Lonzi Vai
pure” in May Revue (April 2010): 73–77.
16 See The Combahee River Collective’s Statement (1977). Available online through:
www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement­
1977.
17 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 113.
18 Hèlène Cixous, “Sorties,” 70.
19 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997), 252.
20 Ibid., 112.
21 Ibid., 114.
22 Spillers, “Interstices, a Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White, and in Color:
Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University Chicago Press,
2003), 153.
23 Ibid., 156.
24 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal
beyond the Limits of Critique,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Femin­
ism 8, no. 1 (2018): 20.
25 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, in Black, White, and in Color: Essays
on American Literature and Culture (University Chicago Press, 2003), 68.
26 M. Ly, “The Riot of the Literal,” The Oxford Literary Review 42, no. 1 (2020):
76–108. Available through: www.euppublishing.com/doi/pdfplus/10.3366/olr.
2020.0294, 79.
27 Ly, “The Riot of the Literal,” 102.
28 Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 6.
1 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla
Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings

Introductory Note
The experience of the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s in
Europe and the United States had postponed the women’s struggle, making
more evident the failure of leftist and revolutionary ideologies to deal with
their internal unaddressed sexism. The emergence of feminist collectives, in
the 1970s, must be inserted in this context of a refusal of not only the white
male supremacy over ideas of “culture” and “history” in general, but also as
a response to the overlooked struggle over reproduction of the revolutionary
politics of the New Left. This sentiment is echoed in Italian radical feminist
Carla Lonzi’s Let’s Spit on Hegel, when she writes, “by trusting all hopes of
a revolutionary future to the working class, Marxism has ignored women,
both as oppressed people and bearers of the future.”1 In a different context,
that of the U.S. civil rights and Black radical movements, in an address titled
“Learning from the 60s,” Black lesbian feminist warrior and poet Audre
Lorde, similarly writes, addressing the Black community:

We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in iso­

lation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfor­
table. We know what it is to be lied to. The 60s should teach us how
important it is not to lie to ourselves.2

The point of departure of both Lonzi’s and Lorde’s elaboration of the fem­
inist practice of writing is their respective dissatisfaction with the solutions
offered by revolutionary ideologies and an idea of female autonomy that
reproduced the dominant colonial-patriarchal culture. An autonomy in
terms of a deceiving equality that, as the manifesto of the Italian feminist
collective Rivolta Femminile [Female Revolt], states, “what is offered to
colonized people as legal rights. And what is imposed on them as culture. It
is the principle through which those with hegemonic power continue to
control those without.”3
Both Lonzi and Lorde address “difference” in their work. In Lonzi’s fem­
inist practice, “difference” remains of the order of thinking, as Lonzi writes

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261162-2
18 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
in Let’s Spit on Hegel, “we hold systematic thinkers for the humiliation
imposed upon us by the patriarchal world,” but does not quite address the
system itself, namely the materialities of women’s lives and works. Lorde’s
poetics emerges from a different set of conditions and personal experiences,
as an African-American and lesbian feminist, who had grown up in a
racially segregated American society in which freedom and equality had
been legally available, yet remained inaccessible to many black people.
For Lorde, neither the civil rights movement nor the feminist and lesbian
movements—by centring the white body, experience, mythologies—had
provided an adequate space or language or theory to speak of how she had
experienced her struggle for liberation. If Lonzi’s female revolt is directed
toward the “male culture,” Lorde’s refusal is directed towards both patri­
archal culture, as well as towards the solutions offered by white feminist
discourse, whether in its liberal or radical form, which often remained silent
about racism and white privilege.
The scope and vision of the theories of difference that inform Lonzi’s
autocoscienza writing and Lorde’s Black lesbian feminist writing, as much
as their experiences, struggles, and politics, significantly differ. And while
their political affiliation and commitment are incommensurable, both share
in their refusal to be reduced to one and the other social identity or cate­
gory: that of woman, or writer, or art critic, or feminist, or Black or lesbian.
It is through this act of refusal that the poet/writer gives birth to herself. In
“Learning from the 60s,” Lorde says:

I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched

into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life,
my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pre­
tended to match somebody else’s norm.5

It is through the refusal of “somebody else’s norm” that, in this chapter, I

bring the works of Lonzi and Lorde together, and I examine the ways in
which they use writing as a feminist practice, an act of self-scrutiny (Lorde),
thinking against oneself (Lonzi), as tools to develop a language to account
for the relations of power that shape their lives and work.
In this chapter, I look closely at the ways in which Lonzi and Lorde “use”
their personal “lived experience” to address the realities of “differences” and
insist on a “female subject” emerging from and as a result of a collective
effort. Their personal writings refuse the demands of turning oneself into an
object of theoretical speculation and embody a politics of collective voicing
that resists the commodification of personhood.
As Laurent Berlant recalls about her experience of feminism in the 1970s
and 1980s, “the alliances feminism promised to make seemed destined to
produce collaboration and cohabitation across different identities and dif­
ferent kinds of privilege and struggle.”6 Berlant observes that this promise
was based on new relations between knowledge, authority, and desire,
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 19
which fostered intellectual closeness and intimate knowledge as dependent
on “a scene of intersubjectivity,” of a transparent intersubjectivity that fre­
quently blocked out or minimized the material conditions of intersubjective
relations.
I find it important to return to the feminist writings of Lonzi and Lorde
for their conceptualization of writing as a form of coalition building based
on listening, and a different inhabitation of the relation between self and
world. In their different ways, they both embody the figure of the “feminist
killjoy,” which, as Sara Ahmed explains, is someone who works against the
Western obsession with acquiring and maintaining happiness. “To kill joy,”
she writes, “is to open a life, to make room for life, to make room for pos­
sibility, for chance.”7
In placing Lonzi and Lorde side by side, the chapter aims to offer a
nuanced reading of their refusal of a normative existence and their belief in
the power of coalition building and collective organizing through their
creative practice as writers. How do Lonzi’s and Lorde’s writings speak to
the conditions of alienation and oppression that define their present? And, in
Lorde’s own words, “how do you reach down into threatening difference
without being killed or killing?”
In my reading of texts by Lonzi and Lorde, I have foregrounded the ways
in which, in their writing, Lonzi and Lorde have harnessed the “decon­
structive” power of their anger, desire, and alienation; how they have
experimented with the personal in writing that refused the spectaculariza­
tion of the private and have developed poetic forms to practise thinking
against themselves, the self, and against the image given to them as truth of
their beings. Together, their works compose a certain poetic thinking that
names the complex experience of alienation—as lack of and as an enacted
desire for freedom in the key of non-recognition and refusal to identify with
the solutions offered to them by both revolutionary theories and the feminist
movement to “cure” their sense of alienation, and by doing so, affirm their
autonomy as creative subjectivities.
Through the work of Lonzi and Lorde, I turn to reinterpret once again
the idea of “the personal is political.” I am here interested in the examina­
tion of what, beyond the similarities, is the order of intimacy explored by
white and Black feminists and their critical-creative work; the “unspeak­
able” ground on which their visions of liberation historically cross and
clash.

“Shut Up. Or, Rather Speak”: Carla Lonzi and the Reproduction of
Writing Revolt’s Power
In her feminist practice and writing, Lonzi invests her identity of a new
significance. In refusing to assimilate to the demand of the patriarchal order
to identify in her social roles (as a mother, art critic, feminist, socialist,
revolutionary), she discloses the contradictions, the discrepancy, and
20 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
complex ways in which she had experienced her process of autonomy as
creative subjectivity
Her feminist practice emerged in the context of Italian modernization
after the Second World War, when the country’s social structures were
shaken by a growing political contestation, the workers’ strikes of the
1960s,8 the 1968 student revolts, and the proliferation of autonomous youth
movements. In Italy, the feminist movement was never a unified entity.
Some feminists claimed their affiliation to socialist movements, whereas
others preferred to adopt a strategic form of separatism and focus on the
existential practice of desubjectivation and subjectivation, such as is the
case, for example, with the group of Rivolta Femminile (RF). Lonzi had
been an art critic for more than ten years, when, in 1970, together with
Italian artist Carla Accardi, and Italo-Eritrean journalist and activist Elvira
Banotti, co-founded Rivolta Femminile, a collective of predominantly white
Italian women, many of whom were involved in art and culture.
RF was a space where women could give a new meaning to their creativ­
ity outside the legitimate space of culture and the liberal arts. Lonzi refused
the idea that art was the outcome of individual genius, and the art critic
should participate in the reproduction of the same bourgeois value system
and patriarchal order by becoming the “gate-keepers” of culture. In their
manifesto, RF refused the need for “leaders, scientists, thinkers,” and, as
their manifesto states, they rejected “the achievement of power as the basis
for the assessment of actions, in the past and the present, but also in the
horizon of revolutionary ideologies.”9
Lonzi’s feminist practice called into question the means of subjectification
available to her in a colonial-patriarchal culture, and she urged women to
disidentify with the given models of culture. She describes this process in
terms of a process of “deculturalisation,” of “wearing off of the ties to the
male world,” deconstructing given modes of identification, norms, cate­
gories, meanings, representations of what it means to be a woman as a
creative autonomous subjectivity. In her elaboration of “woman” as a sub­
ject of a radical negativity, Lonzi disidentifies with what is given to her as
her desire and image of subjectivity, seeking a woman’s language to name,
elaborate, conceptualize the contradictions and distortions produced by
patriarchal culture as they manifested in her everyday life. For instance, the
ways in which women have been socialized to become good, nurturing, and
caring mothers-girlfriends-muses, or other forms of internalized oppression.
Lonzi’s criticism does not spare feminism itself. Illuminating in this respect
is a conversation with Michéle Causse, a French lesbian writer, translator,
and member of Éditions des Femmes, 10 published in 1977 in which Lonzi
contested how white feminism, being assimilated into mainstream culture,
had become “an ideology, which confirms, rather than throwing power into
crisis.”11
In this section, I look at the ways in which Lonzi combines the material of
her lived experience as the origin of her art (of living a life without a frame)
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 21
as the art of refusing cultural reproduction by delving into the realities of
the experiential. And I oberve and take note of the quiet and quotidian work
of resisting her disappearance either in the silence of nothingness or in her
acceptance to reproduce what is given to her as possibilities of her
liberation.
Her feminist writing becomes a way of recording the salient moments of
relationships and experience that mark a coming to consciousness of herself
as female feminist political subjectivity. This coming to consciousness is
articulated as a departure without arrival—a departure from the art world,
from feminism, from her partner, elaborated and inhabited in the generative
space of writing.
In her diary, Lonzi recalls that “Rivolta Femminile was born from the
effort of two people, Ester [Carla Accardi] and myself, who had questioned
male subjectivity because we had posed ourselves as subjects: Ester as an
artist, myself as a consciousness of a ‘different’ identity.”12 From the outset,
RF denounced the ways in which women had internalized their oppression,
as a psycho-affective or ideological attachment to their circumstance, to the
male master-sanctioned forms of delegated recognition. That’s why RF’s
first gesture of revolt was one that Lonzi calls “deculturalization.” The
manifesto, dated 1970 and first posted up on the wall of the city of Rome,
describes this process of disidentification in the following words:

Our mode of action is deculturalization. […] It affirms the lack of any

need for ideology. Women have countered men’s constructions simply
with their existential dimension: They did not have leaders, thinkers, or
scientists, but they had energy, insight, courage, dedication, application,
sense, and madness. All traces of these things have been erased because
they were never meant to survive, but our strength lies in not having a
mythic view of facts. To act is not the specialized task of some parti­
cular caste, although it becomes so when the purpose of an action is the
achievement and the consolidation of power. Men have mastered this
mechanism to perfection. Since this mechanism is culturally justified, to
reject male culture is to reject the achievements of power as a basis for
assessing actions.13

This refusal to identify with the language of revolutionary ideologies, which

only served to reinforce the existing culture of relations, was matched by the
need to elaborate a women’s counter “culture of relations” grounded on the
practice of autocoscienza, which involved small groups of women meeting
to discuss “issues of all kinds based on personal experience,”14 RF refuses
the patriarchal idea of autonomy in terms of independence and equality,
insisting that it only obfuscates the interdependencies and relations that
conditions a woman’s autonomous existence in a patriarchal order. Lonzi
believes that the first step toward liberation was not the assimilation of
women into male culture, but the need for women to produce a different
22 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
image of power and another culture of relation and recognition based on
dialogue.
The practice of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, was central to
Lonzi’s feminism. The peculiarity of the Italian version of consciousness-
raising, as Teresa de Laurentis pointed out, lies in the emphasis on self-
analysis, on the individual, self-induced, self-determined, or self-directed
character of this process of achieving consciousness15 as a political sub­
jectivity.16 In a diary entry, Lonzi describes the process of autocoscienza as
the realization that “All is intertwined in a web of mutual influences where
the action of one woman is simultaneously reaction and stimulus to another,
and so ad infinitum. Any fixed point of reference is lost, and any answer is
put into crisis.”17 The “safe” space of the group was then, ideally, the space
where women could share their stories, their frustrations, and how they felt
oppressed; deconstruct their experiences, expose the conflict, the interiorized
forms of oppression, and question the image of femininity they had assumed
as their own. As Giovanna Zapperi observes that autocoscienza is perhaps
“the most significant attempt to imagine a feminist autonomous space, based
on dialogue, horizontality, and collective empowerment.”18
If language and knowledge are already colonized by patriarchy, decultur­
alization for Lonzi meant not only and simply to refuse to participate in
culture, but to find new words, a grammar, and a syntax to examine and
express the truths of women’s lived experience. Writing assumes a central
role in the feminist practice of Lonzi and of the women of RF. There is a
conscious attempt to transform writing from a tool of critical legitimation
to a form of recording the ordinary events of a life that disclose both the
insidious character of patriarchal oppression and the possibilities of refusing
it, by affirming one’s own specific and unique way of being-in-relation, in an
essay titled Espressione di sè e cultura [self-expression and culture], Anna
Jaquinta, another woman who was part of RF, says that, in the practice of
the feminist collective, the act of writing stopped being “an alienating mask”
to become, “a means of expression, from a monologue that imposes listen­
ing, to the offer of a dialogue.”19 For Lonzi, this dialogue is possible once we
abandon the certainties of culture and given identities (wearing off the ties
to the male world) and embrace the uncertainties of living a life without a
frame. She writes:

My first need as a feminist has been to make tabula rasa of received

ideas, a tabula rasa inside myself to divest myself of any guarantee
offered by culture, persuaded by the fact that acquired certainties hide a
paralyzing poison.20

She conceives of a form of theorizing rooted in praxis, in a doing that pro­

duces a rupture in the forward-projected history, shifting the analysis from
the consciousness “outward” into the ensemble of social relations within
which the self takes place. This necessity to make tabula rasa invests
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 23
everything: it points to a paradoxical suspension of time, to the idea of
feminism as the gesture that breaks with the linearity of time understood in
terms of historical progress.
Lonzi conceptualized the void of culture as the place from which women
could start theorizing their particular way of being in and of this world. Her
first gesture of revolt, as woman and intellectual, is to reject the Hegelian
theory of recognition in one of her most well-known essays, Sputiamo su
Hegel! [Let’s Spit on Hegel!], Lonzi refuses the Hegelian dialectics of recog­
nition, and the deterministic idea of history and freedom as violent processes
of overcoming, a war between two consciousnesses that fight each other for
their survival. “Hegel’s dialectic,” Lonzi writes, “does not address the lib­
eration of women, that great population so oppressed within patriarchal
civilization.”21
For Lonzi, Hegel had spiritualized “this hierarchy of destinies,” saying
that “woman is immanence, man transcendence.” Contempt for the femi­
nine is thus rationalized: “If femininity is immanence, man has had to negate
it to start the process of history.” Man, Lonzi comments, “has prevaricated,
but about a necessary given. On what bases,” she notes, “have philosophers
acknowledged the act of masculine transcendence and denied it to
woman?”22 Not only is Lonzi’s attack directed against Hegel, but Marxists
too are the target of her critique: “Marxism has ignored women,” Lonzi
writes. “Its revolutionary theory was developed within the framework of a
patriarchal culture,” and she observes that “sufferings, needs, and aspira­
tions” of women should not be “subordinated to the class problem.” Lonzi
thus embraces “woman” as a transitional category of identification that, as
she believed, women might be able to transcend as soon as they become
conscious of its existence as a form of identification.
By revolting against Hegel’s dialectics of recognition, Lonzi affirms
“woman” as the subject of a radical form of negation. If, in the history of
Western philosophy, woman “lacks the necessary premises for leaving the
family ethos” and, Lonzi writes, “for achieving the self-conscious force of
universality through which man becomes a citizen,” Let’s Spit on Hegel
attempts to perform this act of incredulity by which Lonzi deconstructs the
concept of “woman”:

Let us consider the man-woman relationship in Hegel, the philosopher

who saw the slave as the driving moment of history. He rationalized
patriarchal control most subtly of all within the dialectics of a divine
feminine principle and a human masculine principle. The former pre­
sided in the family, the latter in the community. […] The difference
between the sexes is used to form the natural metaphysical basis for
their opposition and reunification. Within the feminine principle, Hegel
locates a priori passivity in which male domination’s proofs disappear.
The patriarchal authority has kept women in subjection, and the only
value recognized as belonging to them is their being able to accept it as
24 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
their nature. Following the tradition of western thought, Hegel sees
woman as, by nature, confined in one particular stage, which is given as
much resonance as possible, but at which no man would ever choose to
be born.23

