SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY: NO PICTURES IN MY GRAVE: A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY IN SICILY BY SUSAN CAPERNA LLOYD

Abstract

The paper focuses on No Pictures in My Grave, a travel memoir by Susan Caperna Lloyd - a contemporary Italian American writer, who succeeds in turning the account of her numerous travels in Sicily into a powerful narrative of awakening and self construction.

Headnote

Abstract: The paper focuses on No Pictures in My Grave, a travel memoir by Susan Caperna Lloyd - a contemporary Italian American writer, who succeeds in turning the account of her numerous travels in Sicily into a powerful narrative of awakening and self construction.

Keywords: Black Madonna, femininity, identity, No Pictures in My Grave, Susan Caperna Lloyd, travel literature

1. Introduction. Susan Caperna Lloyd and her Italian experience

A filmmaker, photographer, and non-fiction writer, in 1992 Susan Caperna Lloyd published No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily, a compelling memoir chronicling her experience in a land she felt profoundly drawn to, even though her Italian ancestors on her father's side actually came from Terracina (located in the southern part of Latium). Her volume also falls into the category of travel writing, a hybrid genre in itself that, according to Valentina Seffer (2015: 99), "bridges documentary narrative and personal experience, the encounter with the Other with the exploration of the Self'. Born in California and raised in Oregon, the author first visited Sicily in 1983, when she was struck by the procession of the Mysteries (i Misteri) held in Trapani on Good Friday: nineteen life-like statues representing the Stations of the Cross were carried on heavy platforms (ceti) by male porters (portatori) through the streets of the city, for twenty-four hours. Mesmerised by the sacred performance, she went back to Sicily two more times during the Holy Week, before releasing No Pictures in My Grave, the last of a series of artistic endeavours connected with such a momentous experience in her life. Indeed, in 1989, she had already produced an award-winning documentary, Processione: A Sicilian Easter; moreover, in 1991, a prominent literary journal, Italian Americana, featured her short story entitled "No Pictures in My Grave: A Woman's Journey in Sicily", whose poignant portrayal of iMisteri would be later included in her volume. As Edvige Giunta (2002: 98) has highlighted, however, while in her video a male protagonist (Caperna Lloyd's friend, Gian Carlo Decimo) had been assigned the leading role - being entrusted with tracing the history of the procession - her short story and, even more significantly, her memoir are decisively "woman-centered" narratives, due to their focus on the first-person female narrator and her progress. Furthermore, her travel memoir is by no means limited to the depiction of the Mysteries, viewed by the author as "a predominantly male event" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 10); quite the opposite, the text offers detailed descriptions of ancient sites associated with the cult of prehistoric mother goddesses, as well as with the myth of Persephone, a traveller between two worlds who, like many Italian immigrant women, had been forced to face the unknown, leaving her beloved mother(country) behind. Caperna Lloyd's very grandmother Carolina (a recurring figure throughout her text, who serves to reconnect the author with her ethnic identity, as Fred Gardaphé (1996: 120) underlines) is often compared to a sorrowful Persephone, whose resurrection from the Underworld had been cruelly denied. In fact, she had left Italy for America in 1922, never to return, while her own mother would die in her village, thirty-five years later; hence, as Susan sadly remarked, "the two had never been reunited" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 14).

Unlike other Italian American travel writers, driven to the peninsula merely by curiosity, family ties, or a nostalgic longing for lost roots, Caperna Lloyd apparently turned her journeys in Sicily into "a complicated feminist search", "in which personal story, myth, and history overlap" (Giunta 2004: 770). Given what has been argued so far, this paper sets out to explore the strategy through which the writer succeeded in transforming her travel memoir into a narrative of awakening and self-construction, leading to the discovery and the proud assertion of her identity as both an Italian American and a woman. As it will be shown, the author strove to propose constructive alternatives to the customary depiction of women as docile, passive, and enduring Madonnas, constrained in their stereotypical roles as nurturers and consecrated vestals of the temple of the hearth. By embarking on a quest for dark Mothers and other ancestral deities, whose power stretched beyond the boundaries of the male-dominated Church and its hierarchy, Susan Caperna Lloyd encouraged a more active role for women, who could eventually embrace all the previously discarded facets of their complex personalities, thus offering their valuable, manysided contribution to society.

