She turned and walked back through the doorway, back to the outside world. Even though she was called a “prison guard,” she was not an actual guard inside a jail. When they shut the door behind her, I felt as if more than a door was closing. I felt as if it was the last time that I would see the outside or see someone from the outside world. My hope closed along with that door.
I didn’t know that was there was basically no cell phone service in jail. The coverage was very weak; it came and went. The two texts that I had sent did not go through. Had I known that at that moment, I might have cried for real.
I was alone now with a new female guard, who was little more than a girl, certainly younger than me. She was not wearing an abaya. She was dressed in a long skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, with her hair twisted tightly and wrapped around at the back of her head in a style of bun. She took my papers, the papers that had followed me from the Khobar police station to jail, and pointed at a place where I was supposed to sign. On the paper there was a line for charges. In the blank space, someone had written “driving while female.”
After I signed, the guard looked at my paper and asked me, “Why are you here in this jail?”
I looked at her and said, “Guess.”
She said, “You are Manal al-Sharif?”—she already knew my name—and then added, “They brought you here? For driving a car?” She asked each question as if she couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that I was standing there, couldn’t believe that I was being sent to her jail for driving a car.
I decided that this was the opening I needed. I told her that I was to be allowed one phone call before I entered the jail. She looked at me and said, “No. Who told you that?” I explained that Musaad had told me to ask the prison guard when I got inside. I showed her that I had already bought my calling card.
The prison had one small room with an old landline phone for prisoners. Each woman was allowed one call per month. I kept insisting that I could make a call. Finally, the guard called the main section, and someone must have told her that it was okay. I used my phone card to call my sister-in-law.
She was upset and relieved at the same time. She kept asking, “Where are you?” I told her that I was fine, that I was in Dammam Central Prison and to tell my friend Ahmed to tweet about it. She replied, “What’s ‘tweet’?” She had no idea what Twitter was. We went back and forth a few times, and finally I said to her, “Just tell Ahmed to tweet, and he will understand.” And I told her to find me a lawyer. Then the call was over. I hung up the receiver with its long cord. There was nothing else I could do.
I wasn’t going to be getting any more special favors. The guard looked at my bag and told me that I could not take it with me. She took it, along with my ID and my phone, and told me to follow her through a back door. In an apologetic voice, she said, “You will not like this.” I didn’t understand what she was talking about.
We entered another foul-smelling area and she said, “Take off your clothes.” I thought I had misheard her.
I said, “Excuse me?”
She told me again to take off my clothes and to bend over.
“All my clothes?” I asked. “Even my underwear?”
“Yes, even your underwear.”
It is hard to convey just what an extreme indignity this was. If you are raised as a traditional Saudi woman, you cannot bear being exposed. It is the greatest shame possible. Women do not uncover themselves even for doctors. When I was in the hospital giving birth to my son, the only time I felt embarrassed and uneasy was when the doctor came in and I had to take off my underwear. The doctor was another woman, and still I felt extremely uncomfortable, even though I was in labor. Submitting to this examination, bending over to have this strange prison guard with her gloved hands check the most intimate parts of me was the most humiliating thing I had ever experienced.
When it was done, she told me to put on my clothes.
All my frustration and rage spilled over. I starting shouting at her, saying that this could not be happening, and I vowed that I would have her exposed.
She looked at me and said very calmly, “You have to leave here first. Only then can you start threatening to expose us.”
Those words stunned me into silence.
We stepped back into the processing office where another woman was waiting. Her name was Zahrah, which means “flower” in Arabic. She was also wearing a skirt; apparently that was the uniform for the prison guards. She was short and heavy and was carrying an enormous chain of keys. She was to lead me to jail.
We exited the administration area, leaving behind the offices and the tiny room with the old phone, and another that was like a workshop with sewing machines, and a holy room set aside for prayers. We passed through a very small yard. The top should have been open to the sky and filled with blazing afternoon desert light, but instead there were two layers of metal netting, each overlaying the other. It was like being fenced in on all sides. We came to another room with a metal mesh ceiling, but in this one there were ropes stretching from wall to wall. They were the clotheslines. Women could go into the bathroom, wash their clothes in the same sinks as they used for the toilets, wring out the water with their hands, and then hang the clothes up to dry on the rope lines. The room was only open one hour a day.
Then we arrived at the cellblock itself, behind a heavy, noisy gate. The individual cells ran along a corridor lined with bars, and as I stepped inside, I could see faces pressed into each open space. There’s nothing to do in jail. It’s like watching your life in slow motion. The boredom—the complete nothingness—makes you want to kill yourself. You come up with anything to fill the space: even a new cockroach crossing the wall will be something to talk about. So, at the sound of the gate opening, all the prisoners rushed to the bars and started looking. The noise was so loud: the sounds of them pushing against bars, pushing against each other, the screech of everyone talking at once, “Jadid, jadid,” Arabic for “new one.”
I desperately wanted to cover my face.
For more than a decade, I’d fought with my family, fought with my ex-husband, fought with my society not to cover my face. My face is my identity. No one will cover it. I’m proud of my face. If my face bothers you, don’t look. Turn your own face away, take your eyes off me. If you are seduced by merely looking at my face, that is your problem. Do not tell me to cover it. You cannot punish me simply because you cannot control yourself.
