Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  I looked straight at him and asked, “What’s going on? Why are you doing this?”

  “You ask yourself, Manal al-Sharif,” he said. “You put yourself in this position!”

  2

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  Cockroaches and Prison Bars

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  * * *

  I could not tell you if I stayed in that police room with my sticky, ink-stained hands for a long time or for a short time, if many minutes had passed or only a few. My entire sense of time had vanished. Eventually, another man entered and said that we were going upstairs. He carried the stack of rustling papers with my handprints on them. He was talking in brisk, overlapping sentences to me, but really to no one, rattling off a list of bureaucratic instructions and observations. It was like being thrust into a conversation where I only knew a few words of the language. I felt my mind grasping for a familiar phrase. “We need to send your papers to the governor’s house. It’s out of our hands, we can’t do anything. They’ll take care of your papers there. We’ll need to send you there.”

  I was not going home.

  There were two guys waiting for me, in civilian clothes with a civilian car—a white Toyota Camry with fabric seats. A man in a uniform handed them my papers and told the two men to open them once they were inside the car. They acted like they were in a hurry, sliding into their seats, facing forward. Around their heads, held in place by a black band, they wore the traditional Saudi shemagh, the red-and-white checked cloth that identifies Saudi men. But their shemaghs were draped in such a way that I could not see their faces. If I were to pass them on a street or in hallway at some point in the future, I would not be able to recognize them.

  Halimah came with me, trailing slightly behind with her ripped gloves and her bag with the nearly broken strap. She sat next to me, completely silent, clutching her bag on her lap. They had given her my cell phone and my ID but had returned the rest of my bag to me. In the bright sunlight, I could see that her abaya was dirty. She looked even poorer than she had inside the police station.

  I asked the men if I could perform my afternoon prayers. They ignored me. I asked again, and they very curtly told me that I could do my prayers “when we get there.” The entire time that I had been at the police station, I had convinced myself that I was not a criminal, just a regular person merely being brought in for an interrogation, that I’m not someone who would be sitting next to a woman whom they would all call “my prison guard.” But now, in that silent car, it was hard to keep pretending.

  It was afternoon and because it was May, it was neither hot nor cold. Springtime in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia is quite beautiful. In the green, watered spaces, flowers were blooming. I knew that it was around 2:00 p.m., because I saw all the government workers streaming out of their offices at the end of their workday. It was crowded; we were just another car joining the commuter stream. We had vanished by blending in.

  Usually when I’m riding in the car, I read a book. I am a voracious reader. I keep a book beside my bed on the nightstand, in my office, even in the bathroom. But I didn’t have a book then. So, as the man from the prison drove, I started reading whatever I could see out of the car windows. I read the names of the shops and stores along the streets; I read the billboards, the road signs. I read while we were entering Dammam, the city where I had lived for four years when I was married. I was still reading signs when we arrived at one that read Dammam Central Prison. A solid concrete wall and a checkpoint loomed before us. I was being sent to jail.

  They had taken me from my house at 4:00 a.m., without warning, without allowing me to call a lawyer, without a warrant. I had begged the men who had interrogated me to let me call my son, but they didn’t allow me to call anyone. It was as if I had disappeared. And they could detain me indefinitely. It was done. There are people in jail in Saudi Arabia, even women, who have languished there for years without a trial or a sentence.

  I started yelling at the two men in the front seat. “Where are you taking me? Sir, please talk to me, where are you taking me? It’s my right to know where you are taking me.”

  They remained silent.

  “You can’t just do this, I am not a criminal!” I screamed. “How could you take me to jail without papers, without a ruling, without being sentenced in the court?”

  Not a word. I looked at Halimah. “Halimah, say something, do something,” I pleaded. But she just clutched at her bag balanced on her knees, not making a sound.

  If any of them had shouted back at me, that would have been more merciful. I had never been to jail. All I could think was that if I went in there, I would never get out. I thought about my son. Would I ever see him again? I thought about my job, knowing that after this, I would surely lose it—a job that I had fought so hard to get and keep. I was the only woman working among so many men, not just working beside them but proving that I was better than them. I thought about the scandal that being jailed would bring to my family.

  The car stopped. The driver rolled down his window and asked the security guard where the women’s prison was.

  I tried to think. I had to get a message through to Halimah. When I had left the house in such a rush, I hadn’t checked my bag. I didn’t even have a pen or paper to write on. But then I realized that I did have a piece of paper in my bag. I had been planning to go to apply for a driver’s license with one of the female activists, but we couldn’t find a taxi to take us to the licensing office. Instead, I had gone off driving on the streets with my brother after work. When I ended up at the Thuqbah police station and one of the policemen had accused me of driving without a Saudi license, I had pulled out the paper and said, “This is my application. Give me my driver’s license.” Now, ironically, those papers were still sitting in my bag. I just needed a pen. I dug around and the only thing I had was an eyebrow pencil. It was good enough. I wrote on the driver’s license application, “Help. Get me Muneera’s number from my phone.” Muneera is my sister-in-law. As we drove on, I reached over and squeezed Halimah’s hand and showed her the paper. I had to be careful. The men could see us through the rearview mirror. They could hear anything that we said. But I had to get her to read the note.