Lonzi believed that the subject “woman” is the only one that could really
challenge phallocentric and Western philosophical, political, and legal dom­
ination. In her unorthodox use of philosophical, psychoanalytic references
and personal experience, the text discloses the mechanisms of construction
of the subject “woman,” through its subjection to the Other’s discourse.
Hegel’s account of natural law that governs history, according to Lonzi,
shows how patriarchy as a mode of power relegates women to be part of a
“community” created by the male owner of property, citizen, subject of
power, and ruler of the household. In this way, female subjection is justified,
as it becomes part of a universal order’s divine project.
In Lonzi’s idea of tabula rasa, we can hear echoes of Sartre’s existenti­
alism and his engagement with Hegel’s theory of recognition. In her cross-
reading of Sartre, Fanon, and Lonzi, scholar Vinzia Fiorino24 has high­
lighted the similarities between Lonzi’s and Fanon’s engagement with Sar­
tre’s existentialism with regard to his reading of the Hegelian theory of
recognition, but also the important difference between Lonzi’s and Fanon’s
engagement with Hegel and the possibilities of mutual recognition. If, for
Fanon, recognition is impossible within a colonial system which objectifies
and thus blocks the racialized subject’s path to freedom, Lonzi describes
the “void” of women’s culture as the condition capable of restoring the
sexualized subject to the world, opening to the possibility of mutual
recognition among women, However, this seems to imply a utopian space
of interpersonal relations where differences among women would not
produce violence.
Fanon’s radical view sees no possibility of mutual recognition within a
system that does not recognize the humanity of the racialized subject,
whereas Lonzi argued that the concept of autonomy and transcendence in
the Hegelian dialectics is marked by violence, and insists that rather than
violence, it is possible to imagine a female form of transcendence based on
mutual recognition among women. As feminist philosopher Luisa Muraro
argues, “the act of female transcendence, for Lonzi, is missing in human
culture as well as in women’s freedom—that extra act of existence that we
can acquire by symbolically surpassing the limits of individual experience.”25
If Hegel had negated the possibility of female transcendence, and thus in a
patriarchal culture, “woman” as subject cannot exist, Let’s Spit on Hegel
provocatively asks, who is then this subject of negation that I am—that
being that I am not? And if the assumption that Hegel makes assumes that
woman cannot desire, is it possible to imagine a subject who cannot desire,
who cannot transcend her condition, and thus cannot be a subject in the
proper manner, and yet in her improperness still speak?
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 25
Lonzi does answer this question with a 1,300-page personal diary which,
ironically, is almost twice the size of Hegel’s Phenomenology. In it, she had
exposed the drama of her life, from her upbringing in Florence to her fem­
inist years, intending to answer a question: what is left now that I have lost
my role—that I am not an artist, I am not an art critic, I am not a feminist?
Lonzi believes that expressing the different subject’s viewpoint in discursive
terms means to open a theoretical space that is marked and recognized as
one of exclusion. The opening of this space allows for the experimentation
with a different way of thinking and being in the world as the expression of
a specific situation and form of discrimination—being a woman, in the case
of Lonzi.
The idea of an intervention on temporality, which fractures the historical
continuum, the moving forward of history whose ultimate goal is the seizure
of power, is one of the central themes of Let’s Spit on Hegel. As Maria
Luisa Boccia observes, “what Lonzi questions is the foundation and legit­
imation of a historical dialectic founded on power and the elimination of the
enemy, and thus its realizing as political history.”26 It is important to recall
here that in the Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir accused Hegel of betraying
his insight into freedom as negativity by constructing a positive—racist and
sexist—future at the end of history. Beauvoir claims that Hegel’s focus on
the future as some kind of preordained goal allows him to sacrifice the pre­
sent situation in the name of an abstraction,27 and falsely claims the essence
of subjectivity as negativity.28 But oppression, de Beauvoir observes, effec­
tively denies existence any expansion into the future, confining the oppressed
in the given of the present, forcing them into a repetition of the past and
making the givens of their situation appear to them as fixed, immovable,
and unchanging. De Beauvoir uses the concepts of “immanence” and
“transcendence” to explain women’s situation. Immanence is stagnation
within a situation, while transcendence is, as she argues, reaching out into
the future, through projects that open up freedom. Insofar as they work on
meaningful projects that reach into the future, men occupy the sphere of
transcendence. At the same time, women’s oppression relegates them to the
sphere of immanence, and to become just what they are expected to be: a
transcendent-existent trapped in the immanence of being.
If the male’s recognition is the basis of the construction of a false sense of
womanhood, which denies her autonomy, Lonzi, as a subject of radical
negation, assumes identity as a form of refusal, an active process of dis-
identification that implies the strategic affirmation of several “undesirable”
identities (art critic, feminist, lover, female), which are added and dialecti­
cally removed: one identity is “not-All” and thus remains open, incomplete,
opaque, beyond positive and negative, where, the cultural “void” is experi­
enced as the realization of a condition of the absence of autonomy, the
acknowledgement that, as subjects, we become who we are in relation.The
search for this openness depends for Lonzi on the resistance of the other
who activate this desire for oneself and one’s authenticity.
26 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
There are different aspects to Lonzi’s idea of “void of culture” that are
addressed here. The image of the leap into the void as existential openness
gives the woman writer access to her experience of interdependencies. It puts
into crisis the idea of the autonomy of the artist/the critic as individual
genius. Lonzi experiences her autonomy as an abundance of relations that
cancel the self out (absence of autonomy), acknowledging that, as subjects,
we became in relation. In examining these interdependencies, Lonzi also
speaks out the distortions produced by patriarchal mentality in interpersonal
relations, conceiving of her feminist writing in deconstructive terms; a
questioning of given meanings and images, concepts, ideas, identities, pro­
fessional role, and experience. This leap into the void of culture necessitated
a severing of the ties to male culture. But it is also not really a void, but a
moment of opening of life’s possibilities, when, by refusing the gaze of men,
by refusing the forms and images in which she is given to be seen, this
void—filled with the voices of the other women of the collective—allows
her as a female subjectivity to inhabit a more positive image of herself.
Lonzi writes that “the consciousness of myself as a political subject is born
with the group; from a reality that has taken the shape of a non-ideological,
collective experience.”31 Lonzi’s leap into the void is a possibility for a non-
ideological experience, that attempts to conceptualize a space of non-alie­
nated relations among women, with the potential to provoke a new culture
of relations.
Let’s Spit on Hegel is also a response to Simone de Beauvoir’s idea that
women should abandon the idea of a female subjectivity and the idea of
femininity. Lonzi disagrees with de Beauvoir and writes that, for her, fem­
inism is not an idea but “the practice of autocoscienza in the group,” that is
“the real contact, never experienced before, with women who do not iden­
tify with culture, and who, nonetheless, are in search of a culture of their
own.” For Lonzi, this desire for a woman’s culture discloses the pitfalls of
“the illusion of recognition”.

[T]he illusion of a recognition paid at the price of constructing a self on

the only image that man can recognize: the one offered by him. This is
the point that de Beauvoir does not accept and against which she con­
struct defensive theories: according to her, women can only discover
what men have discovered, the same values. De Beauvoir fails to grasp
feminine modalities because she does not admit a feminine meaning of
existence.32

Lonzi rejects de Beauvoir’s idea according to which equality meant to

share power with men. Instead, she insists that women must see themselves
as subjects giving birth to themselves, to a new way of seeing, a new per­
spective, a different way of understanding existence. For Lonzi, feminism
meant a gesture of revolt from which emerges a new consciousness. The
rupture introduced by the emergence of Lonzi’s “unexpected” subject
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 27
33
produces, as scholar Giovanna Zapperi argues, a sort of anachronism
which puts the notion of a linear continuum of history into crisis.
Lonzi inscribes the feminist subject in the present: “we recognize in our­
selves the ability to do of this moment a total transformation of life. Who is
not (invested) in the Master-Serf dialectics,” she writes, “becomes conscious
and introduces in the world the Unexpected Subject.”34 This subject of
radical negation thus introduces a new word in the here and now of the time
of feminism: “the goal does not exist, what exists is the present. We are the
obscure past of the world; we realize the present.”35 The emergence of this
subject of refusal and negation interrupts the flux of history and affirms
a present of transformation; a present that returns each time a woman
makes an unexpected gesture of disidentification with oppressive modes of
subjectivation.

Thinking Against the Self: Carla Lonzi’s scrittura autocoscienziale

In 1972, Lonzi begins the project of writing a diary, with the intent to record
her process of autocoscienza. The diary was published in 1978 by the fem­
inist collective’s press, Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, of which Lonzi was one
of the editors. Taci, anzi parla [Shut up. Rather, speak] is “a feminist
diary,” as the subtitle says, and an important document of Lonzi’s experi­
ence in the feminist group. In it, Lonzi questions her identity as a feminist,
art critic, and woman through an analysis of interpersonal relationships that
formed her “me”. The diary is not there to affirm and confirm Lonzi’s
experience, but rather to question the image of herself in which she did not
feel reflected. The diary is thus a way of interrogating the normative space
of existence, rather than simply making her experience “available” to a
larger audience. The meaning of this questioning is given to the reader in the
title of the diary; a line borrowed from a poem Lonzi dedicated to her sister.
The poem was included by Lonzi in a diary entry dated January 30, 1973. I
here reproduce it in its entirety:

Sister, where are you, my sister?

Are you playing piano
Or translating Plato? Are you feeding
The children or roaming the shops
Absentmindedly? The skirt you bought
Don’t you like it? Are you undecided about its color?
The concert begins, ends
The meeting, the train departs,
Comes a friend from London,
A friend of Sandro. Were you waiting for me?
Ah, you are busy.
I find you pallid, although
I see that you eat. The oldest interrupts
28 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
Always, the same as the youngest.
Do you truly answer to everything?
You neglect nothing about them?
You want them to be happy with the most
Exceptional mother, all for themselves?
Is it enough for you to be an exceptional mother?
And as a sister, friend, and the rest?
Why do you hang up the phone? Did you
not suffer enough solitude?
And me? Do you know me? Do you care? Do you count on me?
Or, it does not matter… Shut up. Or, rather speak.36