2. No Pictures in My Grave: a spiritual journey in Sicily

The volume (meaningfully dedicated to the writer's mother, but written "in memory of Grandmother Carolina") opens with a fictional letter to Carolina, identified with "a grieving Madonna and a long-suffering mother" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: ix), who closely resembled "the Pieta" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: ix) the moment her husband, one night, passed away in her arms. Not even death could release her from the shackles of her role as dutiful and selfless caretaker: in fact, her son (the author's father) had placed a photograph of himself and his only son in her coffin, so that Carolina could continue to nurture the men of her family from the afterlife (conversely, Susan and her sisters were literally not in the picture; being women, they could only bestow protection, not wish for it). The title chosen for her memoir, therefore, stems from Susan Caperna Lloyd's firm intention to eventually break the patriarchal mould, thus gaining the independence and the self-determination her grandmother could never attain; when her time comes, she hopes to "rise up and be free" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: ix), with no one to care for, no pictures in her grave.

The first chapter of the narrative entitled "Processione" represents the writer's first attempt to "revise the mater dolorosa role written into the script of an Italian woman's life" (Bona 2010: 57), quoting Mary Jo Bona, by replacing it with the prerogatives of an icon of self-empowerment and strength: the Black Madonna. As Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (1993: 3) demonstrates, the black Madonna "may be considered a metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was believed to be the body of a woman and all creatures were equal". Her unusual colour (mostly displayed by wooden and stone statues dating back to the Middle Ages) is reminiscent of the various shades of the fertile earth, besides recalling the hue of the mythical Dark Mother, belonging to a time before history, when communities knew no hierarchical distinctions based on culture, class and gender. According to Moser (2008: 6), the dark-skinned Mother may be identified with Mary Magdalene, "the 'other' Mary"; furthermore, the archaic cults of the African Goddess Isis, of the black Goddess Artemis of Ephesus, of Demeter, of Cybele (the Great Mother of the Gods), and of Hera somehow all merged with the adoration of the black Madonna, perceived as a powerful, syncretic, and all-encompassing figure, defiant of borders and divides. Accordingly, when Susan Caperna Lloyd witnesses a smaller procession in the city of Marsala before going to Trapani for i Misteri, she is immediately enthralled by the statue of Our Lady, remarkably different from the sweet, "ivory-colored", modest icon she had grown accustomed to since childhood: "she was dark and angry. She was powerful and struck [her] more like Demeter than Mary [...]; this Madonna's demeanor, like Demeter's, was wild and passionate" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 3). In her effort to place a stronger emphasis on women (thus restoring the balance between the sexes), Caperna Lloyd even offers a challenging interpretation of Christ as "another version of Persephone", since one of her names, "in early Greek language, meant 'saviour'" (ibid.). Once in Trapani, she finds out from the local people that, the processione is "not really the story of Christ's death. It is about his Mother, Mary" (10), searching for her lost son; in the vernacular version of the biblical events (i.e. the folkloristic variant narrated by those who have been left out and marginalised), the Madonna seems to hold a central place, forcefully rejecting the subordinate position traditionally assigned to women. Incidentally, it should not pass unnoticed that in her 1991 short story, the Madonna of the procession in Trapani was also depicted as "dark, Moorish-looking" (Caperna Lloyd 1991: 250); in truth, only her mantle is black. Captivated by the scene before her eyes, Capema Lloyd yearns to take an active part in the processione, thus refusing to play the role of a mere observer. Nonetheless, as a woman, she is denied a privilege which is easily granted to both her husband Tom and her son Sky on account of their gender: while the former acts as a bilancino (the most important among the sixteen carriers of each statue) and the latter marches with the other men, carrying a pillow with sacred medallions on it, she is only allowed to follow the last of the platforms: the Madonna's ceto. This controversial experience of longing and exclusion is like an epiphany for the writer, thus prompted to begin a journey that is both physical and spiritual: "I knew that I had to find the meaning of the dark Madonna's power, the power that Carolina and so many women had lost or relinquished - or had never had. [...] Perhaps I would find the power if I journeyed back to the places where the old deities like Demeter had once lived" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 28).