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even look at me.

  We reached yet another gate that led to a parking lot and a building. But the driver didn’t park in any of the spaces; he drove up and stopped next to the door. The two men left the car and went inside carrying my papers. This was my chance. I had to get in touch with someone. I didn’t know where my brother was, and the only phone number I could remember was my dad’s, but I wouldn’t call him. He did not even know about the campaign for women to drive. But my sister-in-law, I could reach her.

  I turned to Halimah. This time, I reached out and took hold of both her hands, and said, “Halimah, I need your help. I need to call my family.” I kept talking to her. “Please, Halimah. They are inside. No one will know. I just need to make a call from my phone or send a text message to my sister-in-law. Just so they know where I am. Please.”

  Her eyes looked at me through the tiny slit, and she said, “I’m really, really sorry.” Her voice sounded like she was in pain. She said that she did not know they were bringing me here. She had only been told to accompany me so that I would not be alone with two men. But, she said, “I cannot give you your phone.”

  I kept pleading with her. “I have a child,” I said. “You have two kids, I have one kid. You know, you understand.”

  But she told me that if she gave me my phone, she would be fired. She had instructions that she could not violate. “If I break them,” she said, “I will be in so much trouble. I cannot afford to lose my job.”

  I kept begging her the entire time that we waited, but she did not relent. When the men came back, they opened the car door and told me to come with them. I tried to resist. I said, “No, I’m not going with you, I want to call a lawyer. You can’t just put me in jail with no charges.”
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br />   But they replied that I was coming with them. If I refused, they said, “We will have to drag you inside by force.”

  I dragged my feet the whole way inside to a very big room with an office on one end. The first thing I noticed was the ceramic tile on the floor. It was the exact same black-and-white pattern that had covered the floors of my old school in Mecca. Decades before, when the kingdom built all its government and school buildings, it must have used these tiles on every floor. They might have looked new back then, but now they just looked worn and old.

  There were two men at the entrance, sitting on a row of chairs, the kind you see in airport terminals, where the seats are connected. They were holding papers. I was told to go toward the office and wait on a sofa away from the desk. Then they ushered me in.

  My papers were handed to a man in a uniform sitting behind the desk. His name, Musaad, had been engraved on a small wooden nameplate. I later learned that he was the deputy head of the prison. The man in charge of the prison was on vacation, which is how I came to be standing in Musaad’s office. He did not cover his head. He had a short beard and a mustache, and when he saw my papers, pure disgust crossed his face. He looked at my papers, then up at me. I started to wonder what those papers said.

  “So you’re the infamous Manal al-Sharif,” he said, eyeing me from behind his desk. “Aren’t you ashamed of what you did?”

  “Is driving a car something shameful?” I answered back.

  The same Saudi newspaper that the interrogator had showed me earlier in the day lay open in front of him. Musaad held it up, pointing to my picture with my face uncovered and my colorful hijab. He was shouting now: “How could you go out like this? Your face is uncovered, you’re not even wearing a black hijab.” He raised his voice still louder, as if he had an audience but lacked a microphone, so that his words bounced out of the small office and out over the long expanse of tiles. “You’ve shamed your religion, you’ve shamed your tradition, you’ve shamed your country. You deserve what’s happening to you.”

  “Sir,” I said, “there must be a mistake, you cannot put me in jail.”

  His look told me that of course he could.

  “Can I at least talk to my son?” I asked. “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “Now you ask about your son? You didn’t ask about your son when you drove? You didn’t ask about your son when you started your woman-to-drive group?” He was still sitting, while I was standing before him, my face uncovered, because I refuse to cover my face. So he had to look at my expression as clearly as I had to look at his. I think that irritated him more than anything, having a woman dare to stand before him with an uncovered face.

  He continued to scold me for at least half an hour as if I were an errant child. I did not get angry or aggressive. I remained respectful, polite. All through the interrogations, I had been cooperative, I had given them information. I knew that I could not get angry, that I could not fight back, because against all these men, I would lose. I kept saying, “Please, sir, you cannot put me inside without me being able to call my lawyer and my family. I don’t know where they took my brother, I don’t know why I am here, and my family doesn’t know that I am here.” He kept shouting, “No, no, no. Later you will talk to your family, you cannot talk now,” although sitting next to him on the desk was a phone.

  I was standing, trying to stay upright despite my exhaustion, when I remembered something that one of my friends had told me. She is an activist and has been detained, but she has never been jailed. Once I asked her what her secret was. She said, “It’s easy, we’re women.” And then she showed me. She made her shoulders start to shake and tears come to her eyes. “Give them two tears, say you are sorry, and they will pity you and let you go,” she said. I kept thinking about what she had told me, but for me, there were no tears in my eyes.