The poem is composed of a series of questions. Lonzi questions her sister’s

doing; the meaning of her bourgeois liberation, whether she is happy in her
role as a successful woman, the perfect wife with a lovely family and a nice
house. The list of questions puts into crisis the idea of emancipation,
resulting in women’s multiple sites of labour. It discloses the exhausting
work and failures of trying to fit into the ideals and aspirations of happiness
within the heteronormative Italian bourgeois family system. These are
questions for the “sister,” both addressed to her and for her to ask. Each
question seems to annul the precedent. Each utterance is the expression of a
condition that is deeply questionable.
The poem’s meaning is to be found not in the single utterance/question, but
in their accumulation and exhaustion. The poem records Lonzi’s refusal to
accept the given terms of woman’s emancipation, and her desire to engage in a
more authentic dialogue with her sister. This questioning is the meaning of
Lonzi’s writing of a feminist diary. If a positive language is not yet available to
her, because she cannot find it in the given definition of liberation, then for
Lonzi, questioning is the only form left, the only position available. A gesture
of refusal that troubles the given image of emancipated femininity that is
available to her, as a white Italian middle-class woman. For Lonzi, feminism
presented the possibility to question but also and more importantly to imagine
alternative ways of collective organizing, of writing and making that could be
expressions of a different “culture of relations.”
In the preface of her diary, Lonzi explains that “in the book I speak of
relationships, not people.” In the diary, which record the period between
1972 and 1977, she indeed engages in the process of writing conceived as an
act of scrutiny of her lived experience. Lonzi turns the private and solitary
activity of writing a diary into a collective narration, as she measures her
experience in relation to her interlocutors: her friends and family, her sister,
Marta; her partner, artist Pietro Consagra; her artist friends; Italian intel­
lectuals of the time such as, for instance, Pier Paolo Pasolini. But more than
anyone else, her addressee is the women of Rivolta Femminile, who are
called upon to take part in this dialogue.
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 29
The diary is a heterogeneous body of writing in which she attempts to
negotiate the terms of her own existence as a woman and find a direct form
of expression, a voice that is simultaneously autobiographical, yet deperso­
nalized; theoretical, yet deeply rooted in experience. As the title of the diary
suggests, Taci, anzi parla [shut up. Or, rather speak], is a speech act,37 an
appeal and invitation addressed to other women to speak up, to make their
voices heard. At the same time, while being addressed to others, the speech
act, “taci, anzi parla,” is also a note to the self, a maxim that performs the
function of an admonition addressed to the self as other, and to all other
selves. In other words, the diary seems to be invested with the power to
speak back to Lonzi, reminding her of what she has set out to do—that is,
to speak as a woman with other women.38 Agency, in this case, does not
only belong to the writer, but writing is given agency, the power to act on
Lonzi’s consciousness.
The adverb “anzi” (rather) in the title of the diary is significant, since it
suspends the silence in which she has lived up until that moment, and
announces a sudden and unexpected change; a change that changes the
game, a moment of refusal that enables her to question and speak. The
account of daily events and details of experience, the straightforward and
unembellished language is not meant to please, impress, or entertain the
reader. Some passages of the diary might be difficult to get through. The
reader might even find some descriptions and reflections unnecessarily
lengthy or tedious, and stylistically unrefined. But the diary is not there to
prove Lonzi’s literary abilities, nor does it exist to inscribe Lonzi in the
pantheon of great writers and poets. Lonzi describes her diary as “the
treating of a non-ideological thought,” “a conflict between authenticity and
culture,” “a document of the experience of a group of women,” “drama of a
female consciousness in the world;” as “the possibility of relationships.”
And all of them at once.
In Taci, anzi parla, Lonzi transforms the sense of alienation and incom­
municability into a necessity to communicate differently and a possibility to
speak, the endeavour of emptying the name “woman” from any identifica­
tion or identity, even a feminist one: “all distinctions, and categories that
were [an] expression of the construction of my identity,” writes Lonzi in the
diary, “to start with my dissent—I couldn’t see another woman as woman—
[they] do not belong to me anymore.”39 The diary testifies how the journey
made possible by Lonzi’s refusal—of either an alienated existence or the
abdication of her body under conditions of patriarchy—is a painful process
that involves loss, disorientation, and is without reassurances.
Taci, anzi parla is a feminist call to examine the operations of power on
our lives, including women’s own complicity in their own oppression, and
for this same reason, it remains an important document of a journey that
confronts the writer and the reader with the interiorized sense of oppression
that Lonzi had experienced as a white woman in a patriarchal culture in
post-war Italy.
30 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings
Lonzi’s diary announces a new departure from the feminist collective and
the work of autocoscienza and the feminist movement; a departure made
clear in an interview with Anna Piva, in 1981, a year before Lonzi’s pre­
mature death at the age of 50. In that interview, Lonzi expresses her dis­
appointment with the way feminism had been assimilated, without
producing the systemic changes it had hoped for.40
The practice of autocoscienza itself, which was central to Lonzi and the
feminist group’s practice, by focusing on interpersonal relations within the
limited space of the group, had quickly shown its limitations. Significant is,
for example, the testimony of a group of women who, after a brief experi­
ence with autocoscienza, had joined women workers in the occupied Feda
factory and, in an article published in the feminist magazine Sottosopra,
expressed their frustration with the talking practice of the feminist group:

Going personally to see what was happening fulfilled the need we felt to
go beyond the work of autocoscienza done in groups. We recognize that
it is an essential method of attaining consciousness, individually and
collectively. Still, by itself, it is not enough, because it makes us aware,
but does not give us the instruments for change. It does not help us
develop the contractual power we need to transform society, but only
consciousness and anger.41

The practice of autocoscienza had produced feelings of powerlessness and

frustration because, as the women wrote in the text quoted above, it was a
limited political practice in that it did not involve any form of direct action.
In 1977, in a short text published in the Italian anarchist magazine Anar­
chismo titled “Women as a Revolutionary Minority” (1977), the Sicilian
anarchist and translator Melina di Marca contested Lonzi’s positioning for
similar reasons and for the limitations it shows in articulating the com­
plexity of the struggle for freedom. For di Marca, the failure of many fem­
inist movements in Italy had been to see in “man” the antagonistic subject
which “could unite all women against their oppression independently from
their economic and social situation.”42 Lonzi assumed that sexual oppres­
sion could bring women together. Yet, in her emphasis on interpersonal
relationship, she failed to account for the material realities that shape those
relationships, and how women of different backgrounds might have experi­
enced their sense of womanhood differently. This is evident in a passage in
Let’s Spit on Hegel, in which she makes a false parallel when she writes, “a
black man may be equal to a white man, a black woman to a white
woman.”43 Lonzi’s statement lacks an analysis of the existential material
conditions that shape a woman’s life.
It is significant here to recall the words of Senegalese feminist Awa
Thiam, who, in an essay titled “Feminism and Revolution” included in the
book Black Sisters, Speak Out: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa
(1986), writes of white European feminism:
 Autonomy and Revolts in Carla Lonzi’s and Audre Lorde’s Writings 31
Let us compare comparable things. A textual equivalence between
“woman” and “Black” cannot be justified. One can be of the female sex
and of the Black race. […] What, in all of this, is the position of the
Black woman? European feminists do not seem to know: they continue
to satisfy themselves with the false comparison between the situation of
Blacks and that of women—by which we must understand White
women, even if they don’t say it so explicitly. Others tell us, “Women
are the Blacks of the human race.” Can they tell us then what or who
are Black women? The Blacks of the Blacks of the human race?
You would think that Black women did not exist. In fact, they find
themselves denied, in this way, by the very women who claim to be
fighting for the liberation of all women.44

