Fog, The Qur'an, George Washington, and More...

Journal entry October 17, 2017

By Heidi O’Donnell Eastman

Pea soup. That is what some would call it. We were driving in dense fog on our way home from the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, RI on a recent October evening. Jane Pickens is an art house cinema in historic Washington Square. Seeing a film there is an event. The building was built as a church and has shown films since the silent film days in the 1920’s

The fog was dense and mysterious and beautiful except for the fact that it made traveling treacherous. Newport to Westport Point, as the crow flies, is a short distance; by car one must travel up and down the fingers of the south coast and over the bridges. For the past nine months have been occupied by the Celtic Ports of Dublin, Donegal, St Malo and Paris. It was a thrill to be home again relearning the stories of my local ports.

It was something about the fog, the film and the route home over multiple bridges which had me thinking about the bravery and courage it took to set sail in days before GPS and modern technology. The fog was conjuring a story in my head. For some reason, I felt transported back in time. Perhaps it was the shrouded masts with their clanging halyards in the Newport Harbor then later in the Bristol Harbor and that quality about fog which distorts everything. It is not only vision and perception but sound that is distorted. As we inched along through the fog I was transfixed by the sounds and sights which could have been 100, 200 or even 500 years ago save for the humming of our engine.

I kept floating back to the memory of the film we had seen. The story is about Queen Victoria and her relationship with a subject of her empire in India. A Muslim prison clerk from Agra, India, Abdul’s story was pieced together through the journals of the Queen and Abdul. ALthough quite the neocolonialists view, it is an incredible record of their ten-year relationship; he was her Munshi, she was his devoted student. It was beautiful and heart wrenching at once. The journey from India to Britain for Abdul and his Indian companion and the visits to Balmoral Castle in Scotland-- where everything is scratchy --were arduous and mystifying. They were wrenched from their home, culture, and customs and thrown into the royal household which was fraught with bigots and racists. The Queen’s Munshi taught her about the Qur’an and Urdu. The journals recorded the Queen’s lessons and display that innate pull of the human soul to seek, to learn, and to wholeheartedly experience all the world has to offer. This is the essence of Port to Port. I was intrigued.

We left the theater after seeing Victoria and Abdul on its opening night and we headed to the car. As we rounded the corner we peaked in the window of the historic Touro Synagogue. I was reminded by my friends who accompanied us that it was George Washington who said in his letter to the Hebrew Congregations of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790

“every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

He continues:

"For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

From the Qur’an to the Old Testament to the fundamental tenets of our American democracy the fog did not distort this: history matters and journals are important records of the human story.