  I cannot cry in front of men. In 2002, I started working for Aramco, and for the first six years, all my colleagues were men. In 2008, a new girl joined our section. She always cried; the slightest criticism or comment that she found hurtful would bring her to tears. I remember my boss saying to me, “I wish she had ten percent of you, Manal. I never see you cry.” And it’s true; my nightmare is to have a man see me crying. Even my ex-husband would say, “I might show you mercy, if I were to see you cry.” But if I want to cry, I cry alone. Or I can cry in front of women. They understand. It is okay if they see my tears.

  At this moment, though, I was pushing myself to cry. I thought if I could at least cry a little and say, “Please, sir, can I talk to my son?” he would take pity on me and allow me to make that phone call.

  There were so many things that I wanted to tell Musaad. I wanted to say, “I’m not a criminal. I’m a good person. This country should be proud of someone like me. I am the first woman to work in information security for the state oil company. I’ve been assigned to work in a very sensitive and important department. My company is very proud of me. I’ve been written about in the newspaper for my work, and I’ve done interviews with magazines. I do not deserve to be standing here being shouted at by you.”

  I finally managed a few tears, enough for Halimah, who had been standing silently off to one side, to reach over and take my hand in hers. She stroked it, the way a mother strokes the hair of a distraught child. But seeing my eyes well up only made the prison deputy director meaner. He kept saying nasty, hurtful things, loud enough so that anyone nearby could hear: the two soldiers in his office, the guard, my escort to the prison, everyone.

  Then in the middle of his tirade, his phone rang. I could hear the name of the man on the other end, it was the head of the Khobar police station. He was the one who had told me that I had done this to myself. The two men talked and then Musaad closed his office door. He looked at me, and he said, “Don’t worry, you’ll be here for a couple of days.” Then he used the Arabic phrase that means “just pinching your ear.” In school, if you forgot your homework or you misbehaved, the teacher would pinch your ear. In Arabic, “pinching your ear” basically means “teaching someone a lesson.”

  I started pleading with him again, “Please, can I just get my sister-in-law’s number from my phone?”

  And this time, he said, “Okay, you can open your phone.”

  Halimah gave it to me, and while everyone was talking (I type very fast), I typed two text messages. One was to my friend and colleague Ahmed, who had been tweeting from the Women2Drive account. I told him, “I’m in Dammam Women’s Prison. Tweet about it.” The other message was to my sister-in-law, who was with my son. I also told her I was in prison. And I asked her to find me a lawyer. Even though I had talked to a female lawyer before I was taken from my house, in Saudi Arabia at that time, women weren’t given licenses to practice (the first licenses for female lawyers were issued in 2014). I would need a man if I was going to get out of Dammam Women’s Prison.

  At that moment, everyone turned back to me and the deputy director starting asking, “What are you doing?”

  I said, “I’m just getting the number.”

  “Did you finish?”

  I told him yes, and I turned my phone off and gave it back. I have a password on my phone, so I did not think that they could unlock it.

  Then, carrying my bag, without my phone and my ID, I walked with Halimah and the security guard, a man, into prison. It was an old place, with high walls, and to get to the main prison we had to cross a huge yard that was all dirt. No tiles, no walkways, just bare earth. On the other side of the yard was a huge metal gate, and next to the gate was a small, enclosed space for a guard with a weapon. And in the distance were towers all around the prison.

  I entered through another building. The door was damaged, almost broken, there were no windows, and the seats were filthy. Someone told me to sit down. I was still insisting on making a phone call. Mussad had told the security guard that I could use a phone once I was inside the women’s jail, but that I could not make a call from my phone. Inside the jail, I could pay mone
y and buy a phone card, ten or twenty riyals’ worth. (Interestingly, some of the Saudi men who are detained are allowed to keep their phones.)

  I bought a card and the guard then asked me how many cards I wanted for food.

  “I’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t want anything.”

  He kept saying, no, no, no, you will need it inside. So I bought a small coupon book for 100 riyals. It looked like the booklet that we used to buy as kids in school to pay for our breakfasts. It was full of yellow cards, and I stuck it in my bag.

  We walked from this admission room closer toward the prison itself, passing through two gates. At the smaller one, the male guard had to leave. We were entering the place where only women could pass.

  On the other side of the gate was a hallway. The moment I stepped inside, I covered my nose and mouth against the stench of urine and shit. It smelled like a giant bathroom. On one side, the wall was thick Plexiglas. This, I would learn, was the place where visitors were permitted. There were no chairs to sit down: everyone pressed up against the Plexiglas. There were small holes on each side, but none of the holes matched up. You could shout some conversation, but nothing could pass easily back and forth.

  Halimah took my hand in her thin, worn glove. Then she handed my papers and my phone to the internal prison guard. She looked at me and said, “May God protect you.” Then she added, “You will be fine.”