METAMORPHOSIS / “Help me in this evil hour, O Giant”: The Tall One becomes religious, prays to his portrait on the wall!

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The image, the donkey and the donkey

2026-11-08 19:56:57Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ÇAPAJEV GJOKUTAJ
The image, the donkey and the donkey
Chapaev Gjokutaj

Man is sensitive, so he can't stand harsh words. You call him a donkey, he jumps up, they ride him on his back, he carries you his whole life and doesn't give a damn.

Beautiful, I said to myself when I read this quote that Azis Nesini is said to have said. It oozes irony, at first glance it claims that man is sensitive, in the subtext it says that his skin has become a sole, worse than a donkey's. He jumps up for a word spoken in the moment, he is enduring being stolen and trampled on his whole life. He worries about the label, but he doesn't feel anything for the vinegar that is being sold to him as wine.

It happens like this, I said to myself, because many people don't think things through first, they act with intuition and out of habit rather than logic and reason.

When I delved a little deeper, that is, when I put logic and not prejudices to work, psychology came to my aid. Quite naturally, I said, the insult 'donkey' is perceived instantly and evokes a reactive reaction, while the trampling and exploitation are realized little by little, over months and years. What is experienced instantly evokes strong emotions and reactions, what is experienced over time becomes a habit and begins to seem ordinary.

However, this explanation did not seem one hundred percent convincing to me, so I was trying to approach the 'man vs donkey' problem on a socio-historical level. In traditional societies, where oral plays a major role and where fame and glory are highly valued, labeling and insulting in public inevitably weigh heavily and become a source of quarrels. In modern societies, I continued, real and pragmatic things take on more value, no one asks you where you come from or whose son you are, whether you are wearing a suit or jeans, but what you are capable of doing for yourself and for others.

The contrast 'suit - jeans' somehow brought to mind the anecdote of Nasruddin who, when he went to a party dressed in any way, they didn't care, when he went with a silk binish they put it on his head and Nasruddin started 'feeding' the binish and telling it 'eat meat binish'. Damn, right after that I remembered the principle 'image is everything', a principle that dominates our time and which is the same as Nasruddin rising from the grave and saying: sorry, binish is everything.

Since the social historical approach was confusing me badly and removing the cloned boundaries between traditional and modern, and especially the sacred boundaries between Western and Oriental, I returned to thinking about something simpler: the donkey is a noble animal, a worker like him, without pretensions to a saddle, bridle, bridle and noble tack, and even with quite an intellect. When it has all these merits, why do we use it to insult and humiliate the other?

And even further: when we cannot recognize and appreciate a simple, concrete thing like a donkey, consider what we are missing when we judge the Oriental and the Occidental, the modern and the traditional, the rational and the intuitive, and other things that can hardly fit into the narrow drawers of our prejudices.


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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