Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  The youngest of Uncle Sa’ad’s daughters, Amal, was the same age as me. Though she always wore a new dress on the second day of Eid, she never said anything about my “repeated” dress and remained my friend throughout my childhood. Usually on the holiday, the younger children would go up to play on the roof, where the girls would show off their new dresses: Amal’s was always a touch more lavish than everyone else’s. Together, the girls and boys would also play a tag game known in Arabic as Shar’at, where one child chases the others, and those who are tagged before reaching the “safe wall” are forced out to wait until the next round. Other times, Amal and I would sit quietly and draw and paint and read comic books.

  In the final part of the celebration at my uncle’s house, eidiyyāt, money given as gifts to celebrate Eid, would be handed out. At Aunt Zein’s house, the eidiyyāt was given out first, tucked into small bags that my aunt would press into my palm and my brother’s when we walked through the door. (Eidiyyāt varies in amount, from anywhere from five riyals to more than one hundred. Favored children receive more eidiyyāt from their relatives. Aunt Zein was always very generous with me.)

  I remember early on at my uncle’s, I got my small purse and hung it over my shoulder in preparation for the gift giving. Then my uncle’s older daughters called the children to gather around in a circle, where one by one my cousins would push the eidiyyāt into their outstretched palms. They called every name, except for mine and my brother’s and sister’s. At first, I assumed that they simply forgot us. But each year it was the same, until I stopped taking my purse at all. Then there came the year when I thought I understood the reason. My sister had inherited the same milky, fair complexion as my mother, a feature not usually found within my father’s family; among his tribe tanned skin prevails. As we entered my uncle’s house that year, I had heard other women asking in curious voices, “Who are these girls?”

  If someone asks about a child—boy or girl—it is customary in Saudi culture to refer to them in relation to their father. You only mention their mother’s family if you want to belittle them. To the question, “Who are these girls?” I was expecting my cousins to answer, “The daughters of Uncle Massoud.” But instead my female cousins replied, “The daughters of the Egyptian.” They of course knew my mother’s name and that she was Libyan, not Egyptian. But they had learned to say that my sister and I were “the daughters of the Egyptian.”

  Saudi families, almost universally, reflect a contradictory combination of extreme intimacy and extreme segregation and impenetrable privacy. We sleep in common rooms and travel in and out of each other’s apartments, but we keep our windows covered, and indeed often have no windows that face the outside world. In many houses, men and women live on different sides, and enter and exit via different doors. We are a culture of peeking, where women peek from behind windows or on the other side of doors to see who might have come to visit. We do have apartments with balconies, but those apartments were designed by Egyptian civil engineers and others from cultures that ring the Mediterranean Sea. In those countries, people gather on balconies, sip their dark, aromatic coffee, and call down to passersby on the streets, whether friends or the vegetable seller. They do not live in the dusty, blazing, dry, desert heat of the Saudi kingdom. In Mecca, we did not sit on our balconies. Women might use them to spy on the surrounding streets, watching cars or other vehicles, but we did not socialize on our balconies. We called down to no one, drank nothing. Our own balcony stored an extra water tank. I would sometimes flatten myself against it to watch kids playing below, but even as a child, I considered balconies a useless waste of space.

  More often than not, we were not taught the rules of our lives, we simply absorbed them. Just as our first day of Eid was always spent at Aunt Zein’s house, just as my father always brought the same sweet fried dough balls (halwa al-zalabya) and the same sesame sweets called halwa tahiniyya from a shop named Abu Nar, the most famous halawa store in the whole of Mecca, and just as my aunt always prepared sweet vermicelli with sugar and cardamom, and set out plates of white cheese, olives, and Indian-style mango pickle and the same Meccan dishes of debyāza, fūl mabakher, and khobz al-shreek bread, we always sat in the same arrangements.

