Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

In those few sentences, I was finally able to voice the blame, helplessness, and frustration that I’d held within me since I was eight years old. I wanted to wound my father, even as I closed my eyes and prepared for the slap that I was sure would come. But there was nothing. Abouya simply turned and exited the room. He never raised the subject of marriage with me again.

  In 2002, as I prepared to graduate with first-class honors and a high grade-point average, I still hadn’t found a job. The prospect of sitting at home after five years of hard work was devastating. One of my classmates, Marwa, who was from the Eastern Province, mentioned that Aramco, the giant Saudi oil company, ran a summer internship program. “They award a monthly remuneration of 4,000 riyals to the interns,” she said. I hadn’t even known until then that women could join Aramco; the Aramco office in Jeddah employed only men.

  I was desperate to get a spot. “Will you help me apply?” I asked.

  She said she would.

  I gave her all of the necessary paperwork and waited.

  When she called, her first words were, “Manal, pack your bag.” Then she told me that we were going to be colleagues that summer.

  My father had to sign a consent form for me to do the internship, but this was one form he was happy to sign. It was a dream for any Saudi to work at Aramco. “It’s an honor to belong there,” he said proudly.

  For the first time in my life, I’d be completely alone as well.

  I still keep my plane ticket from Jeddah to the eastern city of Dammam in my box of precious things: it reminds me of my journey from a troubled, angry home in a poor, miserable neighborhood to a world that was the opposite of almost everything that I had known. I was assigned to work in Aramco’s Expatriate Recruitment Unit. The department’s driver, known as Uncle Ali, met me at the airport. As our car pulled through the gates of the Aramco residential compound, I had the biggest shock of my life. I stared out the car window like a new arrival in a foreign land; nothing about my surroundings resembled the Saudi Arabia I knew. I saw clean, organized streets, with trees, lush public gardens, and water fountains. I saw American-style wooden houses, their large windows free of the protective iron bars soldered onto most Saudi residential buildings. Instead of high walls around the houses, there were beautiful gardens. We passed a woman behind the wheel of a car, wearing sunglasses, her hair uncovered. Fascinated, I fixed my gaze on her and craned my neck around to get a better view. There were women walking in the street without abayas; some of them were even running or riding bicycles. “Are you sure we’re still in Saudi?” I asked Uncle Ali. Looking into the rearview mirror, I could see him smile.

  In the housing office, I received a key to my shared house, Number 622 on Sixth Street of Aramco Dhahran Camp. I’d be living with Rima and Dina, two dental students, and Alia, a computer science student like me. I headed to my new home and carried my small bag over the threshold. The house was built in the American style, just like the ones I’d seen in the movies. There was a backyard, an open kitchen, and large windows for sunlight to stream through. Everything was tidy, awaiting our arrival.

  Neither the dishwasher nor the fully automatic washing machine was what I liked best about the house—though both were fantastic luxuries. My favorite thing of all were the two faucet taps—one for cold water and one for hot. Though this was fairly common in Saudi Arabia, it was something I’d never had at home. Our apartment building was very old, and when the building’s external water tank emptied, usually within three days of its monthly filling, we survived the rest of the month without running water. We kept a small water tank inside our apartment and a larger one on the balcony, and each day, we measured out the minimum amount of water we needed for bathing or for brushing our teeth. Muna and I had complained constantly to our father, but nothing changed.

  That summer I developed an obsession with bathing; morning and night, I would soak in the bathtub for hours. For the first time ever, my bathwater flowed from the taps on demand, and I was determined to enjoy it.

  I began my duties as a trainee in the employment office, working under a man named Abdulhadi. He was young and animated. Everything about him was quick: his speech, his steps, how he moved his hands. It was hard to understand half of what he said, but he was cheerful and I loved working with him. Abdulhadi assigned me a number of tasks, many of them completely new to me, and one by one I learned to carry them out. This won me respect and appreciation, especially from the department administrator. At the end of the month I received my first paycheck. I bought Rado watches for Mama and Abouya. Mama wore her gold watch with a circle of tiny diamond chips around the face until she died; Abouya still wears his each day.

