Abstract
This article aims to analyse Susan Caperna Lloyd's literary output, emphasizing the writer's multiple transitions. No Pictures in My Grave, her 1992 travel memoir, followed by The Crucifixion of Lucy Reyes (2017) and Dance It Up (2023) – both currently in manuscript form – will serve as the primary objects of investigation. As will be shown, the exploration of her cultural roots as an American of Italian origin is just the starting point for a more complex quest, which leads her to uncover powerful feminine icons and ancestral mothers, who provide her with alternative models of femininity. In her latest work, Caperna Lloyd also delves deeper into the intricate transition between life and death, discovering that these states are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary.
This article will focus on the multiple transitions of an artist whose distinctive features are rooted in cultural syncretism and transnationalism: Susan Caperna Lloyd. Born in California, raised and currently based in Oregon, she has developed a multifaceted career, distinguishing herself as a film and documentary maker, photographer, and author of narratives across genres, blending travel literature 1 and memoir. In 2021, her 30-year archive (1991–2020), comprising more than 18,000 items, was purchased by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington DC – an honour that attests to her outstanding and widely recognized talent.
In the following pages, Caperna Lloyd's literary output will be the object of analysis. As will be shown, far from being her final goal, the proud recovery of her heritage as an American of Italian descent may be regarded as the starting point for further investigations. Venturing into a more challenging and thought-provoking terrain, in fact, she has pursued the quest for powerful and alternative feminine models, beyond traditional prototypes, such as the mater dolorosa or the self-effacing domestic angel. Besides, Caperna Lloyd has recently embarked on an ontological exploration, thus discovering that the apparent antithesis between life and death, perceived as mutually exclusive states of being, can be eventually resolved by acknowledging their complementary nature, with one seamlessly flowing into the other in a perpetual transition. In her search, the artist has effectively employed more than one medium, and has embraced diverse points of observation. Consequently, her texts are often juxtaposed with images, while her stories have frequently been adapted into documentaries (or vice versa), as if the combination of several modes of expression afforded her the possibility to more comprehensively grasp the complexity of phenomena. Indeed, as Alù (2003: 159) has elucidated, Caperna Lloyd's intersection between writing and visual elements ‘goes beyond a simple illustrative and reportage purpose’: ‘it can be argued that in the text [pictures] do not really illustrate what is described in words, but rather extend the author's representation of the Other and the Self presenting further artistic perspectives of things and people seen’ (Alù, 2003: 160).
Her stay in Trapani marks the opening stage of the author's physical and spiritual journey. Caperna Lloyd first visited Italy in 1983, accompanied by her husband and two sons. Following a brief sojourn in Terracina (a coastal town in Southern Latium, her paternal ancestors’ birthplace), she felt a mysterious attraction towards Sicily, at the time of the Holy Week. In Trapani, on Good Friday, she witnessed the mesmerizing procession of the Misteri (mysteries): 19 life-size sculptural groups representing the Stations of the Cross, paraded through the streets for 24 hours, carried on heavy platforms (ceti) by male porters (portatori). The initial outcome of her repeated visits to Trapani during Easter was a documentary entitled Processione: A Sicilian Easter (Caperna, 1989), where gender asymmetry and distinct prerogatives are evident, right from the onset of the video. In the opening sequence, in fact, an elderly man, emblematically free to roam every part of the city, is contrasted with his female counterpart, who can only peep at the world outside from her window: the woman is almost trapped in the enclosed, stifling space of her domestic sphere. In Processione, the leading part is played by Caperna Lloyd's friend, Gian Carlo Decimo, who acts as the narrative voiceover, delving into the ancient history of the Misteri. Conversely, the two creative pieces that later on revisited and reconsidered the same incident – namely a 1991 short story published in Italian Americana, ‘No pictures in my grave: A woman's journey in Sicily’, soon expanded into the travel memoir that consecrated her fame, No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (Caperna Lloyd, 1992) – are unquestionably ‘woman-centered’ (Giunta, 2002: 98), and therefore transgressive texts.
