Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  5

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  Behind the Veil

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  I still remember the last beating I received from my father. I was in my third year of secondary school and he struck me so hard across the side of my head with his palm that I almost lost my hearing on one side. For hours, my ear was deaf to all sound. I don’t know why he hit me.

  The illogical cycle of cruelty at home and in school carried over into my interactions with my siblings. We dealt with each other with our fists, the stronger one hitting the weaker. I received my share of beatings, biting, and hair pulling from my sister, and in turn, my brother received his share of beatings from me. Then as he grew up and grew stronger, I received my share of beatings from him. But we were simply acting out what we had learned. Fear dominated our relationship with our parents. If there was no physical violence, there was a steady stream of verbal abuse, frustration, an absence of encouragement, constant intimidation, or simply total indifference.

  I ran away to books and lessons to forget, but that was not always successful. One time, when I was twelve, I borrowed a romance novel—The Empty Pillow by Egyptian writer Ihsan Abdel Quddous—from my sister, without asking. Risqué romantic novels like The Empty Pillow and the Abeer series, a collection of foreign romances translated into Arabic and published in Lebanon, were banned in Saudi Arabia, but frequent trips to visit my mother’s family in Egypt meant that my sister and later I were able to smuggle them back into the kingdom. When Muna discovered I had her book, she beat me and then she burned the pages before my eyes so I wouldn’t be able to finish it. I remained obsessed with finding out the ending—did the young lovers find happiness or not? Only when I saw the movie based on the book, during a visit to my grandfather’s house in Egypt, did I discover what had happened to the characters that had captivated my mind.

  My appetite for reading led me to love writing, and here again, my visits to my mother’s family in Egypt were invaluable. We were staying at my grandfather’s house, where my uncle Omar was also living at the time. The oldest of my uncle’s daughters was a lady we called Abla (big sister) Eftaima, who baked bread for us in a wood-burning oven. One day I saw a pile of worn-out storybooks next to her. They were hidden under layers of dust, but I cleaned off one cover to reveal the title Al-Mughamiroon Alkhamsa—“The Five Adventurers.” I realized that my cousin was tossing the books into the fire. The bread to feed our stomachs was being baked at the expense of the pages that would have fed our minds.

  I asked Abla Eftaima if I could take books from the pile. I would have been thrilled with just one, so imagine my happiness when she nodded and pushed the entire pile toward me, saying, “Take them all.” I spent my summer vacation with the five adventurers: cracking codes, taking risks, outwitting the most notorious of criminals, and delivering wanted fugitives to the police. As I read, I decided that I too would write my own adventures, and this time I would be a hero, as would my favorite people from real life: my brother, Muhammad, and my cousins, Amal, Ahmed, Hanan, Hammam, and Hossam.

  At that time, there were no personal computers for typing my story, no home printers to print it. Since all the riyals I’d saved from my pocket money during the year went to buy books, I didn’t have the money for a new notebook, so I started tearing out the empty pages from the notebooks I had used at school the previous year. I carefully cut out the subject and date line at the top of each page. I drafted each chapter in pencil until I was satisfied, and then carefully wrote over the words in blue pen. And because I loved drawing, I began to create cartoons of the people and events in my story. My greatest moment of pride was when I set down my pen after writing “The End.”

  I would be moving up to the sixth grade of primary school after the summer, and was counting the days until the new academic year began. I couldn’t wait to show my Arabic-language teacher, the much-loved Miss Maqboola, my story. Just a day or two after classes had resumed, I stood proudly and impatiently at her desk, waiting for her to finish correcting our homework. She looked up at me from behind her glasses and smiled. I handed her my story. I explained that I had spent my summer vacation writing it, and I hoped very much that she would read it.

  A day passed, two days, a week. Every time Miss Maqboola entered the classroom, I would look hopefully at her, but there was no response beyond silence. After two weeks had passed, I walked hesitantly up to her desk at the end of class to ask about the story I had left in her care. “Miss Maqboola, have you read my story?”

  Her reply was angry. “Your story? You liar,” she told me. “It’s not your story. You copied it from others and claimed it as your own.”

