Danmark Uge 1

Week One: Settling into Copenhagen life, exploring the city, and delving into colonialist narratives.

It was just last Friday that I boarded a plane to cross the Atlantic. My international travels had only taken me as far as Canada before, so this was new, this was to be an exciting adventure. For the better part of the seventeen hour journey, it was mixed with what my dad often refers to as “ca-naps”, more ounces of coffee than I can count, and pastries from the maze that was Amsterdam’s airport, the journey was peaceful - a shred of a day that allowed me to do positively nothing.

Throughout this past week, we’ve not only been adjusting to the nine hour time difference, danish kroner, and military time, but also the cultural customs, food, and language of the Danes. There is simply too much good to say about the food, so I’ll let the photo speak for itself. In terms of the language, I’m still struggling, but I’ve picked up on a few words and phrases that have helped me get by, like…

Tak (Thanks) and Kaffee (Coffee)

What stood out?

While there were many moments from this week that left me positively awestruck, either for good or for poorer, there were two, when merged together, that struck me the deepest.

Bench with "De evige tre" enscribed

On our second day of the program, Morten gave us a tour around Vesterbro and the greater Copenhagen area. The very last stop on the tour were these two concrete benches, one inscribed with a poem entitled “De evige tre”, which translates to “The Eternal Three”, by Tove Ditlevsen. It goes…

Original Danish Version

Rough English Translation

Der er to mænd i verden, der bestandig krydser min vej. Den ene er ham, jeg elsker, den anden elsker mig. Den ene er i en natlig drøm, der bor i mit mørke sind. Den anden står ved mit hjertes dør, jeg lukker ham aldrig ind. Den ene gav mig et vårligt pust af lykke, der snart for hen. Den anden gav mig sit hele liv, fik aldrig en time igen. Den ene bruser i blodets sang, hvor elskov er ren og fri. Den anden er et med den triste dag, som drømmene drukner i. Hver kvinde står mellem disse to, forelsket, elsket og ren. En gang hvert hundred år kan det ske, de smelter sammen til en.

​There are two men in the world, that constantly crosses my path. The one is the one I love the other loves me. One is in a nightly dream, that lives in my dark mind. The other stands at the door of my heart, I never let him in. One gave me a breath of spring of happiness that soon passes. The other gave me his whole life, never got another hour. One showers in the song of blood, where love is pure and free. The other is one with the sad day, in which dreams are drowned. Every woman stands between these two, in love, loved and pure. Once every hundred years it can happen, they merge into one.

Carved into this bench in Tove Ditlevsens Plads is this beautiful, yet heartbreaking, poem about the reality and humanity of love. It is one thing to love another, it is yet another to be loved by them too. The “plot” of this poem seems to encapsulate every 2000s “high school shy girl and football boy fall in love in an unlikely spout of romance” troupe there ever was. It’s classic, cliché even.

To me, this poem is the essence of the reality of true love in all of its fantasy, unlikeness, and waiting. To me, this is the cliché about finding your soulmate, your one, true person.

But I’m western, a white woman decked in the privilege of being born and raised in America, I’ve never had to think about this kind of “true love” in any other different way.

Barly has.

Connections to the program

Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Exterior

On the first “real” day of the program, we went on an excursion to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where we met with Barly Ihirba Tshibanda, a student at the institution and the co-creator of the “Voices in the Shadow of the Monuments'' walking tour of Copenhagen. While presenting his backstory and his art, Barly mentioned how, when immigrating to Denmark, he felt as though he loved this country, but this country did not love him.

How rare is true love? Not in the sense that we all get to meet that once-in-a-lifetime soulmate we dream of, but find love in where we live, where we work, and where we breathe?

While America is not my ideal utopia of a nation, it is a place I truly and deeply love - it is my home. How many people do not get to feel this way? To feel love for the place where they pay their taxes to, to feel pride in rooting for their nation at the Olympics, to feel joy when spotting another citizen abroad?

How many more, then, are too then loved by that country? How many have full freedom and rights? How many do not worry about whether the color of their skin, their origin, their accent, or their level of english comprehension is a condition of their love and acceptance?

To feel deprived of love from one’s soulmate, whom you feel you love the most is one thing, but to be also deprived of the love from a body of people who, at their core no different than you, is perhaps the loneliest and most solemn feeling of all.

If the love triangle of “De evige tre” is present now, even after everything society has done to progress, what was it like long ago?

Colonialism in denmark

This week we have focused on the hidden nature of Denmark’s colonialism past and present - a topic not easy to digest, but increasingly vital to understand and bring to light.

In America, colonialism is talked about in bulk - I cannot think of a history class in which the topic was not eventually raised or discussed. But in Denmark, a tiny nation thousands of miles from where colonialism lived, it is easily hidden. The ruling nation does not have to “deal” with the byproducts of colonialism or racism, for it simply was not here. Yet, the very absence of colonialism in Denmark’s mainland, has made the history of it in the rest of the kingdom invisible. It is easy to forget a reality when it was not your own and you never had to see it; however, that does not mean that it never existed.

Changing my perspective

Through tours and discussions with scholars and activists, like Dr. Jaren Siberstein, the history of Denmark has slowly come to light. The feeling of knowing is something I can only relate to through the disappointment from modern celebrities.

Has there ever been a celebrity you admire so deeply that has done something so unspeakably wrong? What did you feel in that moment of finding out? Shame? Regret? Denial? Any of which would be valid responses - you’d idolized or admired the figure for so long that seeing them make a mistake seems earth-shaking.

To me, that’s what this past week has been: earth-shaking. Denmark had always been a nation I looked up to for its progressive political field, beautiful nature, and captivating stories. However, the deeper I dig into this course, the more I’ve realized that I’ve, perhaps, set Denmark up too high on a pedestal. I had succumbed to the idea of Scandinavian Exceptionalism - the idea that the Scandinavian nations are excelling in a way the rest of the world isn’t. The present progressive nature of Denmark, in my eyes, could only have been a sign that their history was always good and always right - it truly was impossible for them to have done or do wrong.

Yet, I was wrong and it took me coming nearly 5,000 miles away to realize that.

That’s not to say that I’m by any means disappointed, I’m just now having to re-evaluate how I’m viewing the “exceptionalism” I’m seeing in the world. This trip, if nothing else, has given me the ability to look with a more critical eye, examining and searching for the truth and absence of voice in a narrative.