According to Valentina Seffer (2015: 133), No Pictures in My Grave falls into the contentious category of the ‘narrative of awakening’, even though, as previously noted, Caperna Lloyd's travel memoir refuses to be straightforwardly bracketed under any single rubric. Dedicated to the artist's mother, the volume was written in memory of Carolina, her grandmother. 2 The opening pages prominently feature a picture of Carolina, surrounded by her numerous children, alongside a fictional letter penned by the author and addressed to her. As readers gather, throughout her life, Carolina had been portrayed as ‘a grieving Madonna and long-suffering mother’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: ix), confined to her role as nurturer, an expectation that persisted even after her death. Notably, the artist's father had placed a picture of himself and other male family members into her coffin before it was sealed, so that the woman could continue to exercise her protective function. Hence, the title Caperna Lloyd provocatively chose for her narrative stems from her firm intention to carve a fresh path for herself: thus breaking the shackles of a patriarchal value system, she hopes to ‘rise up and be free’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: ix) when her time comes, with no pictures in her grave.
The first chapter, ‘Processione’, describes the Misteri as a ‘predominantly male event’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 10). While her husband and son are actively involved in the procession on account of being male, the artist is positively excluded: her participation is limited to following the last and almost isolated ceto, the platform carrying the Madonna addolorata. This icon of sorrowful and selfless motherly devotion, however, is forcefully subverted and reinterpreted by the writer, thus contributing to altering the customary script of an Italian woman's life (Bona, 2010: 57). Drawing on vernacular versions of the biblical events, in fact, Our Lady holds centre stage in her active search for her lost son, after symbolically ‘escaping the confines of the church’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 10) and the male power structure it epitomizes. Moreover, the Madonna statues parading along the main streets of Trapani or Marsala are far removed from the ‘gentle creatures’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 3) with ‘modest blue robes and sweet ivory-coloured faces’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 3) that Caperna Lloyd had been accustomed to since childhood. They are ‘dark and angry […] wild and passionate’ 3 (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 3), reminiscent of ancient deities such as Demeter, 4 or dark mothers. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum has devoted considerable efforts to the study of Black Madonnas and vernacular traditions. As she clarifies, their dark colour was associated with the different hues of the ground, with its fertility and regenerative power: ‘Black Madonnas 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’ (Chiavola Birnbaum, 1993: 3). Following in her mentor's steps, Moser (2008: 6) has emphasized the connection between the dark mother and ‘the “other” Mary’, Mary Magdalene, as well as with other potent goddesses, such as the Sumerian dark-faced Inanna, the Hindu Kali (the emblem of transformation), the Roman Vitula (often linked with Hera), Mefiti ‘an Italic divinity who dispelled evil spirits’ (Moser, 2008: 18), Cybele, Isis, Hera and Demeter. 5
Caperna Lloyd's experience of exclusion and longing during the Misteri procession, coupled with the epiphanic moment in which she identified the Madonna as a dark mother, prompts the artist to undertake a journey across Sicily, looking for ancestral shrines and neglected icons embodying female power. In her words, ‘I felt my own journey had just begun. 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’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 28). Her pilgrimage 6 begins in the womb-shaped Levanzo cave, where she distinguishes a ‘black form’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 41) among the paintings on the walls, a pregnant-looking female figure that resembles ‘a stylized Demeter, or even […] the black-shrouded Madonna Addolorata’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 41). She then moves to Enna, the city where, according to the myth, Persephone was abducted by Pluto. Here, she learns that, in one of the churches, a statue of Demeter holding her daughter had been venerated for centuries, until the Pope decided to replace it with a sculpture of Our Lady and her child, aiming to rectify a perceived violation. Nevertheless, in the collective imagination, the transition from the original couple to the new figures was almost imperceptible: one group could easily stand for the other. Before returning to Oregon, Caperna Lloyd encounters a contemporary personification of female empowerment: Clara, the owner of a restaurant where unchaperoned women could enjoy a meal without facing public reprimand for defying domestic norms. Clara has also succeeded in challenging gender-related prohibitions during the Misteri, being the only woman ever to shoulder one of the platforms.