  The whole class was listening. My cheeks turned bright red. “Could you please return it to me?” I asked, my voice shaky and verging on tears.

  “I tore up your stolen story!”

  I couldn’t turn around to return to my seat. I stood there, tasting the salt from my tears running down the back of my throat, but under Miss Maqboola’s glare, my eyes remained frozen, unable to cry.

  After that, I hid almost everything I wrote. I did not want it to be destroyed again.

  The most peaceful period of my childhood occurred during a war. In the summer of 1990, Iraq’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, invaded the small, neighboring, oil-rich country Kuwait. Saudi Arabia’s vast northeast border straddles both Iraq and Kuwait. A state of war was declared inside our kingdom, but I was not there. We were visiting my mother’s family in Egypt and Libya. At that moment, we were staying in the Libyan city of Benghazi, in the house of my oldest uncle, Muhammad. The Libyan press was strongly biased against Saudi Arabia: the newspapers wrote about an American invasion of the Grand Mosque, and I remember a caricature of President George H. W. Bush in which he was shown riding round the Kaaba on a camel led by King Fahd, the Saudi king at that time. Worried, we called my father. He told us there were no American invaders and to get our news from BBC Radio London.

  This wartime was also the first time that I saw my oldest half brother. My sister, brother, and I were playing Chutes and Ladders with the children of our much older cousins (Mama was the youngest of her siblings and Uncle Muhammad the oldest, making his children the same age as Mama, and their children the same age as us). We heard the sound of a car entering through the gate and stopping. I saw Mama and my grown-up cousins run toward the door. A tall young man with suntanned skin stepped inside and stopped when he saw my mother, smiling broadly. My mother began to cry, and my cousins too. My uncle’s son, Abu Bakr, followed, and when Mama hugged the young man, Abu Bakr began to cry too.

  My brother and sister and I sat dumbly watching the scene, waiting for an adult to explain. I turned to Kholoud, the daughter of my cousin. “Who’s this?” I asked her.

  “This is Essam,” she replied. It didn’t make things any clearer. Why was everyone crying at the sight of Essam?

  But then Mama took his hand and called to us, “This is your brother.”

  Mama had left Essam when he was just two years old, forced to return to her father’s house in Egypt after her divorce. Now she was seeing him for the first time since that day, as a grown man. Mama’s head barely reached his shoulder.

  The other great event from that summer was small enough to fit in my suitcase.

  In Saudi Arabia, the only house where I felt truly welcome was Aunt Zein’s. She was a Saudi woman in the old style. In her home, she wore traditional Hejazi tribal clothes, not the shapeless black abaya, but a bright azure dress, open at the chest, the skin beneath it covered by a high-necked, silver-buttoned white vest. It was still possible to see the part in her hair peeking out from under the white scarf wrapped around her head. She adorned herself in jewelry: rows of engraved gold bangles stacked along her wrist, jangling and announcing her arrival like a cat’s bell. Her palms and nails were permanently stained with henna. And her daughter, my cousin Hanan, had dolls.

  During my childhood in Mecca, the sale of most dolls
was forbidden. The only acceptable ones were shapeless cloth things without faces, toys that looked more like pincushions than dolls. There were a few Western-style dolls, but they were treated like contraband. They had to be bought under the counter and you had to know the store owner well. Once, accompanied by my mother, I had bought one such doll for five riyals, and the shopkeeper had wrapped it in layers of newspaper to hide its face and shape before we stepped out of the store.

  Hanan’s doll was like nothing I had ever seen. She was named Barbie, and had long, luxurious blond hair and beautiful clothes and high heels. She had a car, a bicycle, and a pink-and-white home called a Dream House. She could bend her knees if she sat down. My doll wasn’t blond; her hair was short and fluffy and black. She wasn’t dressed in beautiful clothes, and I couldn’t bend her knees.

  “Where did you buy Barbie?” I asked Hanan.

  “My brother brought her for me from outside Saudi Arabia,” she replied. And that was that. I would never be able to find Barbie inside the kingdom.