Thiam’s words expose the assumptions and limitations guiding many fem­
inist attempts to find a common language of female transcendence. Attempts
to speak for the whole universe of women inevitably end because of the
unwillingness of many white feminists to recognize racist patterns and
behaviours in their practices and works, reproducing the violence of the
White Fathers’ language. Thiam points out that an equation between white
and Black women, based on sexuality only, cannot be made, because, “like
her Black brother, she suffers from the damaging aftermath of colonialism
and the crimes of the colonial.”45
When Lonzi attempts to move beyond her experience and signify
“woman” differently, she remains reliant on the specifically white European
abstract category of “woman” as universally given and somehow untouched
by the realities of her skin and the privileges it confers to subjects. In that
sense, de-culturalization cannot always be and for everyone an adequate
solution to women’s liberation, especially when it ignores the effects of
multiple exclusions on women’s lives and works. In her attempt to articulate
a female transcendence, to recuperate “woman” (which is white European)
as an abstract subject of difference, Lonzi’s political imagination remains
obstructed by the desire to reconstruct a self-determined subject “woman,”
who, recognizes her own oppression and the possibility of liberation in the
experience of resonance with another woman.
For Lonzi, resonance is of the order of the “authentic” and of the
transparent, since the event of authenticity happens in this moment of
intimate sharing, by which another woman discloses her multiple ways of
being in the world, and renders possible seeing and recognition among
women of something unique and beautiful about the truth of one’s own
words and actions. Yet what happens when recognition becomes impos­
sible because the terms and values used to assess that relationship are
fraught and dangerous to begin with? What if it assumes the bourgeois
given value of self-determination and agency, as the freedom to choose?
Here Lonzi’s desire for transparency and authenticity, the desire to share,
and the modalities of this sharing, are problematic. Giovanna Zapperi has
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
with him, for he possessed a biting wit that was used unsparingly,
greatly to the discomfiture of his adversaries.
Lord Lynton smiled but made no answer to the remark.
“As a matter of fact I want you here only because you are the
brother-in-law of John Gaunt. I suppose that in the moments that
you can spare from society you do sometimes study international
politics, and you are probably aware that there is room for
improvement in the present position. I am referring more particularly
to Germany, but I don’t blame them more than ourselves. If war
ever takes place between us, it will have been brought about by the
press. The position is such that we have to avoid every possibility of
disagreement, and your worthy brother-in-law is embarrassing me
considerably. The Congo must be a great question in the future, and
I am anxious to delay the day as much as possible. The Free State is
surrounded by colonies owned by England, France, and Germany,
and each country would like the largest slice when the division takes
place. Unfortunately Germany is absurdly jealous of England, and we
reciprocate the feeling just as absurdly. Therefore they will look upon
any step we may take with the greatest suspicion, and we should
return the compliment. Do you follow me?”
“Yes, I think so,” Lord Lynton answered quietly.
“Good. This being the state of affairs, it is essential that the Congo
question should be kept out of sight as much as possible. Your
brother-in-law evidently does not understand this, for he is
responsible for an agitation which is rapidly becoming a nuisance. I
think you will now understand what I want. Gaunt must be silenced,
and it struck me that you, being a relative, were the most desirable
person to bring this about.”
“I don’t know that I have any influence with Mr. Gaunt. True, he is
my brother-in-law, but we have seen very little of one another,” the
Earl said doubtfully.
“Then you must cultivate his acquaintance. Probably you have
some influence with your sister. You may be able to reach Gaunt
through her. I want you to appreciate that the matter is very serious,
and that you must leave no stone unturned to make him keep his
mouth shut. If once the British public gets the bit between its teeth,
there is no holding it, and we shall be forced to intervene.”
“I see the danger, and I will do my best, sir.”
“Good. If he is obstinate, send him to see me at once. Let me
know how you get on as I am rather anxious. You need not hurry to
get back to your post.”
And the secretary gave him a curt nod of dismissal.
Lord Lynton did not at all like the task that had been given to him,
but there was no alternative save to obey, so he ordered his
baggage to be put on a taxi-cab, and as he was about to step in, a
newsboy thrust a paper into his hands.
“Evenin’ Comet, sir? All the news.”
Lord Lynton gave the boy a copper, and during the drive casually
glanced at the paper, but suddenly an exclamation escaped him, and
he proceeded to read a half column with the deepest attention.
“I think that it was about time I came home,” he muttered
savagely. And when he entered Gaunt’s house there was a grim look
on his face.
For a few minutes he waited in the hall until a glad cry was heard,
and Lady Ethel ran towards him with outstretched arms.
“How glad I am to see you, Geoffrey,” she cried, and gave him an
affectionate embrace.
“Where is Mildred?” he asked quietly.
“With her husband. Come along to them,” she said, and slipping
her arm through his, drew him along.
Gaunt and his wife were sitting close together, and it was evident
to Lord Lynton that they were on the best of terms. Lady Mildred’s
expression was that of a perfectly happy woman, and he thought
how greatly she had improved. Her greeting was a quiet one, and
then Gaunt came towards him with outstretched hand.
“Run away, girls; I want to have a business talk with Gaunt, and
afterwards I shall be at your service,” Lord Lynton said hurriedly, as
he just touched his brother-in-law’s hand.
“My husband has no secrets from me—isn’t that so?” Lady Mildred
said quietly, turning to Gaunt with a smile.
“Do you wish her to remain?” the Earl asked coldly.
“It is as my wife wishes,” Gaunt answered, and frankly met his
brother-in-law’s rather hostile look.
“You had better go, Ethel. I don’t suppose we shall be very long.”
“I suppose it is that wretched Congo again,” Lady Ethel said
petulantly, but she left the room.
“What is it?” Gaunt asked quietly, exchanging glances with his wife
who had drawn closer and had slipped her hand into his.
“I really came to see you about this Congo foolishness, but there
is something in to-night’s paper that is of more consequence. Please
read this paragraph, and you will understand why I am rather
upset.”
Gaunt took the paper, and his lips were firmly pressed together
when he saw the head-lines.
“A deal in Amanti Shares. Curious story at the Police Court.”
He rapidly mastered the statement which followed—the arrest of
Davis at the instance of the Mining Company for having forged and
despatched the cable, and the explicit statement that Julian Weiss
and John Gaunt were the men who had planned the forgery. In
counsel’s short speech the facts were disclosed, and Gaunt realized
that it was impossible to deny their accuracy.
Without saying a word, he handed the paper to Lady Mildred, and
his eyes were fixed anxiously on her face as she read.
 “I don’t understand it,” she said at last.
“It is simple. If this account is true, your husband conspired with
the Jewish financier, Weiss, to commit a gross fraud upon the public.
Is that correct?” Lord Lynton demanded of Gaunt.
“Yes, it is quite right,” was the quiet reply.
“And do you deny the charge that they make against you?”
“I do not recognize your right to question me,” Gaunt answered
coldly, but he was eagerly looking down at his wife, and her hand
still rested in his.
“Perhaps I had better tell you the whole story,” he began,
addressing himself to Lady Mildred.
The facts were soon told, and he suppressed nothing except the
vow that he had made, but when he spoke of the interview at which
Edward Drake had been present, and the subsequent sending of the
check to the King’s Hospital Fund, the look of distress vanished from
his wife’s face.
“You did not benefit from it, John. Of course you were very wrong
in the first place, but——”
“Is that the way you look at it, Mildred? Then you have indeed
changed,” Lord Lynton cried harshly. “Cannot you understand that
Gaunt has been found out in a dishonorable act? By this time all
London will have read the report of the proceedings at the police
court, and they will rightly call him a——”
“Silence, Geoffrey!” she cried peremptorily, and her bosom rose
and fell quickly. “Perhaps John may have done wrong, and I am
sorry, but I do not intend to allow it to affect me. If you wish to
remain friends you must be silent.”
Lord Lynton gazed at his sister in wonder.
“Of course, Gaunt may be able to smooth the matter over. It
would be advisable to go to the Amanti people at once, and if
necessary, pay them handsomely for withdrawing the charge. Then
you can get a clever counsel to go to the police court, and say that it
is all a mistake. It is only a question of money,” he said with the idea
of making the best of the situation.
“I intend to take no step at all, for I cannot deny its truth,” Gaunt
answered, and he felt his wife’s hand tremble slightly.
Lord Lynton uttered an exclamation of anger, but quickly brought
into play his diplomatic training.
“We will discuss it later on—with other matters,” he remarked, and
Lady Mildred gave a quick sigh of relief.
 CHAPTER XXVI

L ADY MILDRED was dressed for dinner, and as it was rather early,
she sat down in her own room, but very soon Gaunt came in.
They had not spoken since the interview with her brother, and there
were still traces of anxiety on his face.
“You were very good to stand up for me in the way you did,
Mildred,” he said earnestly. “Your brother was in the right, for it is a
sordid business, and I greatly regret it.”
“Say no more, John,” she said gently, and drawing his face to hers,
kissed him on the lips. “Perhaps it is true that women lose some of
their ideas of morality when they love, for I cannot condemn you. I
only know that I love you.”
He took her in his arms, and there was a great yearning in his
eyes, as he looked steadfastly at her.
“These last few hours have given me a glimpse of paradise,
dearest. For your sake, I wish that I had been a better man. If I had
met you years ago, I believe that I should have always been
straight. At any rate, I can give you my word that there shall be
nothing in my future to make you ashamed.”
“I am sure of that, John. Promise me that you will be very patient
with Geoffrey. He is impulsive and may say things that will hurt you.”
“I will keep my temper for your sake. After all he has some reason
on his side, for this scandal will naturally reflect upon you, and
indirectly upon himself. Now I think it is time to go down to dinner.”
“One kiss, dearest.”
And she placed her arms around his neck and drew him to her.
And John was happy, in spite of the many dangers by which he was
surrounded. There was only one thing that he feared—that she
should become acquainted with the Marillier affair. Her present
attitude assured him that she would forgive the exposure of any of
the shady transactions in the City of which he had been guilty, but
he realized that a charge of murder was a very different matter.
At dinner Lord Lynton made himself agreeable, and the
conversation became animated, all taking part in it save John Gaunt,
for he suspected the reason of his brother-in-law’s unexpected
journey from Paris, and he anticipated an unpleasant interview.
However, it was not his way to postpone anything that was
disagreeable, so when the ladies had left the room, he proposed
that the Earl should accompany him to the library.
“I do not intend to talk about that Amanti business. I will be quite
frank with you, Gaunt. I was sent for by the foreign secretary, and
he wishes me to tell you that your present action of fanning this
Congo agitation is causing him serious embarrassment,” Lord Lynton
said slowly and impressively.
“I can quite understand that he does not like it,” Gaunt answered
with a faint smile.
“The present moment is inopportune for the raising of any
international question. It is impossible for us to do anything without
Germany, and she thinks us incapable of any action for philanthropic
motives. She imagines that we have an eye on the Congo Free
State, and that if any partition should take place we shall, as usual,
succeed in getting the lion’s share.”
“I do not think that we should allow Germany to dictate our policy.
In other days England was wont to go her own way, and she was
always eager to help the oppressed.”
“We have already done everything in our power, for we have made
urgent representations to the Belgian government.”
“Representations are useless—a cruiser at the mouth of the Congo
is the only effective argument,” Gaunt answered drily.
“You will not try to understand our difficulties, and it is useless
discussing the matter further. I want you to promise that you will do
your utmost to stop this agitation. I presume that it is you that pay
for these advertisements. May I ask why you are wasting your
money in this way?”
“Surely that is my business. If I like to throw away my own
money, it only concerns myself. On occasions I have given away
large amounts, when there was no prospect of an adequate return.”
The Earl’s face flushed, and he rose to his feet.
“I suppose you intend to refer to myself. You were very generous,
and the money came when I was hard pressed. I am very grateful to
you for your kindness, but I shall begin to regret that I accepted any
benefit at your hands.”
“You are mistaken, Lynton. On my honor I was not thinking of
you. The money I settled was on my wife’s brother, and you are not
under the slightest obligation towards me. If you had not been
Mildred’s brother, I should have seen you damned before giving you
a penny, so you may make your mind easy. I never professed to like
you personally, for you always struck me as being one of those ultra-
self-satisfied people, who are an offense to the mere ordinary
person. One only has to look at you to know that you appreciate
yourself at your full value—and a little over. Forgive my plain speech,
but you rather brought it upon yourself.”
Lord Lynton looked curiously at Gaunt, and knew not whether to
resent this frankness; but he quickly remembered his mission, and
forced a rather sickly smile to his face.
“It is a good thing to hear an opinion of oneself. But let us return
to the Congo. I want you to promise to give up this crusade. It can’t
really mean very much to you, and you will be doing me a great
favor. Naturally the foreign office know that you are my brother-in-
law, and——”
“They may think the less of you for possessing such an
undesirable relative? I am afraid I can give you no such promise, for
instead of relaxing my efforts, I intend to redouble them, until I
force the government to intervene,” Gaunt said, and the voice was
grimly determined.
 “Governments are not moved so easily, and you will only injure
yourself.”
“I have already done that, for I am pretty sure that the Belgians
are responsible for the Amanti exposure.”
“All the more reason why you should do as I ask,” the Earl broke
in quickly.
“Do I interrupt you?” Lady Mildred called from the doorway.
“No. Come in, for I don’t think that your brother has much more
to say,” Gaunt answered.
“Yes, come in, Mildred, and help me to persuade your husband to
be sensible,” the Earl cried eagerly.
“What is it?” she asked, and sat on the arm of Gaunt’s chair,
allowing her hand to rest on his shoulder.
“Sir Keith Hamilton wants him to stop this Congo agitation, and he
flatly refuses,” Lord Lynton answered, and there was wonder in his
voice that any one dare oppose the wishes of such an august official
as the foreign secretary.
“I do not intend to interfere. John must decide for himself, and I
shall be content with his decision,” she answered quietly.
“You are a very dutiful wife, and a foolish woman. I did think that
you would have more common sense, Mildred,” he cried angrily; and
then turned to Gaunt. “Is this your final decision?”
“Absolutely, and I keep my word,” he answered quietly.
“Sir Keith must have anticipated this, for he said that if I were
unsuccessful, I was to ask you to go and see him at the foreign
office,” the Earl said reluctantly, for his lack of success would be a
reflection upon his diplomacy.
A smile came to Gaunt’s face, and he looked at his wife as he
answered.
 “I fear that I must refuse Sir Keith’s invitation. If he wants to see
me, he must come here.”
“The foreign secretary come to you!” the Earl cried in an amazed
tone.
“Yes. But you may tell him that his visit will be a useless one.”
“Gaunt, I don’t understand you. I think you must be mad.”
“Let us join the others,” Lady Mildred cried hurriedly, for she saw a
glint appear in her husband’s eye, and she had no wish that they
should quarrel.
“Very well, dear,” Gaunt said with a laugh, and the Earl followed
them slowly.
During the rest of the evening there was no further reference to
the subject, but Gaunt now and then caught Lord Lynton looking at
him with a curious expression in his eyes.
In the morning the two men met in the library where the Earl was
surrounded by the morning papers, most of which bore evidence of
having been impatiently thrown aside.
“Gaunt, you must do something. The papers are making a feature
of this Amanti business, and it ought to be stopped. Get your lawyer
man to threaten them with a libel action.”
“For telling the truth. No, I intend to let them go their own way.”
“It is scandalous,” the Earl cried hotly, but Gaunt only smiled. In
fact he had just left his wife and could still feel her kiss upon his lips,
so these troubles were things that did not matter.
When Edward Drake came in, the Earl at once tackled him.
“I understand, sir, that you are Gaunt’s adviser?”
“Why do you say that?” Drake asked quickly.
“He has probably been talking to Lady Ethel,” Gaunt answered
quickly.
 “If you have any influence with Mr. Gaunt, pray induce him to
reconsider his decision. As his near relative, I wish him to do two
things—to stamp out these vermin who are attacking him, and to
cease this Congo agitation. Don’t you agree with me that I am only
reasonable?” the Earl asked warmly.
“No. I know the whole facts of the Amanti business. Gaunt did
wrong, and he must suffer for his wrong-doing. As to the Congo, he
would dishonor himself if he turned back,” Drake answered quietly.
“You speak as a clergyman?” the Earl cried angrily.
“I speak as a Christian and a man. May I suggest that you allow
Mr. Gaunt to manage his own affairs? For I assure you that he is
quite capable of doing so.”
Lord Lynton plainly showed his annoyance.
“Gaunt—I am now going to the foreign office,” he said curtly.
“You may convey my answer to the foreign secretary.”
Lord Lynton left the room, as he did not wish to lose his temper,
for he knew that he was a match for neither of these strong, self-
contained men.
“His lordship is angry,” Drake said with a smile.
“And has reason to be, if you look at it from his point of view.
Have you seen the morning papers?” Gaunt asked casually.
“Yes, and I am sorry that this thing has come out at the present
moment. I suppose there can be no doubt that the Baron is behind
it?”
“No doubt at all, and they will probably work the trial so that I am
subpœnaed to attend. It might even be possible to get Weiss and
myself in the dock on a charge of conspiracy. However, I am
prepared for any development.”
“You are not afraid?”
 “Of nothing, for I have my wife’s confidence—and her love,” he
added so quietly that Drake could scarcely catch the words.
However, he understood and he placed his hand on Gaunt’s
shoulder.
“I am very glad, and have only one regret,” he said in a low voice.
“What is that?”
“That you did not tell your wife everything. She is a noble woman
and large-minded enough to have forgiven, if you had confessed.
But if she finds out from any one else——”
“I won’t think it possible,” Gaunt cried passionately, and there was
horror in his eyes.
 CHAPTER XXVII