Her pilgrimage starts with the Levanzo Cave where, together with her family, she contemplates ancient drawings featuring "a black form [...] look[ing] like a stylised version of the terra-cottas [she] had seen of Persephone and Demeter, or even the black shrouded Madonna Addolorata" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 41). In the cave, she also has the chance to gaze at "another large female figure, apparently seated on a throne, [...] painted red, the Paleolithic color for menstrual blood and fertility" (41). Even though these goddesses are still elusive (meaningfully enough, she had forgotten to load her camera and she could not capture their image), they seem to inspire important reflections regarding gender inequalities ("why was there now such a division between male and female?" (42) and the passive attitude of modern women to life, an attitude that, rather clearly, had not been shared by their prehistoric counterparts: "the old goddesses had been powerful and active, suggesting that women had been too" (42). The next stop of her journey is Enna, where Persephone's abduction had supposedly taken place and Demeter was believed to be buried. Here, Caperna Lloyd gathers that a statue of Demeter holding her daughter had been worshipped for centuries on the altar of one of the most important churches, only to be replaced with the Madonna and her child as soon as "the pope [had] found out" (55) what he believed was a sacrilegious offense. As the author is told, however, in the citizens' imagination the two icons of maternity actually overlap, the one stands for the other, in a symbolic act of resistance to the male-dominated Church, privileging the logic of rupture and mutual exclusion over connection and continuity. Once more, as Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum (1993: 14) points out, following in the steps of Antonio Gramsci, "folklore can challenge hegemonic culture".

In the first half of her travel memoir, relating the events of the author's second journey in Sicily (in 1988), Caperna Lloyd also describes her acquaintance with two Sicilian women: Lucia and Clara. The mother of one of her Italian friends, Lucia embodies the traditional virtue of domesticity: the elderly lady spends most of her time indoors, cooking delicious meals for her family; quite unsuccessfully, she struggles to teach her culinary skills to her new American friend, "an inept housewife" (Capema Lloyd 1992: 67) if judged by her standards. Lucia reminds Susan of her grandmother Carolina, who "rarely left her kitchen post to sit down" (11), making her granddaughter so uneasy that she would develop "an aversion to that 'woman's work'" (11). Even Clara is associated with the preparation of food, but in a strikingly different way: she runs a restaurant where unchaperoned women are welcome, and never reproachfully stared at; she is a liberated woman with two children, a new partner, an African assistant (never disparagingly called a housemaid), and a scholarly education. Readers are told that, on three occasions, she even shouldered one of the platforms during the Misteri. At this point of her spiritual journey, however, Susan Caperna Lloyd is still affected by what Theodora Patrona (2011: 154) has termed "the confusion of postmodern women": the writer has not yet adjusted herself to the multiple roles of mother, daughter, wife, career woman, and artist, which she still deems are somehow conflicting. Hence, she feels "caught between these women" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 86), incapable of fully indentifying with either model, or both. Back in Oregon, for almost two years she experiences anxiety and a deep sense of imbalance, alienation, and fragmentation, accompanied by a craving for belonging that only the process of nurturing her roots may appease. Finally, she decides to go back to Sicily, this time meaningfully on her own, in order to pursue her quest and eventually come to terms with both her hybrid self and her complex femininity: "I would continue my study of Demeter and Persephone and try again to meet and talk with Sicilian women. But mostly, I was returning for the procession" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 91).

During her third sojourn in Sicily, she is initially hosted by friends, the Amoroso family, and enjoys life in their "protective cocoon" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 111), frequently compared to a harem, given the seclusion of the female members, perpetually dressed in pink, like beautiful dolls content in their world of "gauzy curtains, knick-knacks, and costume jewellery" (95). Despite being fond of them, Caperna Lloyd seems to dissociate herself from the Amoroso ladies, wondering whether they actually realise "how restricted their lives [are]" (96). Nevertheless, she is also intrigued and perplexed by their "hidden darkness" (98), voiced through their bold and improper songs on cuckolded husbands and illicit liaisons, interpreted by Patrona (2011: 160) as "a remnant of the primitive strength and resilience of the Goddess", still alive in Italian women.

