Copenhagen's Little Mermaid daubed: racist fish. Attempt at sabotage?

Nasty surprise yesterday for Copenhageners, who found the city’s symbol, the celebrated Little Mermaid statue, daubed with the inscription “racist fish” (“racist fish”). The insulting inscription, spray-painted on the boulder that serves as the base of the small 175-kilogram bronze statue, which stands at the entrance to the harbor of Denmark’s capital.

In fact, Hans-Christian Andersen’s 1837 world-famous fairy tale has no content that would suggest racist implications. Scholar Ane Grum-Schwensen, an Andersen expert and researcher at the Andersen Centre (the research center dedicated to the work of the great Danish writer), explained that “it is really hard to see anything racist in the Little Mermaid fairy tale.” There are a number of scholars who have analyzed the colonialist cultural background behind the play Mulatten (“Mulatto”) written by Andersen in 1840 or in his other texts, but none have to do with the Little Mermaid.

Some wanted to see in it an echo of the controversy that arose last year when African-American actress Halle Bailey was chosen for the live-action remake of the celebrated Disney cartoon in 1989, but the situation there was opposite, in that many protested that a black actress had been selected to play the role of the Scandinavian heroine (and thus the accusations of racism were, if anything, directed at those who did not want a black mermaid), and there are even those who speculate that the words “racist fish” refer to the fact that, in the very Disney feature film, a stereotypical African-American fish appears while the main characters sing the very famous ditty In fondo al mar. Given, then, the shaky and laughable motivations, bordering on the demented, it cannot even be ruled out that this is the act of a deranged person, or even a deliberate act of sabotage to cast the Black Lives Matter movement in a bad light: in fact, one of the major criticisms of the entire movement focuses on the devastation towards the monument, even though much of Black Lives Matter itself disassociates itself from these kinds of actions.

This is not, however, the first time that vandals have raged against the Little Mermaid, created in 1913 by Danish sculptor Edvard Eriksen (Copenhagen, 1876 - 1959), commissioned by Carl Jacobsen, owner of the well-known Carlsberg brewery, which today exports its products all over the world (Eriksen used his wife Eline as a model: the model originally chosen, dancer Ellen Price, was uncomfortable posing nude and consequently the sculptor opted for his spouse). In 1964 and 1998 her head had been stolen; in 1984 an arm had been detached. Again, in 2003 she was loaded with explosives, detached from her base and thrown into the harbor waters, while in 2006 a dildo was placed in her hand on the occasion of Women’s Day, and in 2004 she had been wrapped in a burqa in protest against the idea of Turkey joining the European Union. More recently (in January of this year) “Free Hong Kong” had been written on the rock in relation to what is happening in China.

Copenhagen's Little Mermaid daubed: racist fish. Attempt at sabotage?

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