  But I discovered that Barbie was in Egypt. That summer of the Gulf War, my mother bought me my beautiful, blond doll. She was dressed as a skater, wearing tiny white skates and a gauzy, pale, pink-and-blue skating dress, the outlines of her legs showing through her translucent skirt. I could dress her. I could style her hair. She was the loveliest creation I had ever seen. I smuggled Barbie and my Five Adventurers storybooks into the kingdom, wrapped up and buried deep inside my suitcase.

  When I returned home, I did not return to school. War over Kuwait was imminent; for six months, until the Iraqi troops were forced out, our school was closed. My grandmother—“Sitti Alwa” we called her—was ill, and Aunt Zein and my uncle Sa’ad’s wife, Aziza, took turns caring for her. I asked my parents if I could stay with my grandmother and help Aunt Zein, and they agreed.

  Tarfa’a is an Arabic name for the tamarisk tree that grows in desert regions, but to me, it means a small, quiet village nestled between the peaks of the lofty Sarawat Mountains in an area called Wadi Fatima. The Tarfa’a of my memories is a place largely forgotten by time. Small redbrick houses with wooden ceilings lie scattered along its sandy roads. Everyone in the village knows everyone else, because everyone is from the same family. Kinship lines entwine and wrap around like a vast network of desert tree roots. At that time, there was no electricity, no water, no sewage system, no telephone, and no grocery store at which to buy your supplies. The sole source of electricity in the village was a noisy diesel motor; it grumbled to life after dark and was shut down before dawn. Although the village was only about twenty miles from Mecca, it was difficult for me to understand the accent of the people who lived there, even my grandmother, but I tried to imitate the dialect and to fit in.

  My grandmother had a house at the entrance to Tarfa’a. A green iron door in a brick wall led to a wide courtyard covered with pebbles. On the right of the door was a water tank, which was filled once a month by a delivery truck. On the left was a small, barren sidr tree (a species mentioned in the Koran) and an assortment of cactus plants. A small room along the eastern wall of the house was used as a bathroom. The toilet was a large hole in the ground, covered over by a narrow opening. Each occupant had to pull a concrete slab over the top after using “the facilities.”

  The main house at the far end of the courtyard consisted of three rooms: my grandmother’s room, which was equipped with a desert air conditioner running on water; the kitchen; and an extra room, used for storage, where she kept several mattresses and an assortment of heavy, handmade wool rugs known in Arabic as hanābil. Behind these rooms were a goat pen and a chicken coop. My aunt would milk the goat in the morning and boil the milk to make delicious goat’s milk tea. We, the children, collected eggs every morning to make omelets, and then gathered around my grandmother to listen to the news on the radio.

  Life in the village was completely different from the world I knew in Mecca. All the village girls knew how to milk the goats, bake slightly sour, brown khabeez bread, and prepare Arabic coffee and tea. No one wore abayas; instead both women and girls wore the kurta, a long and brightly colored dress with long sleeves and a fitted waist. On their heads they wore a sharshaf, a type of scarf, either pink or white, tied to reveal their faces and the initial strands of their parted hair. I liked to copy the village girls by wearing a sharshaf. So great was my desire to fit in that I even came close to piercing my nose; I wanted to wear a stud in my nostril like my aunt and the rest of the village women and girls.

  My cousin Amal joined us, and Aunt Zein’s daughter, Hanan, came from time to time as well. Every day after Asr prayer in the afternoon, the women of the village met at my grandmother’s house. After brushing out the rugs in the courtyard, they set down mattresses along the walls and an assortment of mirāki—big, hard pillows—to lean on while they sat. While they set up, my aunt busied herself preparing refreshments: coffee with ginger, tea flavored with herbs, and a dish of salted biscuits and dates.

  We as girls were not allowed to sit with the women; instead, we would go off with the children who had accompanied their mothers to play. On these days, we always played in the same place, an area behind my grandmother’s house called Shi’ab, a local term meaning a place between the mountains. It lay on the path of a dry creekbed that would swell with water gushing down from the mountains during the rainy season, which transformed the landscape from a muted brown to a vibrant green. We raced through the flat beds, climbed parts of the mountains, and picked the flowers off the desert plant harmal. We gathered up locusts and beetles, competed to see who could throw pebbles the farthest distance, and collected bunches of masāweek twigs from the arāk tree, which we used for brushing our teeth.