  Aunt Zein lived with her husband, Uncle Hamed, and six of their children on the first floor of a two-story house. Their eldest child was a professor of Islamic studies at a university and lived on the second floor with his own wife and family. They had two sons, Hammam and Hossam, who were close in age to my brother and me, as well as to Zein’s youngest daughter, Hanan, and to Amal, uncle Sa’ad’s youngest daughter. When we were small, we would all crowd in together around one sofra, a plastic sheet that we spread on the floor, picnic-style, to eat our way through the Iftar spread. My older female cousins, the other daughters of my uncle Sa’ad, never joined us. They didn’t want to share our sofra with us. They sat in a separate area and ate at a separate sofra to avoid mixing with Aunt Zein’s older sons, their male cousins, teenagers and men whom they could presumably marry. As a small girl I was annoyed with this and wondered why all the cousins didn’t just sit together. I made a promise to myself that I would never sit separately from my favorite cousins, nor would we stop playing soccer and riding bikes together when I came to visit.

  But when I was twelve, Hammam and Hossam were banned from my life with no warning and no explanation. We could not say so much as hello to each other; I never got to say goodbye. Today, if I passed them on the street, I would not even recognize the men they have become.

  Unwritten Saudi rules determined far more than my holiday celebrations, they cast a shadow over nearly my entire childhood.

  In our apartment in Al-Utaibiyyah, we had a neighbor with a twelve-year-old son. He would often come to visit us along with his mother and his sisters. But once he came alone, and while the mothers were elsewhere, he asked me to take off my underwear. I was about six years old, and I feared him from that moment on. I knew better than to mention it to Mama, but after that day, I stayed with her whenever he visited us, refusing to leave her side until he was gone. Then this boy had made the mistake of asking my sister to remove her underwear. Unlike me, Muna would not keep quiet. She told Mama right away.

  Mama questioned my sister and me about the details of what had happened, but I was too shocked to speak and afraid that she would hit me because of what this boy had asked me to do. I denied that he had asked me to remove my underwear.

  The usual custom would have been to wait for my father to return home from work and have him deal with the issue, but Mama’s patience would not allow it. She pulled her abaya over her head and dragged my sister and me by our hands to the neighbor’s home. My mother found the boy and started screaming. He yelled back, and although they battled with words alone, to me standing there it seemed dangerously close to physical fighting. “I swear to God,” my mother warned him, “if you ever approach either of my daughters again—in the building or on the street—I will cut off your male parts and hang them round your neck!”

  The boy hadn’t in fact touched us; his advances had been verbal only. But Mama said that if it were not for the sitr—the veil of protection—of Allah over us, things could have been much worse. Afterward, she made a promise between herself and God. Believing that He had kept us safe, that He had allowed us to retain our precious and all-important virginity, she vowed that she would fast every Monday and Thursday for the rest of her life. Mama adhered to these two days of fasting without fail. It was only when I heard of my mother’s vow that I became fully aware to what extent a girl’s virginity determines her fate in Saudi society.

  Although Mama never told our father what had happened, my sister and I lived out the rest of our childhoods under a kind of house arrest. We were never again allowed to play with our neighbors’ children in the corridor between the apartment doorways or on the roof of the building. The most we were permitted to do was to open the shara’ah, a small window in the front door, so we could watch the other chi
ldren play, and perhaps occasionally use a water gun ourselves from behind this narrow window. Whether or not he ever knew about our neighbor, Abouya was equally strict; he permitted us only to enter two houses in Mecca: Aunt Zein’s and Uncle Sa’ad’s.

  It did not matter even when our family moved from one apartment to another. No matter where we lived, the rules were always the same and absolute. But they only applied to Muna and me. Mama and, later, Muhammad were free to leave. So, for hours on end, Muna and I would be locked in the apartment, alone.

  We did all kinds of crazy things. The apartment did not have water all the time, so whenever the water did come on, Mama told us to fill up the tank on the balcony and then to turn off the water once it was full. One time we didn’t turn off the water, and the tank overflowed, sending water all over the balcony. We quickly realized that with the right preparations, we could have our own outdoor pool. We put down a towel to trap the water and keep it away from the drain and then took off our clothes, until we were wearing nothing but our underwear. Like little mermaids, we went water skiing on the water on the balcony floor. Another time, I got out of the shower with my wet, long curly hair. There was a small opening, a type of window, on the balcony, and I could slip my head through it and dangle my hair down toward the ground. Anyone looking up would have thought that there was a dead body on the balcony, its lifeless head hanging above the street.