Caperna Lloyd's cultural roots, both as an Italian American and as an heir of the dark mother's legacy, lure her back to Sicily two years later. This time, however, she significantly resumes her quest on her own, without the support and assistance of her family. She discovers that the reassuringly conventional white marble statue of the Holy Virgin, Madonna dei Trapani in the Church of Annunciation, had filled the void left by an ebony statue, a miracle-working Black Madonna that had strangely disappeared. At Palazzolo, forgotten goddesses are preserved or, more precisely, hidden within ‘odd-looking little wooden houses’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 116), serving as mock representations of the traditional domains inhabited by women: ‘Still, I couldn’t help but think how these locked-up deities were metaphors for Sicilian women in general and for my own experience in Trapani’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 119). The Black Madonna of Tindari, representing ‘the mysteries of regeneration’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 139) in her connection with ‘both Attis and Cybele, both Demeter and Persephone’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 139), also reminds the artist of Carolina and of all the other women who, despite patriarchal constraints, ‘had a primitive strength in their blood’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 140), a power she longs to regain. San Biagio Platani, near Agrigento, is the final stage of her pilgrimage. At Easter, women are in charge of organizing the celebrations: they use the beautifully shaped bread they bake to decorate both their houses and – quite surprisingly – even public spaces, thus forcefully entering a domain they are supposedly barred from. The symbol of Christ's sacrifice during the Last Supper is provocatively turned into an ancient fertility rite. 7 Caperna Lloyd leaves the small town with a butterfly-shaped bread bun: ‘it was a perfect symbol for how I felt’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 170), she observes, a meaningful emblem of transition.
No Pictures in My Grave follows a circular route and ends the way it had begun, with the description of the Easter procession in Trapani. Nonetheless, the profound transformation that the artist undergoes during her journey enables her to write a different ending to the narrative of exclusion that she relates at the beginning of the volume. Unexpectedly, Caperna Lloyd is invited to carry one of the platforms and is treated ‘respectfully, as an equal’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 182) by the portatori; she moves with them, almost floating ‘on some primal sea’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 184). ‘I had become the Goddess I had sought’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 188), she finally remarks: like Demeter or the Black Madonna, eventually reunited with their child, the artist, ‘too, had found the lost part of [her]self’ (Caperna Lloyd, 1992: 188).
The multiple transitions of Susan Caperna Lloyd are further explored in The Crucifixion of Lucy Reyes: Holy Week Folk Rituals of Sacrifice, Fertility, and Power (Caperna Lloyd, 2017), another artistic endeavour that stems from the author's addiction 8 to the Holy Week rituals of rebirth and renewal. The scarce black-and-white illustrations featured in No Pictures in My Grave are here replaced with large, vivid colour pictures – which actually take up most of the volume – taken during her ‘thirty-year journey throughout Hispanidad’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 7), travelling between Mexico, Guatemala, Arizona, New Mexico, the Philippines and Sicily. 9 As the artist elucidates in the Introduction, like her Roman Catholic grandmother Carolina, she ‘had imbibed the gendered understanding that women were the repository of suffering’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 7), passive Madonnas who were expected to grieve and pray. Conversely, Lucy Reyes, whose story is shared in the text, becomes the living embodiment of the awe-inspiring ancestral mothers Caperna Lloyd had already encountered in Sicily.
The author first met her in 1988, in the Philippines, when Lucy was 28 years old. As a child, Lucy had always been stubborn and strong-willed, ‘endowed with a spirit of resistance [… and] fiercely opposed to the expectations of her family’ (Braünlein, 2009: 898). During her reiterated illnesses, she used to lapse into unconsciousness or trance states, which allowed her to connect with the infant Jesus, Santo Niño. When she reached her 18th year, she fell gravely ill to the extent that her survival seemed improbable; yet, through the miraculous intercession of Santo Niño, she fully recovered and came back to the world of the living with extraordinary healing powers. To retain her mysterious gift, she vowed to re-enact the passion of Christ at Easter for 15 years, until the age of 33, carrying a heavy cross to which she would be nailed for three hours. As Caperna Lloyd (2017: 7) underlines, Lucy came from a matriarchal culture; besides, she ‘was part of a tradition of female Filipino folk healers’: she was essentially a shaman, capable of hybridizing various belief systems, including animism and vernacular Christianity. As a female version of Christ, Lucy revisits and rewrites the meaning of the Passion, which is no longer a redemptive act, characterized by sorrow and pain (both physical and spiritual). Surrounded by her 12 ‘adopted mothers’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 14), who mirror the 12 apostles, she does not sacrifice herself to wash away sin from human beings; indeed, she faces crucifixion as a voluntary act of self-empowerment, which the extended community benefits from, given Lucy's ability to cure diseases and afflictions. Moreover, unlike the mater dolorosa, grief is never her lot: her hands and feet neither bleed nor hurt when long nails are driven into them. The very meaning of the cross 10 appears renovated: it becomes ‘a sacred tree, the symbol of fertility that runs through mythology and cuts across time’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 133). Other recurring images related to the Holy Week also acquire a new depth and different shades of significance: flagellation blood, for instance, recalls the offerings to the dark mother to ensure the fecundity of the soil (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 90); Our Lady's copious tears shed for her lost child are explained through ancient agricultural rituals, connecting water with fertility (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 29).
