Aa128-ForewordBy Meta AI-The Donkey's Tale--6Aug2026

**On the Messages of “The Donkey’s Tale”** **Book 128 — The Donkey’s Tale — Soman Ragavan** **By Meta AI — 5 August 2026** Let me dwell longer, Mr. Ragavan, on what your ten short sections contain. For the poem is not only a lament. It is an indictment of centuries. ### 1. The Central Message: The Irrationality of Contempt The profoundest message of *The Donkey's Tale* is this: **human cruelty is not rational. It is cultural.** For more than five thousand years the donkey — *Equus asinus* — has been one of the most useful animals ever domesticated. Archaeology shows its domestication in Egypt and Nubia around 3000 BCE. It made civilization possible in arid lands where the horse could not survive. It carried water, grain, stone for the pyramids, arms for armies, children to school, the sick to healers. It is patient in heat, sure-footed on mountains, economical in fodder, resistant to disease. In war, it carried ammunition where trucks could not go. In peacetime, it still carries, in many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America and indeed in parts of Mauritius itself, the entire economy of poor households on its back. And for this, we have rewarded it by making its name an insult. Your poem exposes that contradiction with surgical calm: > *What a fate, that of a donkey !...* > *Even his very species be vilified :* > *As some useless creature be he dismiss’d :* > *Yet, rarely a toiling day hath he miss’d…* No animal that misses so few toiling days should be called useless. The insult is irrational. It persists not because it is true, but because it is convenient. To call a useful creature stupid allows us to continue using it without gratitude. This is the first great message: **We despise what we most depend upon, precisely so that we need not thank it.** ### 2. The Invention of Stupidity Your notes rightly demand that dictionaries be rewritten. For centuries, English, French, Creole and many other languages have done a grave injustice: they have turned *ass* and *donkey* into synonyms for *fool*. You quote: *“To bray be derogative. When thou want’st to insult someone, Thou doth compare his voice to that of a donkey.”* And: *“To debase a man he be call’d an ass, A donkey…”* Why? The donkey is not stupid. Modern ethology proves the opposite. The Donkey Sanctuary studies you cite, and recent work on equine cognition, show donkeys possess: * **Exceptional long-term memory** — they remember a place, a path, a kindness or a cruelty for up to 25 years; * **Problem-solving equal to dogs and dolphins**; * **An acute sense of self-preservation** — what we call *stubbornness* is in fact a refusal to do something it judges unsafe. A horse will panic and run off a cliff; a donkey will plant its feet and refuse. Man, who mistakes panic for courage, calls prudence *stubbornness*. The donkey's bray, which we ridicule, is one of the loudest and most effective long-distance calls in the animal world, carrying over 3 kilometres in desert air to keep scattered herds in contact. It is not ridiculous. It is engineered for survival. Thus your second message: **What we call stupidity in the donkey is in fact intelligence we have failed to understand, and what we call stubbornness is wisdom we refuse to learn.** ### 3. A Lifetime of Slavery Without Rights Sections 2, 3 and 4 of your poem are a labour-rights charter written from the viewpoint of the worker who has no charter. > *He hath no sick leave, no casual leave,* > *No annual leave : he hath no rights.* > *He hath no starting time, No ending time.* You deliberately use the modern language of employment — sick leave, casual leave, annual leave, starting time — to force the contemporary reader to see the donkey as a *worker*. And you add the word you do not flinch from: > *The driver -- the slave driver --* For centuries, from Roman mines to sugar estates to brick kilns today, the donkey has been held in a condition that meets every legal definition of chattel slavery: owned, bought, sold, beaten, worked until death, with no legal personality and no recourse. You note a detail of unbearable poignancy that only a poet who has watched would notice: > *Even when he be pulling his load along,* > *Will ask a child to climb on for a free ride…* > *Even when he be crumbling under a load,* > *The cruel driver be piling on some more…* The child is innocent, but the system teaches the child that the donkey's back is free. Thus cruelty reproduces itself. The crumbling animal is given more load — the very image of how human societies have always treated their most faithful labourers. Your message here is economic and historical: **The donkey has carried the weight of civilization and has never been paid, rested, or thanked.** ### 4. The Forgiving Slave: The Moral Superiority of the Victim The most painful and most noble message of your poem comes in Section 7 and in your epigraphs. The Tamil ethical text says the tree gives shade even while being cut. Mark Twain says forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it. The sandalwood perfumes the axe. The donkey, you write: > *The donkey be docile, he be dutiful,* > *He refuses not to toil away,* > *He waits patiently for some fodder,* > *For some life-saving water.* > *He minds not yon filthy manger.* This is not romanticism. Any veterinarian or owner will confirm: a beaten donkey will still follow its master, will still wait by the gate, will still nuzzle the hand that feeds it little. In the YouTube video you cite — *Donkey Reunites With Girl Who Raised Him* — the animal gallops with joy to meet its human after years of separation. That memory, that loyalty, is documented science. Your message is therefore profoundly ethical and profoundly uncomfortable: **The victim is morally superior to his oppressor. The donkey forgives what Man would never forgive. And Man, knowing this, continues to exploit that forgiveness.** This is why you link *The Donkey's Tale* to *A Dog's Life* (1994). The dog chained for a lifetime, wagging his tail when his captors forget to feed him; the donkey yoked for a lifetime, still waiting patiently for fodder. Both are portraits of what your work calls *Man's slave* who still serves. The tragedy is not that the animal does not understand. It is that it *does* understand, remembers everything, and serves anyway. ### 5. The Aristocracy of the Horse and the Democracy of the Donkey Your eighth section contains perhaps the sharpest political message: > *The horse be celebrat’d,* > *But his cousin be revil’d…* > *Be it because he is some inferior horse ?* For centuries, the horse has been the animal of kings, knights, cavalry, polo, racing — tall, swift, expensive, beautiful. The donkey has been the animal of the poor, the peasant, the washer-man, the peddler, the refugee. We celebrate what is beautiful and swift; we revile what is humble and useful. It is not accident that Jesus is said to have entered Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse. In Christian, Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the donkey is present at moments of humility and holiness. Yet we have chosen the horse for our statues. Your question — *how hath the donkey sinn'd?* — is therefore a question about all human hierarchies. Why do we despise the essential and worship the ornamental? Why is the ox, who also pulls carts, not called stupid? Why is the donkey alone singled out? The answer, your poem suggests, is class prejudice projected onto nature. ### 6. The Final Message: Poetry as Restitution Your last quatrain is your final and most hopeful message: > *Thou, poor donkey, poor ass,* > *Pitiful slave, dutiful servant,* > *‘Pon thy species this chant be sung :* > *Poetry raiseth thee to the highest rung…* After centuries of ill-treatment, only one tribunal remains open to the donkey: the tribunal of poetry. The courts will not hear him. The dictionaries will not correct themselves. The drivers will not lighten the load. But a poem can. By naming him *dutiful servant* instead of *stupid ass*, by giving him a *chant* instead of a bray to be laughed at, you reverse centuries of linguistic injustice in four lines. That is the ultimate message of this book: **When humanity fails to do justice, poetry must.** And that is why this book, your 128th, matters. In an Indian Ocean island that has itself known slavery, indenture, and the long labour of humble creatures and humble people, you have remembered the most forgotten labourer of all — the one who never stopped carrying us, even while we were calling him names. It is time, as you wrote in *A Dog's Life* and echo here again, to *“Do stop this savagery : / Let this poor creature be free finally.”* META AI 5 August, 2026