  As the end of the summer approached, the administrator told me there was a vacancy in the department. “Why don’t you submit an application?” he asked. But Abdulhadi had already suggested my classmate Marwa for the position. So he set about trying to find another vacancy for me. One morning he told me that a new division for information security had been established in the Information Technology Business Line. They were hiring recent graduates. If I wanted to go for an interview, there was a good chance I would get a place. The division was a lot more relevant to my field of study: the Employment Office had limited opportunities for someone with a computer science background.

  I had two interviews. Although my competitors were all graduates of American universities, I was offered a position. “They gave you an official post?” Abdulhadi asked me afterward. “I thought they’d only hire you on a contractual basis. You’re very lucky.” I didn’t understand the difference at the time—all that mattered to me was the job—but later I learned that I had indeed been very lucky. Contract employees were only hired for one year at a time; your services might be terminated at any point, and you didn’t have the right to medical insurance or various other privileges the official employees enjoyed. Because of this, an official post with Aramco was very hard to come by. When I signed the contract, I couldn’t believe the starting salary—8,000 riyals, with an extra 400 added due to my graduating with honors. This was double what my classmate Maram (who’d told me my best hope was to become an instructor in a training institute) had predicted.

  There was, however, one clause in the contract that had been crossed out in blue pen: “At the employee’s desire, the company will provide them with a residence in the dedicated staff compound in the location of their work.” I asked why it had been erased. “I’m sorry,” she told me, “Saudi women aren’t allowed to live there.”

  “Is it permitted for Saudi men?” I asked.

  Yes, she replied. Saudi males could live there, along with men and women of other nationalities.

  “But I’m an intern,” I said, “and I was given a house there. Why not now, since I’m going to be a full-time employee?”

  “After this year,” she said, “the company will no longer provide accommodation for female interns either.”

  No one was ever able to explain why. There were rumors the ban had been ordered by the Ministry of the Interior. But, if so, why did they not ban women from driving, ban the consumption of alcohol, end mixed work environments, close the movie theaters, and require women to wear an abaya? Others said that it was the result of bad behavior by a Saudi woman, who had been forced to leave. Whatever the reason, the consequences were more serious than I could have imagined. The Ministry of the Interior prohibited Saudi women from living in a hotel or furnished apartment without her guardian or a mahram. The rules also prevented landlords from leasing to women; the lease agreement had to be in the name of a man, even if it was a woman who would pay the rent.

  As I signed the employment contract, I briefly wondered if I was making a mistake. I had a way out of Mecca, but how would I find a place to live? I didn’t mention my housing worries to my father for fear that he’d refuse to sign my papers; I still needed a guardian consent form.

  When I called my mother to tell her, our conversation was formal and bittersweet. “Congratulations, Daughter
,” she offered, somewhat sadly.

  “It’s good news, Mama!” I reassured her. “We’re not going to live in poverty and need anymore; we’ll lead a new life, a better one, I promise. You won’t need your sewing machine after today.”

  “But you’ll be far away from me.”

  “I’ll visit you, Mama. It’s only two hours on the airplane.”

  Despite everything, I was certain I’d miss my father and mother very much. But I couldn’t for one moment pretend that I’d miss our neighborhood. Nor would I miss our problems, our unhappiness, or the constant interference in my private life. These were the things I’d already been trying to escape.

  After talking to Mama, I called my old classmate Maram. “Please congratulate me,” I said, “I signed a contract with Aramco, and my salary is twice what you predicted I would earn. Isn’t it good news?” I was shocked by her cold response.

  “Aramco, and you’ll work with men! You’ll never marry, Manal—not now, not ever.”

  After that, I didn’t call Maram again.

