Kianna Mkhonza is an Ontario-based writer and artist. She graduated from OCAD University’s Cross-Disciplinary Art: Publications program and works in collage, digital publishing, and web experiments. Her writing lives in notebooks and text messages, and she’s interested in how accessible digital tools and storytelling can foster creative exchange online.
“‘Moonifred’ was written in response to Herbert James Draper’s The Sea Maiden (1894), in which the sea-maiden is not the seducer but the captured, bewildered figure hauled up in fishermen’s nets. I’ve always thought of her as a mermaid, even though she has legs; perhaps she is one, but none of the men recognize it. I’m interested in that surprise, in how often what you think you’ve ‘captured’ in a woman turns out to be larger and stranger than you imagined.
“Draper’s painting itself responds to a passage from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s Chastelard (1865):
‘A song of drag-nets hauled across
thwart seas,
And plucked up with rent sides,
and caught therein
A strange-haired woman with sad
singing lips […]’
“I was drawn to the moment after the capture: what happens when the ‘strange-haired woman’ is brought into a human home rather than returned? I was thinking about times I’ve felt misrecognized or misplaced—sometimes by others, sometimes by my own inability to exist within certain structures—or moments when I’ve wanted to slip out of someone else’s description or care and keep my wildness intact.
“More broadly, ‘Moonifred’ is shaped by sea-chanties and the blue stories of the oral tradition.”
A black green and murky water
made the low waves where we found her
hurried, scurried, buried up the shore
How can a girl of earth
wear sand like such shawl and slipper
Or wear whips of deep sea tangle
for necklace, earring, broach and bangle
But she did
Interesting too
was the hot moon in her eye
which, when she woke by day,
she still carried
and carried for days on afterwards
The bright moon caught in her eye
When it was obvious her bright head was caught in the sea
And always she reached for water
Mugs of it, pooled of salt
Till the mugs almost put I and my marriage out
Of our bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and couch
As townfolk heard and herded our hilltop house
To get a look at her exquisite mouth
I saw around her face like a shell
Some heavy net of memory hell
Where are you from, we wondered,
from which spot out did you walk!
But the lady of the sea couldn’t talk
She smelled of salt and storm-rotten rock
I knew somehow she was not of Eve
as open her mouth and out
came the bubbles of Amphitrite
I showed her some treasures my Daddy once showed me
a clock of antiquity, a bone comb from the whale-lord
hurled up to land by ticklish rides of tide
But again she was out in dream
And in her sleep that night mumbled names that shivered me
Zoltan, Janus, Perideen
The sea princes of earlier times!
When the weather children held the clock
And Zeus and his brother shone on land a lot
Get her out, said wife of me
Cause the lady of the waves made electricity
Till our warm house bolted cold and blue
And her red hair with lavender flowers grew
and grew down the halls, out the window frames too
into my bed where her tendrils knew
the silent name so deep far down in my locket