L ORD LYNTON did not look forward to his interview with Sir Keith
Hamilton, but there was nothing to be gained by postponement,
for he was satisfied that there was no chance of being able to
persuade Gaunt to change his mind. Accordingly he went to the
foreign office at once, and was admitted into the presence of his
chief.
“Have you been successful?” the latter asked quickly.
“No, sir. Mr. Gaunt absolutely refused to cease this agitation. It is
needless to say that I spared no effort to get him to fall in with your
wishes, but he is quite obstinate. He is an extremely difficult man to
handle,” the Earl said apologetically.
“So I should imagine. Please tell me everything that took place.
Pray be as accurate as possible.”
And Lord Lynton proceeded to relate in detail their conversation,
while the foreign secretary listened attentively.
“A strong man, your brother-in-law. I must see what I can do with
him. When is he coming here?”
“I regret to say that he refuses to come at all,” the Earl answered
hesitatingly.
“Ah, that is serious, for it sounds like a declaration of war,” the
minister said slowly.
“He intimated that if you wished to see him you would find him at
Gaunt House. I am very sorry that I have not been more successful,
sir.”
“So am I,” Sir Keith answered drily, and then lapsed into silence.
The Earl fidgeted in his chair, for he began to imagine that his
presence had been forgotten, but suddenly he felt a pair of piercing
gray eyes turned towards him.
 “You had better remain in London for the present. Are you staying
with Mr. Gaunt?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remain there, for you may be useful. Just one question, and it is
rather a delicate one. What attitude does Lady Mildred take up? Of
course you spoke to her on the subject?”
“Yes, and I am sorry to say that she backs up her husband. She
seems to have changed a good deal since her marriage.”
“Gaunt is evidently a man with a personality, and I shall be
interested to meet him.”
“You intend to go to his house?” the Earl cried in surprise.
“Yes, but there is no necessity to mention my intention to Gaunt.”
A secretary had entered and placed a piece of paper before Sir
Keith.
“Yes, I will see the Baron, but not until I ring. Good-evening, my
lord. Please keep in constant touch with the office,” the latter
remarked to the Earl, who then left the room.
When the door was closed, Sir Keith rose and began to pace to
and fro. It was evident that he was thinking deeply, and now one
could see that the first impression of youth was false, for there were
deep lines on his clean shaven face, and the hair near his temples
was turning gray.
Then he took up a précis which told him of the latest
developments in the Congo agitation, and his brows became
puckered into a frown as he read.
“This man must be stopped. Now we will see what the Baron has
to say,” he muttered irritably, and then touched the button of the
electric bell.
The two men were old acquaintances, and had a mutual respect
for one another’s ability. The Baron possessed an advantage for he
knew that Sir Keith was a straightforward gentleman, and incapable
of chicanery and underhand dealing.
“I expected you before this, Baron. You have been in London
some few days,” the minister remarked, as he returned the Belgian’s
elaborate bow.
“Yes, your Excellency, but I have had very much to occupy my
time. Pray forgive the delay in paying my call,” the Baron answered
politely.
“It is not difficult to guess what has occupied you. For one word—
Gaunt?”
“Your guess is a shrewd one; and in this case I think our interests
are identical. Do you not agree with me?”
“It depends where your interests lie?”
“It is evident—in stopping Gaunt from raising this clamor. It is not
necessary for us to discuss the international situation, for you know
it better than I do. It suffices to say that this agitation is against
your interests and ours.”
“I do not know that it affects my government very greatly, but I
can quite understand that you would object to this exposure. Why
not remedy the state of affairs in the Congo, for sooner or later you
will have to do so?” Sir Keith said significantly.
“We are doing our utmost to improve the status of the natives, but
these things cannot be done in a moment,” the Baron expostulated.
“That is the official voice that speaks. Unofficially I tell you that
the treatment of the natives is as bad as ever it was, and you know
it. But it is useless discussing that; I will drop you a friendly hint. You
are reaching the end of your tether.”
Sir Keith spoke very seriously, and his eyes did not leave the
Baron’s face.
“Of course you are speaking unofficially,” the latter said quietly.
 “Quite so,” Sir Keith rejoined drily; “and now may I know what I
can do for you?”
“Close the mouth of this man, Gaunt.”
“That is not an easy matter. England is a free country, and prides
itself upon its freedom of speech. So far Gaunt has not given us any
grounds for interference.”
“But the agitation is increasing by leaps and bounds. The situation
may become dangerous.”
“You are afraid that His Majesty’s government may be forced by
the clamor to intervene in the Congo. Put an end to the abuses and
you will have no cause for anxiety. I regret that I cannot help you,
Baron.”
Sir Keith rose to terminate the interview, but de Croiseuil made no
sign of going.
“A word from you to Gaunt would make him stop,” he said
doggedly.
“This is not Belgium. An official, however high he may be, is not
such an exalted person as in your country. Good-morning, Baron,”
Sir Keith said decidedly.
“I shall esteem it a favor if you will glance through these papers. I
see that you are a busy man, and I will call again for your opinion. I
have the honor of wishing good-day to your Excellency.”
And the Baron, having placed a large envelope on the table,
bowed himself from the room. The foreign secretary took out the
papers, and it was evident that his interest was aroused from the
outset, for he read on till he had thoroughly mastered each
document. This done he left the office and walked rapidly to his
club, where he ate a frugal lunch, and afterwards went to the
smoking-room.
“The Baron’s little game is very clever, but will it succeed?”
He asked himself the question but could come to no decision.
 “Perhaps an interview with Gaunt will give me the answer,” he said
musingly and having finished his cigar, he started walking rapidly to
Park Lane.
None recognized him save a policeman, for he was a man who
loathed advertisement, and considered that he was most successful
as a foreign secretary when his name was least in evidence. By the
time he reached Gaunt’s house, his mind was made up as to the
course he should take at the coming interview.
There was a few minutes’ wait in the hall, and he noticed with
approval the quiet taste with which the place was furnished.
“Evidently Lady Mildred was consulted,” was the thought, but in
this he was wrong, for Gaunt had chosen everything, even before he
had dreamt of marriage.
To his knowledge Sir Keith had never seen the millionaire, and so
he looked with keen interest at the man who greeted him, noting the
strong face and air of self-reliance.
“The mountain would not come to Mahomet——But I am afraid
that quotation is unappropriate, for I certainly am no prophet, Mr.
Gaunt. May I sit down?”
Sir Keith had held out his hand, and felt Gaunt’s steady grip.
“There is nothing flabby in this man’s nature,” was his thought,
and he braced himself up for a battle.
He sank back luxuriously in the big armchair, while Gaunt brought
a box of cigars.
“Will you smoke, sir?” he asked quietly.
“Thank you. I suppose you know what I have come about. It was
very good of you to invite me to your house. Quite a pleasant
change from my office. This room is very restful; and if I were a rich
man I should choose just such a place. Ah, I see you have excellent
taste in books. Isn’t that a Caxton?”
 “Don’t you think we had better get our business over, and then
the library is at your service,” Gaunt answered, and the respectful
tone removed any suspicion of rudeness.
Sir Keith gave him a quick glance, for he was not accustomed to
be answered quite in this way. It was usually his rôle to lead a
conversation.
“I will be frank and blunt. Why are you carrying on this insane
crusade? You can do no good to the natives of the Congo, and you
will only injure yourself. In addition, it is very embarrassing to me as
foreign secretary, for I tell you it is utterly impossible to do anything
more than I have done. Perhaps in a few months’ time the political
atmosphere will have cleared, and then we may be able to do more
than make representations to the Belgian government. I may say
that, as a private individual, I sympathize with all you are doing. In
the past the conduct of the Congo officials has been diabolical, and
according to the evidence which I have been receiving up to the last
week or so, they are not improving matters. I read your first speech,
and I agree with you that the Belgians intend to exploit the Congo
until they have exhausted the country. I agree with you that there is
no faith to be placed in their promises of reform, and that their
present budget proves them to be liars. This is said in confidence, as
man to man. I believe I have the reputation of not being callous or
hard-hearted, and if it were possible I would intervene at once. But I
tell you solemnly and sincerely that at present we can go no farther
than to make representations. You are only considering the Congo. I
must think of the well-being of the British Empire. The present is a
time of great danger, for a spark might start a war which would
appal mankind. It is my duty to avoid every possibility of causing a
spark. It is my opinion that if we intervene by force, there would be
danger of war with another country, and I dare not run the risk. I
am not usually a man of many words, but I have spoken at such
length so that you may fully understand my position. Now I ask you
to cease this public outcry.”
 Sir Keith had risen, and stood face to face with Gaunt. Their eyes
met, and for a while neither spoke. At last the foreign secretary
uttered a little sigh and turned away.
“And that answer is final?” he asked wearily, although Gaunt had
not spoken.
“Absolutely. I thank you for coming to see me. I thought you to be
a very different man, and I now see that it was a petty act—my
refusal to go to you. Pray forgive me.”
“I, too, was mistaken in you, Mr. Gaunt. Whatever may be your
motive, I do not think it is an unworthy one. It is a pity that your life
has not been different. England can do with such men as yourself.
Good-bye.”
Again the two men eyed one another steadily.
“I won’t insult you by pressing you to change your mind.”
Sir Keith sighed once more, and now his face seemed to have
aged.
“By the bye, I must warn you of one thing. We have not
mentioned the Baron de Croiseuil, but you have probably realized
that he is your bitterest enemy. I don’t think I shall be betraying a
confidence, if I tell you that an application will be made at Bow
Street at once. It concerns the death on the Congo of a man named
Marillier, and proceedings will be taken for your extradition to that
country on a charge of murder.”
Gaunt’s face was set, and his mouth was drawn into a grim line,
but he did not falter.
“It was a kindness to tell me,” he said quietly.
Sir Keith Hamilton gave Gaunt a glance of admiration and then
continued deprecatingly:
“It is evident that this summons for extradition is a move upon the
part of the Baron de Croiseuil to discredit you, and I assure you that
he will not have my support,” he said with quiet emphasis.
 “It is very good of you to tell me this, sir, especially after the
attitude I have taken up,” Gaunt answered earnestly.
“I don’t profess to understand your motive for stirring up this
agitation, and I don’t ask for your confidence, but——”
He paused expressively, and there was an expression of inquiry on
his face. Gaunt knew not what to say, for how could he give his real
motive—the vow? And that was not the sole reason, for now he was
animated by a keen desire to defeat those who were attacking him
so spitefully. His love of fighting had been raised to fever-heat, and
yet he could not explain those mingled feelings to the foreign
secretary.
“I do not fear this police court business, sir. But I thank you for
your kindness. Will you answer me one question frankly?”
“Yes,” Sir Keith answered with a friendly smile, for he felt greatly
drawn to this man and would gladly have helped him in any way that
was possible.
“However great becomes this agitation for reform in the Congo,
however great pressure is brought to bear upon you as foreign
secretary, shall you stick to what you have just told me, namely, that
you will go no further than making representations to the Belgian
government?” Gaunt asked earnestly.
“That is as far as I intend to go, unless there is a very material
alteration in the international position in Europe.”
“Which isn’t likely!”
“Which is very improbable. And now I hope that you will give me
the assurance for which I have asked.”
“I regret that it is impossible, but believe me, Sir Keith, that I shall
always be grateful to you for the consideration you have shown me
to-day. If, in the future, I am fated to act contrary to your wishes
and in a way that you will condemn, I ask you to think of me as
leniently as possible,” Gaunt said, and his voice shook a little.
 “I don’t know at what you are hinting, Mr. Gaunt; but when this
Congo agitation is forgotten I can only say that I should like to know
you. It seems to me that we have many interests in common. May I
look round your shelves? I still have an hour to spare,” Sir Keith said
genially.
And Gaunt proceeded to point out his treasures, and the talk
became animated, as they discussed the beauties of some of the
rare volumes. The Shakespeare folios came in for great attention,
and Sir Keith was frankly envious.
“What it is to be a poor man when money will buy such things as
these,” he said with a sigh.
While they were in the midst of their engrossing talk Lady Mildred
came in, for she had been made anxious by their long conference.
Tea was served and Sir Keith showed her great attention, but all the
time he was studying the husband and wife, and soon came to the
conclusion that they loved one another. For a moment he was
tempted to try to use Lady Mildred in a last attempt to influence
Gaunt, but quickly the idea was dismissed as an unworthy one. And
at last he rose.
“I hope to be able to follow up this meeting with your husband, if
he will allow me to do so,” he said to her pleasantly, and that was
the only occasion on which he made a remark that might have been
construed as a reference to the Congo question.
When he had gone Gaunt turned to his wife and spoke with deep
earnestness.
“That is a man, Mildred, and I hate to have to fight against him.
But——”
He broke off, for her arms were round him and she kissed him
passionately.
“No stupid politics, an you love me,” she whispered.
 CHAPTER XXVIII