Once she decides to continue her journey (thus discarding the traditional part of Penelope played by most Sicilian women), she visits Palazzolo, where she manages to see the Santoni, bas-reliefs of Demeter stored (or better said hidden) in a remote place, inside emblematic and "odd-looking little wooden houses" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 116). As the author remarks, "I couldn't help but think how these locked-up deities were metaphors for Sicilian women in general and for my own experiences in Trapani" (119). The next town she visits is Tindari, famous for the sanctuary dedicated to the Black Madonna, "stern and fearsome" (138), "exuding power and self-assurance", so unlike "the usual image of Mary in her female purity and loveliness" (139). Caperna Lloyd connects the dark virgin with the "mysteries of regeneration" (139), identifying her with "Attis and Cybele, both Demeter and Persephone" (139). What is more, in her vibrant and courageous figure, she recognises the features of her grandmother Carolina, who was originally endowed with "a primitive strength in her blood" (140), although she had progressively lost it once settled in America, removed from her mother, oppressed by patriarchy. The writer's visit to Tindari proves to be essential to her progress: in her words, "with this Madonna and my journey to Sicily, I seemed to look into the unchartered world of my own soul. I left the sanctuary and [...] I felt strengthened" (141). Prompted by Clara, on Maundy Thursday, she reaches a little town near Agrigento, San Biagio Platani, for the last of her Sicilian excursions. In her effort to foster a more active and comprehensive role for women, Susan Caperna Lloyd seems to attach a particular importance to this episode; in fact, while the processione in Trapani was depicted as a male-defined and male-centred event, the Easter tradition in San Biagio and the corresponding celebrations are entirely designed and crafted by a group of women, who take charge of decorating streets, houses and public buildings, using hundreds of bread ornaments they collectively bake. As the author seems to suggest, women are not just caring nurturers and perfect cooks: at the same time, they can also be self-confident managers and skilful organisers, operating both inside and outside the confines of their homes.

3. Conclusion: the final procession

Caperna Lloyd's memoir ends where it had begun, with the processione, following a circular route that, as Bona (2010: 57) elucidates, is "distinctly feminine". Only this time, the author is granted the possibility to re-write her own story with a different conclusion. At the beginning of the narrative, because of her sex, she had been positively excluded from carrying the holy statues and confined to the margins of the procession. Conversely, at the end of her insightful journey, once her power, her potenza (a feminine noun in Italian, as readers are informed) has been recovered, she miraculously manages to get invited to shoulder one of the heavy platforms. Susan Caperna Lloyd accomplishes the demanding task with precision, power, and elegance, just like the other portatori, who treat her "respectfully, as an equal" (Caperna Lloyd 1992: 182). Thus annihilating the distance between men and women, the carriers gracefully move together, "dance together, as a group" (182), almost "floating on some primal sea" (184), heralding both a personal and a communal regeneration. As she proudly states on the final page of her travel memoir, in conclusion to her quest,

I had become the Goddess I had sought, and it seemed right and proper that she had rejoined the world of men. By joining these men, I felt I had given them, too, a new strength. With the portatori I cried. [...] They were not the tears of Carolina, of mourning, or the tears shed onto sad pictures put in a woman's grave. They were the tears of the joyous Black Madonna, of Cybele, of l'Addolorata, of the thankful Demeter having found her daughter again. I, too, had found the lost part of myself. (Caperna Lloyd 1992:188)

Eventually, she had come home.

Sidebar

Elisabetta Marino is an Assistant Professor English literature at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" She is the author of four monographs and has edited/co-edited eight collections of essays. She has translated poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan. She has published extensively on Italian American literature, travel literature, Asian American and Asian British literature, and the English Romantic writers.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

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