  We spent hours, days, and weeks like this alone, particularly in the summers, when there was no school and nothing to do. At least once a week, no one was here at all when Mama went off to the Grand Mosque to conduct her fast, give her gifts, and keep her pledge to Allah in thanks for Him keeping us safe. To amuse ourselves while she was out, we smoked the small, expensive cigarettes that my uncle had given my father as a gift and that my mother had hidden away because my father smoked other brands. One time, we put oil in our hair and then decided to play a game we had invented. We lit candles and I danced around my sister singing, “Happy birthday to you” and waving a candle. Suddenly the candle fell from my hands onto her oiled hair. We both started screaming. I remembered a safety program from TV about a spray that put out fire. I ran all around the apartment looking for the spray. I found a can of Raid and started spraying it, but Raid was not a fire extinguisher. It was designed to kill insects. My sister lost all her hair. Mama was furious. The beating she gave me afterward almost killed me.

  Perhaps the worst of all was the time Muna announced that she was going to do a trick. She started climbing up the door and asked me to hand her the broomstick. I gave her the stick and just then she slipped. The stick went through the roof of her mouth and into her nose. We were alone, and she was bleeding everywhere, but we had no phone and we were locked inside, so all we could do was wait. Muna bled until Mama came home. She was rushed to the hospital and they stitched the hole closed, but she almost died. Afterward, I got another beating from Mama.

  All those years of confinement with one another also meant that my sister and I would often fight between ourselves. We fought in the house, at school, anywhere. Muna was very strong, and I was very thin, so she had the advantage. One time at school I was eating breakfast and Muna and her friends were cleaning the paintbrushes after doing watercolors. Muna said, “Watch me” to her friends and then walked up and spilled the dirty brush water all over my face in front of everyone. I grabbed my orange-colored drink and splashed it on her face in return. Then Muna grabbed my hair, pulled me from my seat, and dragged me over to the dirt, where she started pummeling me. No one stopped her. Finally, after she walked away, the older sister of one of my friends took me to the bathroom and washed my face. I couldn’t tell my teachers what had happened because Muna was my sister. I couldn’t tell my mother because if I told her, Mama would give me a second beating, probably worse than Muna’s. I learned to keep my mouth shut and take whatever came.

  There was one pain that my sister and I shared, a moment of such deep wounding that the scars will never fully heal. The story of these wounds begins with my older female cousins, the same ones who mocked my single dress and my “Egyptian” mother. “Dirty girls,” they said of my sister and me. “They still haven’t been circumcised.”

  I knew circumcision was a fearful word before I knew its meaning. I had once seen an elderly woman named Hasaneyya visiting my uncle’s house: my cousins told me that she was the one who performed “circumcision” on girls. If my sister or I failed to behave properly during our visits, we were told, “Be careful, or we will call Aunt Hasaneyya to come and circumcise you.” Today, my body still clenches at the mention of her name.

  One morning, I woke to hear my sister crying in front of the closed bathroom door, making a sorrowful appeal to my father, who was on the other side. When I came over to her she told me, in between sobs, “There are two women in the sitting room with Mama. They’ve come to circumcise us.”

  I still didn’t understand what circumcision was, but my small mind realized it was something connected to weeping and wailing. I started to cry alongside my sister, and as my father emerged from the bathroom, we grabbed his long, loose robe and hung on in a state of utter hysteria. Abouya dragged us to the sitting room, where Mama sat with two dark-skinned women. They were swathed in black and smelled strongly of aloewood. They had deep long scars on their cheeks and liquid kohl painted around their eyes. A black case sat before them. I wondered to myself if circumcision was what had caused their sunken facial scars. My father asked them quietly to leave the house, and despite my mother’s objections, they did so. But the idea did not leave with them. Instead, it returned, in the guise of a man.