G AUNT understood that Sir Keith was not bluffing in what he had
said, and this knowledge made a complete change in his plans.
After dinner he summoned Edward Drake and his brother to the
library, and proceeded to inform them of what had taken place, but
did not mention the Marillier affair. Lady Mildred came in soon after
he had begun to speak and she drew back when she saw them so
deeply engaged.
“Drake, I wondered if we might take Lady Mildred into our
confidence?” Gaunt asked abruptly.
Edward Drake did not answer at once, for he saw danger ahead.
As a matter of fact Gaunt had spoken upon the impulse of the
moment—a rare occurrence—and now it was difficult to draw back.
Indeed, Lady Mildred did not give him an opportunity for she drew a
chair close to her husband.
“Although I am a woman I can keep a secret,” she said
reproachfully to Edward Drake, and he flushed a little but made no
reply.
“To understand, Mildred, you must first realize that Mr. Drake and
myself have vowed,” he flushed as he spoke the word, “have vowed
to help the natives of the Congo whatever may be the cost to
ourselves.”
“Mr. Gaunt may also count me as having made the same vow,”
Lindsay Drake broke in eagerly.
“From my interview with the foreign secretary, I am convinced
that there can be no help from the British government, however
great the agitation may become. That being so we must fall back
upon the plan we mentioned some time ago, and there must be no
time lost in putting it into execution,” Gaunt said slowly and
expressively.
 “You mean the ‘cruiser’ scheme,” Lindsay Drake cried, and his eyes
were alight with excitement.
“Yes, and I have ascertained that at the present moment there is
a small cruiser undergoing her trials. She was built on the Tyne for
the San Salvador Republic and is the very ship for us, especially as
the San Salvador finances are in a bad state, and they are hard
pushed to find money. Our first step is to begin negotiations with the
San Salvador representatives, and I think that they will jump at the
idea, so that we ought to be able to hire the cruiser at a reasonable
price. It is important that my name shall not appear in the
negotiations for I anticipate that the Baron will be closely watching
my every movement. My difficulty is to find a man to conduct this
negotiation.”
“I will do it,” Lindsay Drake cried quickly.
“You hold a commission in the army. It may be dangerous work,”
Gaunt answered.
“I am willing to run the risk.”
“I think I am the more suitable person in every way,” Edward
Drake intervened.
“I agree with you,” Gaunt answered, “for I have other work for
your brother. The engineers and artificers will be easily found, for we
are willing to pay them well. But the other men will require careful
selection. We shall want a number of men with military training, and
can you find them? They must not be ‘wasters,’ and they must be
able to hold their tongues. My present idea is that these men should
concentrate at the Canary Islands where the cruiser could pick them
up. Can I leave this part of the business in your hands?” Gaunt
asked of Captain Drake.
“Yes, I think I can manage it. At the present moment I know
dozens of men—gentlemen—who would be keen at the chance of
going with us, just for the fun of the thing. I am one of them,” the
latter answered.
 “It is a mad idea,” Lady Mildred cried vehemently, “and a
dangerous one. Should you go on the cruiser?” she asked with a
look of anxiety at her husband.
“I could not very well let the others go and stay at home,” Gaunt
answered with a smile. “At first, the scheme may seem a little mad,
but if you look into it you will see that it is quite feasible. As soon as
we leave the Canary Islands we shall be all right. The danger is that
our plans may be discovered before we can get away. There is that
wretched Foreign Enlistment Act.”
“I am sure I can get the right sort of men who won’t blab,”
Lindsay Drake said confidently.
They proceeded to discuss their plans in detail, and it was decided
that negotiations should be commenced the next day for the hiring
of the cruiser. Lady Mildred did not interrupt them and upon realizing
that their talk was likely to be a prolonged one, she rose, and bade
them good-night.
Captain Drake was the next to depart for he expected Gaunt and
his brother wished to be alone, and in this he was right. But there
was silence for some time after he had gone, until Gaunt began to
tell of his interview with the foreign secretary which concerned the
Marillier affair.
“And there can be no doubt that the Baron will carry out his
threat,” he wound up.
“He is a dangerous enemy, and the terrible part is that we can do
nothing. Do you think that the magistrate would be likely to send
you to the Congo for trial?” Drake asked in a low voice.
“It is extremely unlikely, for I don’t see how they can get the
evidence. Indeed, I am not certain that the Baron expects to
succeed. He merely wishes to blacken my character and close my
mouth. There is the Amanti deal and this coming on the top of it will
be likely to make the public believe that I am not the kind of man
who would be interested in the Congo, merely out of consideration
for the welfare of the natives. And the public would have been right
in thinking that a little time ago. In fact I myself find it difficult to
know what is my real motive. A good deal to do with it is a natural
love of a fight.”
“You are not just to yourself, for I am convinced that you are as
desirous as I am to help the natives. Don’t think me impertinent if I
say that I have noticed changes in your character. When we first met
you were a hard man and devoid of human sympathy. You have
allowed me to see something of the real Gaunt and I understand the
reason of your change. But do you think you were wise to let your
wife know of our plans?” Drake asked quietly.
“Why do you ask that question?” Gaunt cried impatiently.
“Remember her first remark. She wished to know if you yourself
would go. Naturally she imagines that there would be danger in such
an expedition and she loves you; need I say more?”
“My wife will not try to persuade me to stay at home,” Gaunt
answered grimly.
“I am not so sure of that.”
“We won’t discuss it,” Gaunt broke in quickly. “Last night I did not
sleep very well and in my mind I went over everything I had done
since we first met. Tell me honestly, have I so far carried out my
vow?”
“Yes. You have done as much as mortal man could do. I have
been afraid, at times, that you had lost sight of that motive, and
were acting from a wish to get the better of the Baron. May I tell
you what is in my mind?” Drake asked hesitatingly.
“I prefer absolute frankness.”
“I have been afraid that now you have won your wife’s love you
would weaken in your purpose. You have obtained all that you
desired, and I thought that the temptation to enjoy your happiness
would be too great.”
 “I have been tempted, Drake, but I am not that sort of man. I
made a bargain and will carry it out faithfully.”
“And if Lady Mildred tries to persuade you to give it up?” Drake
persisted.
“I said before that she will not do so. If she does, it will make no
difference.”
“But already you have given in, for you had determined that you
would not try to win your wife until you could go to her with clean
hands.”
Gaunt’s face flushed at the rebuke, for he could not deny its
justice, and it was impossible to explain that he had made no effort
to win Lady Mildred, so he remained silent.
“I have a presentiment that misfortune is near at hand. Gaunt,
won’t you go to your wife and tell her of that other thing? It seems
to me that you have gained her love under false pretenses,” Drake
continued in a low voice.
Gaunt rose from his chair and uttered an exclamation of anger.
“Drake, you are going too far,” he cried vehemently, for the
accusation had struck home.
“I only wish to save you from great trouble, and it is not an easy
task to say these things for I recognize what a hard task I am
setting you. Remember your vow—you promised that your future life
should be lived in accordance with the teaching of Christ. It was an
almost superhuman task that you set yourself, for you lacked belief
in the love of Christ and the Christian spirit which alone could give
you the strength to carry out your determination. Don’t think I want
to preach to you, Gaunt, but I fear that you will fail, unless you force
yourself to regard everything from a different point of view. You told
me that you believe that God had given you your wife’s life in
answer to your prayer. Do you still believe that?” Drake asked gently.
“Yes.”
 There was a strained look in Gaunt’s eyes as he whispered the
single word.
“Then you must believe in the efficacy of prayer. Ask God to give
you the strength to make a complete confession to Lady Mildred.”
“I cannot do it,” Gaunt answered miserably.
Drake sighed wearily and rising stood face to face with the man,
whom he longed so intensely to help.
“God did not fail you when you prayed in desperation. Go to Him
again.”
The words were spoken with deep earnestness and Gaunt was
moved, but there was ever before him the fear of the distress that
would come into his wife’s eyes, when she should hear his miserable
story.
“Shall I tell her for you?” Drake insisted quietly.
“No, no!” was the vehement answer. “I am not such an abject
coward.”
Gaunt turned away with a groan and began to pace restlessly to
and fro, while Drake’s eyes followed him, filled with eager
expectation. It was some time before either of them spoke but at
last Gaunt stopped suddenly.
“I will not make you a promise which I may not be able to fulfil,
but I will think it over,” he said with a roughness that was intended
to hide his weakness.
After a tight grip of the hands the men parted, and Gaunt went
straight to his wife’s room, for he felt sure that she had not gone to
bed.
In fact Lady Mildred had been anxiously awaiting him for she
wished to talk over with him the scheme which had been unfolded in
her presence, but at the sight of his white face she quickly
determined to postpone the discussion. Gaunt was surprised at her
silence upon the subject, but their love was a new and very precious
thing, and as they sat before the fire his indecision vanished.
They were both supremely happy, and their eyes would meet,
brimming over with the love that they found so strangely sweet. And
Gaunt knew that he would never have the courage to jeopardize all
that made life worth the living.
Her upbringing was such a one as would cause her to regard with
horror the shedding of blood, and she would not be able to
understand how it had happened. Then, too, there were such sordid
surroundings, which it would be impossible for him to explain.
When she left him he sat there for a while, and his thoughts were
not pleasant, for it was impossible to conceal from himself that he
was not honestly carrying out his vow. Drake’s words had disturbed
him, and he found it difficult to quiet his awakened conscience.
At last he went to his dressing-room and threw off his coat, but
his actions were very slow, and now and then he would stop and
stand still with a frown on his face.
When he had finished undressing a sudden impulse seized him,
and he sank on to his knees beside the bed. Words would not come
and still he did not move. His eyes were closed, and his quick
breathing could be heard.
The door opened quietly, and Lady Mildred stood in the doorway,
a look of surprise springing to her face. But she uttered no word,
and left as silently as she had entered, and Gaunt wrestled with
himself.
 CHAPTER XXIX

