Daring to Drive

by Manal al-Sharif

  I never expected my detention to be national news, and I thought that I would come home to a silent house, but instead there was a small crowd waiting. After my one furtive phone call from my brother’s car, not only had the local papers reported on what had happened but Ali Alalyani, the host of the 8:00 p.m. Ya Hala show on the Rotana Khalejia channel, had broadcast news of my detention to the entire nation along with these kind words: “We pray that Manal will get back home safe.”

  Another Saudi activist, Kholoud, had gone with her driver to the traffic police station and waited outside of the walled compound for hours, phoning in updates. My sister-in-law had contacted Ahmed, who managed the Women2Drive Twitter account. He tweeted out what had happened, thousands more retweeted it, and international press outlets picked up the story. Someone else had put up a “Free Manal” Facebook page, and within a couple of hours it had more than five thousand likes.

  My friends were giddy. “The entire world is talking about you!” they exclaimed. “They’re calling you the Saudi Rosa Parks!”

  My eyes were watering with emotion, but I couldn’t help laughing. “You are all so silly to worry about me!” I said. I explained that the police chief had crossed out the line about cancelling the June 17 event. I thought that was significant. We had tacitly been given the okay to drive that day. “We won!” I said. “I told you! My dears, you are scared over nothing! We won!”

  After such an exhausting day, I wanted to pass at least a few easy hours before dawn broke and a new day began. That, however, was not to be. Before I ever went to bed, the secret police were at my door.

  When I finally got to sleep, it was nearly twenty-four hours later, and I was locked inside Dammam Women’s Prison.

  My first morning in jail, it was the smell that woke me, the overwhelming stench of cooked food, stale sweat, and human waste. Then I felt the hard surface beneath me and heard the clucking and rolling of unfamiliar vowels, trilling consonants, and sharp, truncated sounds. Any slight pause was filled with the rough buzzing of the overhead lights, which made it always daytime in the windowless room. I closed my eyes tighter: I knew the artificial brightness would stab even more than if I looked out across the gleaming golden desert sand at midday.

  Only one thing could get me to sit up that morning: the belief that in a few hours I would be leaving and going home.

  I quickly discovered that just as everywhere else, jail had a hierarchy and a routine. There was a woman called Umm Misha’an, who collected our ration coupons and our orders for breakfast. The better-off women refused to eat the prison food; Umm Misha’an would order them freshly cooked falafel sandwiches. The rest of the women were forced to eat the horrible food from the prison’s very dirty kitchen. After Umm Misha’an had gathered up the coupons and the requests, she passed them to a guard who would go to the tiny grocery store next to the prison gate. The guard would return before the gates opened at 9:00 a.m. with everything from feminine hygiene products to shampoo and toothpaste and plastic plates and spoons. At nine, prisoners were allowed out into a very tiny yard with high walls. It was outside, but not open: there was a ceiling that stretched across it, covered with metal shingles.

  The first day, I refused to order anything to eat. I kept insisting that I would be leaving. I remember saying, “They are going to open the door now, and I am going to ask about my lawyer. I don’t even know why I am here. I want to leave.”

  Umm Misha’an shrugged and said, “Just sit and have breakfast with us.”

  So I sat with them. On the second day, I ordered the falafel.

  One woman, Maha, was already outside most mornings. She was locked in solitary confinement, but each day, the guards opened the door to her cell and let her into the tiny prison yard. I believe she had been jailed after being accused of murdering her own daughter, but her daughter’s actual murderer was already inside the prison. That’s why Maha asked to be in solitary confinement. Umm Misha’an and Nuwayer would go out and sit with Maha on the ground and eat falafel. In an odd way, it reminded me of my school days and how I would sit with my friends and we would all eat breakfast together.

  After breakfast, I asked to see the prison administrator. I had to wait outside for the metal doors to be unlocked and could not even knock. I just had to wait, standing, until I was allowed to enter the office wing.

  The administrator, whose name was Dina, was a pretty woman. She wore her hair short, near her shoulders. She wore makeup and had a nice smile. Her clothes were good quality. She was, in short, a professional woman, like me. Her office was small, but it still held a large desk, a sofa, and a place to hang your abaya. She had a phone on her desk as well as a computer. It was another world from the central prison room, where women hung up small pieces of cloth to try to separate their cockroach-infested space from the cockroach-infested space next to them.