But now, passing through this crush of women, I wished I were veiled. I didn’t want to be seen. Not in this place. I was not a criminal. I did not do anything wrong. I just wanted to throw back my head and scream. The pain was almost overwhelming.
We have a phrase in Arabic: “He swept the floor with my dignity.” I felt like my dignity was being wiped on that foul-smelling, hard concrete floor.
Zahrah got out one of her many keys, walked to the door of one cell, and opened the lock. She pulled the bars behind me, and that was it.
The women inside crowded around, speaking in broken Arabic. “You’re Saudi? You’re Saudi?” they asked. They were mostly housemaids and domestic workers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, and India. They were all speaking over each other. It was like being in an aviary with flocks of every type of bird, screeching and calling and beating their wings. Out of 168 inmates in the prison, only seven were Saudi, and four of these were not even prisoners, they were merely in temporary detention. There is no detention center for women, so the authorities jail them instead.
A women in a black hijab made her way toward me. She was dressed the way many Saudi women do inside their houses, and when she spoke to me, it was with a Saudi accent. “Come with me,” she said, taking my hand. We walked to a room with twelve bunk beds and white fluorescent lights flickering from the ceiling. Ropes, sagging with clothes, were strung all around. It felt like standing in a closet. The walls were covered in plastic bags, filled with partly eaten bread, plastic spoons, and more clothes. Still more clothe
s were stuffed under the beds. The beds themselves were draped in fabric, like a curtain, because that was the only way to sleep: no one ever turned off the harsh, faintly buzzing lights overhead. Their tubes glowed day and night. There was only one tiny window at the top of the room, closed off with tight iron bars so that only the littlest bit of light and no fresh air drifted in. The room smelled damp, like a carpet that has been flooded with water; like food; like diapers, because there was a newborn baby; like hair oil and creams; like sweat, days of sweat that had not been scrubbed off in a long time.
And everywhere, there were cockroaches. Thousands and thousands of cockroaches scurried across the floors, the walls. Cockroaches on the bed, on the floor, on the food.
The Saudi woman was named Nuwayer. Her bed was the first on the right. She told me, this is my bed, please sit down. I didn’t know if I should trust her, but I sat. She had small eyes and was maybe a little older than me. I couldn’t see her hair, but it looked like it was in two braids. She was wearing a black dress with flowers on it, and she had a big scar running down her face. I never asked her how she got that scar. I have scars myself, from my childhood, so I never ask people about theirs.
She started asking me questions: Why are you here? What happened? She couldn’t believe that I had been brought to this prison for driving a car. She refused to believe it. After a while, there was nothing more I could say. How could I prove that I was not lying?
Finally, I looked at her and I said, “Nuwayer, I’m so, so tired. I haven’t slept for two days.” I didn’t care about eating anymore.
She said, “It’s okay, just sleep in my bed.”
I could see the cockroaches climbing over everything. In the outside world, if I saw one cockroach, I used bleach, disinfectants, anything to kill them and clean every surface they’d touched. I hated cockroaches that much. Also, cockroaches usually run away when they see people: they scurry off into dark corners when you turn on the light. But here, they just crawled, heedless of the light, over everything, under everything. As I was talking to Nuwayer, I felt them on top of my head, trying to crawl up the hem of my abaya. I kept batting them off, shrieking, “Cockroach! Oh, cockroach!” And Nuwayer was so kind, so calm. She told me that I would get used to them.
Nuwayer told me to take off my abaya, but I insisted on leaving it on. I was still hoping to leave, if not by the end of this day, then by the next day. But first I had to sleep. I must have basically fainted on her bed. It was so noisy: the women, the kids, the crying newborn, the click click click of the cockroaches on the floor, the walls, the plastic. But I slept. Not peacefully though. It was like when you have been swimming in the ocean for too long, and when you lie down at the end of day, all you can feel is the pitch and roll of the waves all over again. As I slept, I felt my day all over again: the pain, the humiliation, the indignity. I dreamed of crying in front of a man who did not care. I dreamed of a girl pushing her rough, gloved hands over me and in me. In my sleep, I tried to push these thoughts away. I tried to think of my son. I tried to think of my sister-in-law telling me on the phone that he was okay, that his father had come and gotten him.
It turned out that I didn’t need to call anyone in my family to tell them where I had gone. The newspapers, the television, the radio, and the Internet had already done it for me. By the time I’d fallen asleep, all of Saudi Arabia knew that Manal al-Sharif, the woman who drove, was in jail.
3
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* * *
Dirty Girls
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I was born on the floor of our cramped apartment in the city of Mecca on April 25, 1979. My mother was alone, except for my older sister, who was barely much more than a toddler herself. My father had been out when she went into labor, and under Saudi rules and customs, my mother could not be admitted without her male guardian or a mahram to accompany her to the hospital. There were no exceptions. She couldn’t even call for help because our apartment had no phone.