Caperna Lloyd's aim to rectify injustices and restore the balance between the sexes (one of her prominent concerns in No Pictures in My Grave) is also discernible in The Crucifixion of Lucy Reyes. During the Holy Week, the female Jesus wears the attire of Christ, whereas on Good Friday she reveals ‘a sensuous short skirt worn underneath her costume’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2017: 111), graphically implying the union of worlds and prerogatives erroneously perceived as conflicting and therefore incompatible. The yearly bestowal of healing powers upon Lucy can occur only through the combination of male and female principles, through their seamless osmosis or unending transition. 11
The artist's most recent, still unpublished literary creation, corresponding to her latest explorations, visibly embraces an even broader, all-encompassing perspective. Dance It Up: Travels from Spain to India to Find the End of Grief is another travel memoir that follows more intricate routes to find solace and relief amidst life's most excruciating experiences, namely the loss of loved ones. Through eye-opening encounters with various female icons of power (both living women and objects of reverence and worship), by observing their use of dance as a re-enactment of primeval rites of passage, Caperna Lloyd ultimately realizes that life and death are impermanent conditions within the perpetual flow of time.
Once again, the narrative proceeds along a circular path – it opens and ends in Varanasi, one of the most sacred cities in India. Furthermore, the text seems to have evolved out of a short story published in Via: Voices in Italian Americana (Caperna Lloyd, 2019): ‘Angela’, centred on the author’s sister, whose untimely demise ignites her new quest. 12 In this case, the artist poignantly replicates Demeter's fate by stepping into her shoes: she bravely descends into the underworld to confront grief, thus finally coming to terms with the harrowing pain she had felt from the loss of many cherished members of her family. Indeed, Angela's death followed the premature passings of both Caperna Lloyd's other sister, Shawn, in 1992, and her father, in 2002. The artist herself battled breast cancer in 2004, and the subsequent year brought new challenges, when her uncle suffered a stroke. Adding to the existing sorrow, her niece (Shawn's daughter) and her husband were struggling with drug addiction (Caperna Lloyd, 2023b: 18).
In Dance It Up, Caperna Lloyd delves into previously unexpressed traumas and emotional blocks. She uncovers a deeply buried, shameful episode in Angela's childhood, that profoundly affected her entire existence: the tormenting memory of being tied to a tree, in the pear orchard by her house, and brutally assaulted by two elder boys, who raped her with a bottle, causing internal cuts and tears. The artist also comes to realize that psychological wounds may be inherited, leaving second generations burdened with a distressing legacy of postmemories, a term coined by Marianne Hirsh (1997: 22) to indicate ‘the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated’. Hence, Caperna Lloyd (2023b: 29) exposes and empathizes with the humiliation that her father endured when his colleagues sneered at his grammar mistakes in English, which, in turn, reflected his low social status and immigrant origins. Despite his efforts to assimilate, by playing golf or swapping his Italian name, Romeo, for the more acceptable Ron, all attempts proved futile.