  Other times we would go off to play in the farmers’ open fields. The villagers of Tarfa’a cultivated large farms known as al-bilād, which were irrigated naturally by running water from nearby springs. An abundance of delicious things were grown there: mallow, alfalfa, and banana trees thrived alongside mangoes, sycamore, limes, and abāna fruit, which is similar to kiwi. We played hide and seek in the alfalfa fields, climbed the high sycamore trees, and drank from the springs.

  It was beautiful to live in a place without walls or ceilings or restrictions, and particularly without my mother’s screaming and my father’s cane. Many nights, I fell asleep wishing that I could live in Tarfa’a forever. Mecca for me meant narrow streets crowded with cars; it meant broken and dirty sidewalks; it meant the vulgar slang of the slums and the conflict, outside on the pavement and inside our apartment. My aunt was quiet and patient, always smiling. I wished she were my mother.

  The Wadi Fatima of my memory will always be a magical green landscape of springs and farms, but there are no such scenes in Tarfa’a today. The springs of Wadi Fatima dried up in the late 1990s after a dam diverted their water to supply the increasingly populous city of Jeddah. The plants withered and the trees dried up. The land became desolate and sad.

  On February 28, 1991, the Gulf War ended. Saudi Arabia and much of the world celebrated, but I did not. With sadness in my heart, I went back to Mecca, back to our dark apartment and my angry family.

  If I think back to the sounds of my childhood, I hear the harsh words and escalating pitch of my parents and my siblings, intertwined with the softer thrum of purring cats and chirping birds. We had an array of sleek, silky cats who would lie around the apartment. In Islam, dogs are haram, forbidden, but not so cats. (One of our religious figures, Abu Huraira, a companion of the Prophet [PBUH], had a cat that he carried around in the sleeves of his robe.) I named all my cats for Italian soccer players: Cannavaro, Di Matteo, Baggio, etc. Our bright, trilling canaries were kept in cages. Each day my father would take the birds from the cage, wash their feathers in water, and let them fly around the house, their wings fluttering through the warm, stagnant air.

  We were not the only ones who kept birds. My cousin Muhammad, one of Uncle Sa’ad’s sons, kept a pigeon hut on the roof of their house. Muhammad,
who was two years older than me, used to play soccer with us on that same roof, and he was the one who taught Amal and me how to play board games. With him, we played Chutes and Ladders and UNO. Once, when Aunt Aziza, his mother, called for him to help her carry some parcels, Amal and I stealthily took out one of his game boards and began to play. When Muhammad discovered us, he started to yell; we had touched his things. Always trying to avoid a beating, I ran to the roof, leaving Amal to fight alone with him. But Aunt Aziza had other ideas. She threw a slipper into cousin Muhammad’s back, hard, and then proceeded to wreck the game board as well.

  Sometimes, our visits to my uncle’s house stretched into the night. Then my brother and I would sleep together with our cousins Amal, Muhammad, and Ahmed, strewn across the floor of one room. I remember one night when Muhammad woke me up before the others. “There’s something you have to see,” he said.

  Silently, he led me up to the roof and showed me a pigeon egg on the verge of hatching. I watched, captivated, as a blind, featherless baby pigeon pecked its way through the shell and emerged. The tiny, thin-skinned bird trembled as Muhammad cradled it in the palm of his hand. Gently, he slipped it into my palm so I could feel its heat and its newborn hatchling skin and sense the frantic pulsing of its heart.

  But then, without warning, Muhammad vanished from my life.

  The first clue as to why came on a morning that began like any other fourth- or fifth-grade day in my girls’ primary school. Miss Sanaa, our religious studies teacher, entered the room. Her light hair was worn twisted in a bun, as always, and she carried her preparatory book under her arm. Miss Sanaa was fair-skinned, with a round face, thick eyebrows, and a beautiful smile. She was among the few teachers who were patient with us; she didn’t carry a wooden ruler and she didn’t scream at us the way so many of her colleagues did. If asked, most of us would have said that she was our favorite.