  I didn’t have to introduce myself. She practically interrupted me to say, “Yes, they told me about you. I don’t know what to tell you. I have no information about your case. They just said, ‘This is Manal al-Sharif, the one who drove. She’s here in jail until further notice.’ ”

  “Please,” I said, “I need to call my family, but I don’t have their numbers. They are all stored in my phone. I only have the number of my sister-in-law.”

  “Yes, you can use the phone,” she said, “and you have a visitor.”

  The woman waiting for me was a representative from the Saudi National Human Rights Commission. She did not cover her face, and the dark skin of her eyes and cheeks was covered in heavy, bright makeup, so much so that the color stood out in the drab visiting room. She said very little, and offered no words of consolation, no hope. She opened the visit by asking me, “Tell me your story.”

  “I think everyone knows my story by now,” I said. “I just drove and I was sent to jail. They interrogated me and suddenly I’m in jail. No one explained to me why I’m here.” Then I told her, “The story you need to hear is the story of those other women inside. Did you see this jail? Did you see how filthy it is?”

  She looked at me and said, “Yes, yes, I know. What can we do about it?”

  Suddenly, I was so mad at her. It was absurd, sitting here going through the motions. “How could you know the conditions of the women living here, being treated like animals, and not do anything about it?” I asked. “Aren’t you for human rights?”

  She just said again, “Yes, yes, I know, but what can we do about it? We complain, we say something, but what can we do?”

  I sat there feeling confused and hopeless, at the situation and at her. With a bit of a bite in my voice, I asked, “So how do I join your group if I want to volunteer with you?”

  “No,” she said. “You have to quit your job. We don’t accept volunteers. You have to leave your work and be full-time with us.”

  At that point, I gave up. No one would leave a good job to work for a powerless institution for a small salary. I also realized she was not going to leave until I had told my story, because she was required to write up some formulaic report, so I went back over everything that had happened. She listened but did not take a single note. We were both trapped in our roles until the visit was over. In fairness, looking back now, I can only imagine how many other stories she had heard over the years, knowing that long after the stories were told, nothing would change. Domestic human rights groups in Saudi Arabia have little authority and even less sway. Major international groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch can speak out, but even then the kingdom picks and chooses whether or not to listen.

  Even so, I believed I would be leaving prison soon. I believed that the reporters and bloggers who had followed me would agitate to secure my release. I believed this until one of my good friends, Hidaya, arrived. Even though it was not a visiting day—those were Saturdays and Thursdays—the prison staff let her in. I was grateful to see her, but then I realized that she was carrying a change of clothing, a book, and a photo of Aboudi, which the guards confis
cated.

  “Why did you bring me clothes and a book?” I asked. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “I just didn’t want you to think you’d been forgotten,” she said, “I wanted you to know we’re thinking of you.”

  Before she came to see me, Hidaya had asked her mother’s permission. Her mother, who is very conservative, had told her yes, and added, “Ask the authorities to put you in jail with Manal, so that you can stay with her and she is not alone.” Of course, that didn’t happen, but I was grateful. It is particularly humiliating to go to jail as a woman.

  Hidaya told me that Aboudi was being cared for by his father’s mother, that she had my sister-in-law and her son at my house inside the Aramco compound, and that the whole country was shocked to hear I had been arrested and sent to the women’s prison in Dammam. She said that the Arab press had reported my arrest, but that many national news outlets had been characterizing both me and Women2Drive negatively. Only Al-Hayat, the major newspaper of the Arab world, had portrayed my actions in a positive light. Saudi newspapers wrote in their headlines that I had broken down in tears and “confessed” to the charges against me. The five charges that the press had stated as the reasons for my arrest were: 1) inciting public opinion; 2) driving without a license; 3) operating as a traitor and spy on behalf of foreign enemies; 4) posting a video of my driving on YouTube; and 5) contacting the foreign press. And yet I still had no idea who or what entity had ordered my arrest and detention.

  As Hidaya told me everything, I grew increasingly furious until my emotions erupted. “Those liars! How can they charge me with violating statutes that don’t exist?” I cursed. “Wait until I get a lawyer!”