B ARON DE CROISEUIL had half expected to hear from Gaunt, for

he imagined that the papers which he had left with Sir Keith
Hamilton might have caused that gentleman to communicate with
the millionaire, with the idea of persuading him into silence. A couple
of days passed and it was very evident that something must be done
without delay, and the Baron reluctantly decided to cause an
application to be made at Bow Street to secure a warrant for Gaunt’s
arrest. By this time numerous documents had arrived from Brussels,
and among them were affidavits sufficiently strong to make out a
prima facie case of murder. There were numberless ex-Congo
officials in Belgium who would be prepared to swear to anything for
a consideration, for their morals were warped, and their greed for
gold insatiable.
So the Baron interviewed Mr. Simon Stone—the notorious solicitor,
who was engaged in every case where dirty work was required to be
done skillfully, and gave him full instructions. But as he walked back
to his hotel, de Croiseuil was not altogether satisfied with what he
had done, for he knew that his case was a weak one, and that the
arrest of John Gaunt would cause a great outcry. But it was not his
wish to proceed to that extremity, and as he strolled along Piccadilly,
he saw approaching a gentleman, at the sight of whom he uttered
an exclamation of satisfaction.
“It is really a pleasure to see you. I did not know you were in
London,” he began effusively.
Lord Lynton, for it was he, did not at first recognize the Baron, for
it was some time since they had met, but recollection came at last.
“You are looking very fit,” he remarked politely.
“Will you not come as far as the Ritz with me? It is just time for
déjeuner, and you are the very man I wanted to see.”
 The Earl hesitated, and the Baron continued quickly.
“It concerns your brother-in-law, Mr. Gaunt. For the sake of your
family, I ask you to come,” he wound up earnestly.
Lord Lynton no longer hesitated, and the two men hastened along
in silence, but as soon as they had entered the sitting-room, the
Baron’s face grew very grave.
“It was fortunate that we met, as your lordship may prevent
something very like a tragedy from taking place. But we will not talk
till we have eaten,” he said, and ringing the bell, ordered that lunch
should be served immediately.
The meal was short but excellent and the Baron did justice to it,
but the Earl was evidently occupied with his thoughts, which were
the reverse of pleasant. To do him justice, he had ceased to consider
himself, although it was very unpleasant to read each day the
attacks upon the man who was his brother-in-law. But Lady Mildred
must be protected and he remembered that Gaunt had been
confident that the Baron was responsible for the articles appearing
against him in the newspapers.
“What is this tragedy of which you speak?” he asked as they
lighted their cigarettes.
“First of all, I want you to bear in mind that I am only doing my
duty. I have a great admiration for Mr. Gaunt, and I deeply regret
the necessity of harming him. You are aware of what has happened,
and so it is unnecessary to weary you with details. You know that he
has turned on his old friends in a scandalous manner, and is raising a
bitter but unjustified feeling against my country. May I ask a
question? Have you come to England owing to this?”
“Yes,” the Earl answered quietly.
“Ah! I thought I could trace the cunning hand of my friend Sir
Keith. But I fear you have been unsuccessful in your mission. Gaunt
is terribly obstinate. May I ask if Sir Keith mentioned l’affaire
Marillier?”
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