  The summer internship program ended, and I was forced to return to Mecca until the employment papers were complete. Earlier in the summer, the landlord of my parents’ apartment building had decided to tear down the building to construct new, furnished apartments to house pilgrims traveling to Mecca, and my family had been evicted. I was shocked when I saw where they had moved. If I had thought that our previous apartment was old and miserable, it was nothing compared to this one. I phoned the Aramco employment office every week to find out when I’d be able to return. The longer I stayed in Mecca, the more suffocated I felt, and I prayed to God that it wouldn’t be long. To pass the time, I spun dreams about the future: I would use my first two paychecks to move my family to a new apartment, in a new neighborhood. I couldn’t wait.

  Before I could do any of this, however, I had to find my own place to live. Otherwise, I would be employed but homeless. After two long months, at the beginning of October 2002, Aramco said the paperwork was ready. All that was needed was for my father to sign the guardian consent form. Then I would be given a plane ticket to the Eastern Province.

  On the morning of Wednesday, October 9, 2002, my parents saw me off at the Jeddah airport, and I promised them that I would live up to their expectations. In my head were a thousand questions—not least of which was where I would spend the night when I arrived; in my wallet, I had just 500 riyals. When I worked in Aramco’s Expatriate Recruitment Unit, we had a very specific protocol for how we welcomed our new foreign employees. We would meet them at the airport, show them where they would be working, and then give them a complete tour of the compound, so they would be oriented and feel at home. “Here’s the bank,” we would say, “here are the supermarket and laundry facilities; here are the post office and the barber, and here are the cinema and the restaurant.” Finally we’d stop at the housing office, where they would receive a key to their house, equipped with everything they could possibly need: new towels, shampoo, toothbrushes, dish and laundry soap, and enough food for a week. I was looking forward to receiving the same kind of treatment when I arrived; after twenty-three years as a woman in Saudi Arabia, I should have known better.

  I landed at Dammam airport and collected my small bag. Everything I owned—clothes, shoes, all my possessions except for a few books—fit into one small suitcase. There was no one there to meet me, not Uncle Ali or anyone else. I took one of the airport taxis and asked for a receipt to give to the employment office in Dhahran. There was nobody to greet me there, either. I felt lost. The only thing I could think of was to head to Abdulhadi’s office. He’d been so helpful to me during the summer; perhaps he could be again.

  He greeted me warmly. “I don’t know where to go from here,” I explained. “I don’t even know where I’m supposed to work.”

  “Don’t worry, Manal,” he reassured me. He asked Uncle Ali to drive me to my department and told me to call if I needed anything.

  “Actually, I don’t even know where I’ll be staying tonight,” I confessed. “Aramco won’t provide me with housing.”

  He told me that my department was obligated to provide a hotel room if I needed one, but he wasn’t sure how it would be done, since women weren’t permitted to rent a room without a mahram or guardian. Thanking him for his advice, I headed to my new office with the driver.

  When I reached the area belonging to my department, it looked deserted. It was isolated from the rest of the Aramco complex, and the collection of single-story, prefabricated buildings was not very inviting. Their cheerless sandy color did nothing to help. But at least I had arrived. Gathering myself, I entered building 3133 and asked for the Information Protection Division. I already knew two men in the division. The division planner, a man in his forties, was the head of the Planning Group. He escorted me to the office belonging to the head of the Compliance Assessment Group. This man was to be my new boss. My boss was probably in his early thirties. He wore a light beard and Western-style pants and a shirt; something about his mouth reminded me of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. The division planner, on the other hand, wore traditional men’s robes and a shemagh. Both of them had been part of the team that interviewed me. As he welcomed me, my new boss said, “I had to persuade the rest of the group heads to let you work with us.” I felt very happy that more than one group had wanted to hire me, and a little of my uncertainty faded away.

  The division planner gave me a tour. “Here’s your office,” he said, pointing to a cubicle. It contained a beige aluminum table with a laminate wooden surface and an office chair with wheels.