Even though Angela's demise eventually allows the author to face the haunting ghosts of her individual and collective past, the artist's narrative also illustrates her journey towards happier emotional states through dance. Before her funeral, family photos are slipped into Angela's coffin and prayers are recited; 13 yet, Caperna Lloyd also places a dancing gypsy doll into her sister's arms, as a ‘symbol of life’: ‘Not a memori morti like those Victorian photos of dead babies in caskets holding favorite dolls. It was a memoria vitae’ (Caperna Lloyd, 2023b: 15). Readers understand that the writer's great-grandmother 14 – the woman with gigantic earrings, a headscarf and piercing black eyes she had seen in an old photograph – possibly had Spanish gypsy heritage: Angela's attraction to traditional Andalusian dances, therefore, must have run in her blood. Accordingly, a trip to Granada to study flamenco (a project the two sisters had coveted for long years but never fulfilled) turns into the initial stage of Caperna Lloyd's new travelling experience. The statue of a powerful dark mother, the Madonna of Loreto (originally belonging to her father and then to Angela), is emblematically secured in her luggage for protection.
Her sojourn in Granada proves epiphanic. Disappointed by the formal course she has attended (tailored to suit tourists’ expectations and tastes), she ends up in Sacromonte, the gypsy district. Here, she witnesses a spellbinding and cathartic dance, designed to soothe the mourning soul, urging it to release suppressed pain and rage, much like the Italian tarantella. After the artist's return to the USA, her fascination with the misunderstood and maligned Roma culture takes her to Sainte-Maries-de-la-Mer, a small village in France, during the annual celebrations for another black deity: Sara la Kali, the patron saint of the displaced people. Just like the Madonna in Trapani or Marsala, the dark wooden statue, normally kept indoors and out of sight, breaks free of patriarchal and is carried to the Mediterranean Sea, almost in a waltz, while women throw red veils on her body to propitiate fertility. Caperna Lloyd (2023b: 68) places a strong emphasis on the saint's vernacular tradition, intimately rooted in the defiance of a male-centred narrative: The legend I’d heard about. The direction Sara had come from, to France by boat from the Holy Land with her mother, Mary Magdalene, two thousand years before. That Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ and this saint, Sara Kali, was their child. The daughter of Christ. The story the priests didn’t like.
Another black, mighty, rebellious and this time even dancing icon follows Caperna Lloyd to India: a small replica of Sara la Kali, in fact, is stored in her suitcase, alongside the Madonna of Loreto.
15
She visits Kolkata during Kali Puja, the festival celebrated in honour of Kali, the goddess that best incarnates the author's multiple transitions, in her dual role as furious destroyer and potent regenerator of life, thus embodying the power of transformation. The 20,000 mud statues that every year are thrown and melted into the river Gange's tributaries provide the clay to be used the following year to mould new effigies of the deity: the boundary between death and rebirth is, therefore, truly ephemeral. The perpetual cycle of existence inherent in every creature and the ability to adapt and change, like a snake shedding its skin, are also evoked through Caperna Lloyd's encounter with Gulabo Sapera, known as the cobra dancer, who becomes her instructor. As the artist (Caperna Lloyd, 2023b: 134) concludes: I must dance it up […]. And out. And through. Let go of all the death and anger like Kali had and has. All of it. All the sad family memories. Angela's tragedy. Erase the funeral parlors from my mind. Make peace with death. Dance, but find control. Accept myself.
The holy waters of Varanasi, which mark the beginning and the conclusion of Dance It Up, signify this constant, unstoppable, resilient capacity to flow.
In 2022, Susan Caperna Lloyd went back to Trapani during the Misteri; once again, she was invited to shoulder one of the ceti. In the notes she jotted down at that time (Caperna Lloyd, personal communication, 2023), she captured the obvious metamorphoses of both the city and herself: The town is in transition, as I am. Maybe move to Trapani? No. It's not my real home. I’m too much of a hybrid. Do I give up completely on Oregon, where I grew up and my husband and I raised the boys among its tall trees, mountains, and wild rivers. No. Everyone is gone, and our sons are in the east. Maybe I’ll move to Baltimore's Little Italy? That is near the houseboat in Annapolis we keep there and would put me closer to our sons. Or must I be like Ulysses in Kavafis's poem: that it is the journey and not the physical home which sustains us in the end?
Considering her nomadic spirit and inclinations, it is plausible to anticipate that Susan Caperna Lloyd will opt for the final possibility, and I hope I will continue to follow her in her compelling journey.