  I was eight years old. It was a normal morning during the first days of the summer vacation, and I remember I was wearing a long, yellow jalabiya with embroidered red roses and green leaves, which Aunt Zein had given to me. I had taken out my stories and my coloring books and was sitting on the floor in front of the television screen. In the fall, I would be starting third grade.

  We heard the doorbell ring, and my brother and I raced to answer it. Two men and a woman stood outside. I knew the first of the men, Abdulaleem, an Egyptian barber and a friend of my father; the second man was his son. I had never seen the woman before.

  I remember what happened next as if it were yesterday: it was painful and degrading and left deformities that serve as a constant reminder.

  The actual event was over quickly. My sister disappeared, hiding herself in a place where she believed no one could find her. Mama took my brother into the other room, while I stayed with my father, the two men, and the woman. It didn’t take me long to grasp what was going on: my circumcision, after all this time, was about to become real. Sitting in that room, I recalled everything I knew about circumcision thus far: my sister’s wailing; my cousins’ threats; the sunken scars on the faces of the women swathed in black.

  In one swift motion, the barber’s son grabbed me by my shoulders, the woman opened my legs, and I began to cry and scream hysterically. My father brought the water hose from the bathroom, the same hose that he used to beat us when he could not find his bamboo cane. He stood in front of me, threatening to whip me if I didn’t stop resisting. I stopped struggling.

  The “operation” was performed in a few snips with a single pair of scissors and no anesthetic. The blood flowed red and wet down my legs. In that moment—and forever after—I wished with all my heart that I had kept on screaming and struggling, because the sting of the water hose was infinitely less than the agony I experienced that morning.

  When my circumcision was completed, they found my sister. Because the scissors used during my procedure were blunt and a bit dull, they had managed to cut only the upper part of the clitoris. On my sister, they used a sharp razor blade. They removed everything.

  Soaked in sweat and salty tears, and overcome with humiliation and searing pain, I hid my face under the covers and slept as if I had been knocked unconscious. At one point I felt a hand under the duvet. It reached toward my wound, a
nd I sprang out of bed in fear. The hand belonged to the barber, who was clutching an ointment to smear on the wound. I ran, feeling nothing except the warm blood gushing from between my thighs. Very soon after, I lost consciousness.

  I bled for three days; my sister told me afterward that my face turned yellow. They couldn’t take me to the doctor: although there is no official rule banning female circumcision, female circumcision can still be treated as a crime in many Saudi hospitals. If my circumcision had been reported, the barber could have been charged.

  After the three days of heavy bleeding, an end of sorts came to the trauma. My parents were out, and the old lady was there once again, but this time she was sitting by my head. The barber asked my sister to bring him a needle and thread from my mother’s sewing machine. (My sister told me afterward that she hid all the needles once she realized his intention and brought only the thread.) He used the thread to tie five knots in various places on my most private areas. I don’t recall if it was painful or not, since I was almost delirious; my sister later told me what had happened. Either the knots or simply time or perhaps some combination of the two stopped the bleeding, and slowly I began to regain my health. But no one removed the thread afterward. The knots the barber tied that day caused lifelong deformities on the most intimate part of my body. Beyond the physical pain, I also could not forgive my parents, nor has my sister to this day. Almost none of my friends were circumcised. Mama and Abouya had made Muna and me unlike all the other girls.

  Sometimes, I wonder how things would have been if the dark-skinned women that my mother brought to the house had succeeded in their task. Then my sister and I would have been subject to pharaonic circumcision, which is far worse than the agony of what we endured. Pharaonic circumcision has been practiced since the time of the pharaohs in Egypt and is common in twenty-seven different African countries, as well as Yemen and parts of Iraqi Kurdistan. It completely removes both the girl’s clitoris and her labia. Then the vaginal opening is stitched shut to leave only a small opening for the exit of menstrual blood. Most activists call the procedure female genital mutilation. That is the far more accurate description.