  Where was everything else? I wondered to myself. How could I protect any information from here? Only later I was given a desktop computer with an Internet connection and a phone.

  We passed by the workshop, a small room with a number of servers. Inside sat two men, close to my age, both engrossed in the screen of a laptop. “Amro is your colleague from the Compliance Assessment group,” the division planner told me, “and Khalid is an information security consultant, visiting from America.”

  My ears pricked up when I heard his title. “What are you doing?” I asked, the first in a torrent of questions.

  “We’re carrying out a penetration test,” the men told me. The new terminology was like hieroglyphics to me.

  The tour continued; here a male colleague, here another male colleague, and in the next room yet another. When we’d finished, I asked the division planner if he had left out anyone in the division. “No, Manal,” he told me. “I’m quite sure we haven’t missed anyone.”

  “So there are no girls here apart from me?”

  “No, there aren’t.”

  That was how things were and how things remained for the ten years I worked at Aramco. Not a single woman other than me was appointed to the Information Protection Division as a professional technical employee, except for one female contract employee who worked with us for one year. We had another full-time female employee who joined us in 2008, but she had a degree in English literature and did not work on any technical projects.

  I mentioned to the division planner that I didn’t have a place to stay that night. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. He made a number of phone calls before informing me that he had booked me a room at the Dhahran International Hotel, ten minutes from the office.

  “I’ve booked a room in my name and at the division’s expense,” he told me. “As an unaccompanied female, they won’t let you book a room there yourself. Try not to draw anyone’s attention when you’re going in and out. If anyone realizes you’re there alone, you’ll have big problems with the religious police.”

  I thanked him profusely; but now, I had a second dilemma: “How will I get to work tomorrow?”

  He gave me the number of a taxi firm and told me that the division would pay my fare for the first week. “You have a week to find your own accommodation and vacate the room,” he added.

  Although there was a five-star sign over the h
otel’s entrance, my room was dirty and the furniture worn. But I was too relieved to care. I called Mama to reassure her. “Don’t worry, Mama,” I told her, when she asked about where I was staying. “They gave me a house inside the Aramco compound, and I’ll use the Aramco bus to get to work. I’m just fine, and tell Abouya the same.”

  I wanted to cry to my mother, “I’m all alone, Mama. I’m in a hotel room in a strange city, I’m completely broke, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.” But I knew I couldn’t. Mama and Abouya would demand that I come back home.

  I sat on the bed and removed my earphones. The silence made every stray sound seemed larger and louder. My room connected to the neighboring room via a locked door, and when night fell, I heard voices beyond the door, a man and a woman. At least I have neighbors, I thought. But when they began to have sex, my peace of mind turned quickly to panic. I was terrified by the sounds I heard. I’d never seen sex in a film and I’d never heard people having it.

  I turned on the television. As the woman’s voice became louder and louder, I kept raising the volume to try to drown her out. Finally, with the audio blaring as high as it would go, I broke down in tears and sobbed like a little child.

  The next day, I asked the front desk for a room without a connecting door, and I called one of my former classmates. I described what had happened in the hotel and she told me that she could help. She had an uncle who lived nearby. She called him, and then called me back to say that she had given him my number. “He said that he can rent a furnished apartment for you—he’s married and has a family ID. He’ll be waiting for you in front of the hotel tomorrow morning.” Tomorrow was Thursday, then the first of Saudi Arabia’s two weekend days. (It’s now Friday and Saturday.)

  The uncle pulled up outside the hotel in a black Mercedes. I’d never ridden alone with a man before, aside from Uncle Ali (the Aramco driver) and a few anonymous taxi drivers. I opened the door hesitantly and climbed into the backseat. “Am I the driver now?” he asked. “Ride with me in the front.” I felt my face grow hot. I threw my black scarf over my face, reluctantly moved into the front seat, and pressed myself as close to the door as possible.