I was fortunate to be her fifth child, and the third to survive; her body knew how to have children. When she heard my first cry, she asked my sister, “What did I bring into the world?” And Muna, who had been able to talk since she was about one year old, looked at me on a towel, covered in blood and afterbirth, and said simply, “Ne’ama.” Ne’ama is the name of one of my cousins from my mother’s side, and in Arabic it means “bliss.” My sister knew I was a girl and had named me. But my older cousin Saadiya, from my father’s side, changed my name to Manal. She said that Ne’ama was an uncommon name in Saudi and warned that kids would make fun of me. She was right, and she spared me a lot of bullying in school. So it was that my parents’ children are a matched set, Muna, Manal, and Muhammad—but my mother and father always called me “Ne’ama.”
My mother was Libyan. She was born in 1947 in a hospital in Alexandria, Egypt, where her father had moved his family during the Italian colonial period. But she always considered herself Libyan. Her family was prestigious, proud, and wealthy. At one point they were responsible for overseeing the Ottoman Empire’s vast treasury in North Africa. This is where the family name came from: bayt al mal was what the Ottomans called the minister of finance at the time. My grandfather was a successful merchant and owned property across a vast swath of territory between Libya and Egypt. When he moved to Egypt, he was given the honorific nickname of Sheikh of the Maghareba, or chief of the Moroccans, a loose reference to the many peoples of North Africa living to the west of Egypt. My mother was raised in a lavish house in the port city with servants and attendants and every material comfort a girl of that era could imagine, everything except love.
My father was born poor in the village of Tarfa’a in Wadi Fatima, a valley less than twenty miles outside Mecca. No one ever recorded the date of his birth, although we all believe he was born ten years before his official government age. When he was required to get a national ID and a driver’s license, the state simply assigned him the first day of the month of Rajab. Most undocumented people have that date as their birthday—there is a joke that on the first of Rajab, you can say happy birthday to half of the Saudi nation. Growing up, all of my girlfriends’ parents were also listed as being born on that date. It is as if you suddenly told half of America that their birthday is going to be on July 1.
My father never knew his own father, who died before he was born. He never spoke of his father or his lineage, although it is also a noble one. Nearly everyone in the Fatima Valley belonged to a single tribe, the Ashraf (plural of al Sharif) tribe. Our tribe can trace its origins back to the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him, hereafter PBUH); we are the descendants of his grandson Hassan, the child of Muhammad’s youngest daughter, Fatima, and her husband, Ali bin Abi Taleb, known as the Fourth Caliph, who was also Muhammad’s cousin (Peace Be Upon Them). The influence of the al-Sharif tribe has been felt across the Arab world. In the last century alone, al-Sharifs have governed the Hejaz region of the Saudi kingdom, and have ruled as kings in Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, and Palestine.
My own father, whom we always called Abouya, which means “my father” in his native Hejazi dialect, never went to school. He is illiterate, although he has memorized all the basic phrases for the prayers. But he is curious. He would often listen to the radio and he followed and argued about politics and sports. Once I could read, I would read him the newspaper and a few times tried to teach him how to read and write. My mother had been to school through the fourth grade, so she could read enough to fill out our school registration forms, which she did with a fierce determination.
My parents would never have met if not for Islam. As young men, my father and his elder brother, Uncle Sa’ad, moved to Mecca to work. My dad had a car that he used to ferry pious Muslims back and forth between the airport outside the bustling port city of Jeddah and the sacred places of Mecca. He was busiest during the month of the hajj, the once-in-a-lifetime visit required of all able Muslims to the holiest place in the Muslim world, t
he Grand Mosque of Mecca and the dark granite Kaaba, literally “the cube,” which stands inside. The Kaaba is revered in Islam as the first house of worship, built by the Prophet Ibrahim (PBUH), who is known to Christians and Jews as Abraham. It is the place toward which all Muslims face when they perform their five daily prayers. When a Muslim dies, tradition dictates that for burial his or her face must be turned toward the Kaaba. The rest of the year, my father drove other pilgrims who traveled to the city to observe lesser rites; devout Muslims believe a prayer in the presence of the Kaaba is worth a hundred thousand prayers elsewhere.
My father, Massoud al-Sharif, first laid eyes on my mother when she came from Egypt with her family to perform the hajj. It was as if their meeting was fated. My father was divorced, and so was my mother. When she returned home, he flew to Alexandria, showed up at her house, and asked her father for permission to marry. Her father said yes.
Years later, Abouya would say he married my mother for her beauty, and she was indeed very beautiful. Mama, in turn, would say that she married my father to escape the stepmother she hated: her own mother had died when she was only four years old. But perhaps she wanted to escape from everything. Not once did I hear her wish blessings on her father’s soul, something that Islamic religion and culture require of children after the death of a parent. “God does not wish mercy upon my father,” she used to say, whenever his name was mentioned. “He robbed me of my son, and my education too.”
During her first marriage, Mama had given birth to a son, Essam. But when her marriage dissolved, Mama had to leave her baby behind: her father would not allow her to return to his house with a child. Mama saw her elder son just one time in all those intervening years, in 1990, during a visit to Libya, when Essam was about twenty-one years old.
Daring to Drive Page 4