  In the middle of our visit, the prison warden entered and interrupted us. She held a piece of paper in front of me and without looking at me said, “Sign this.” It was another pledge not to drive. This time, I did not argue. I simply signed the document and handed it back. I wanted to get out.

  The days passed agonizingly slowly. All we could do in the cell was stare out through the bars, count the cockroaches, or wash clothes. There was nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to occupy our minds. I could see the boredom and helplessness that had settled over these women. It was etched in deep lines across their faces, in a vacant dullness in their eyes. Like most everyone trapped inside the space, I slept little. It was hard to sleep because of the noise, because of the cockroaches that crawled across our beds, and because the lights were on twenty-four hours a day. Often I felt on edge, constantly alert for sudden eruptions of violence. The women would fight over the water for tea, or who got to use the bathroom. Because many of the women now trapped in these cells had been abused themselves, they would often abuse each other and their children. Living inside with all of us was a six-year-old boy named Abdulrahman. Some of the prisoners regularly pinched, hit, or shouted at him. Remembering Aboudi, I tried to play with and comfort him. After several days, he followed me around like a little duckling. Later I heard that he and his mother were deported back to their home country, Indonesia, and I felt a sense of relief that he was out of that place.

  I started keeping track of everything I could. I read the inmate statistics on a whiteboard in the prison guards’ room: 168 total inmates, 152 female prisoners, and 16 children. All 168 of us lived together in seven small cells with bunkbeds. Each cell was about ten by fourteen feet. No one ever came to clean them. There were seven bathrooms for all those women and not one of them had a door on the stalls. None of the toilets worked properly; the smell was repulsive and overwhelming. There was no dining room, the prayer room was locked at all times, and there was no space for anyone to have a shred of privacy. Some nights, I could hear women having sex with each other.

  Even growing up poor in a poor neighborhood had not been nearly this bad. The conditions in the prison were deplorable by anyone’s standards, and looking at the small children forced to live in these spaces with their mothers made me cry. No mirrors were allowed, and so, after a few days, you forget what you look like. You forget your identity. The differences between humans and animals become so small you start to wonder whether perhaps there is almost no difference at all.

  I tried to find ways to keep myself from going crazy. I bought a small notebook from Umm Misha’an and began to record the names and stories of the women in prison with me. I already knew something about the stories of abuse of domestic workers; Saudis employed hundreds of thousands of women, mainly from Asian countries, to do their cooking, their laundry, and to take care of their children. Saudi Arabia has no domestic labor codes, so any rights these women have are determined solely by their employer. We hear stories of foreign women who are mistreated or not paid, making them virtual prisoners in the homes in which they worked. (Ironically, their male counterparts, often employed as drivers for Saudi women, usually enjoy good wages, housing, and benefits.)

  Now I found myself in a jail cell surrounded by many of these poor, frightened women, who were completely alone, spoke very little Arabic, and had next to no resources. Maysara, a widow from the Philippines with six children, had not been back to her country for eight years. She had been sentenced to one year in jail because she had run away; her sponsor had not paid her wages for months. She made space for me around her few things and gave me her bed. Other incarcerated women had done nothing more than confront their employers for mistreating them and the employers had them arrested and thrown into jail.

  My arrest was in some ways an education: I was learning about domestic slavery.

  By transcribing the personal histories of these women and trying to figure out how I might help them, I became a kind of impromptu therapist. I listened to the women’s problems and wrote letters on their behalf—like my father, many were illiterate. My interest in their lives encouraged them, but at the same time, they also encouraged me. Their problems became a distraction from my own.

  Hana was twenty-six years old and had been jailed because she was caught with a man who was not her husband. She had finished her sentence the year before but was still in prison; her father refused to receive her and, as a Saudi woman without a guardian, she could not be released. The prison wardens were trying to marry her off to one of the inmates from the men’s prison so that she could have a guardian and leave jail.

  “Why are you doing this, Manal?” one of the prison guards finally asked me. “Why do you care? You should worry about yourself, and not these women.”

  Some of the more aggressive prisoners mocked me, calling me the UN Ambassador, but I just ignored them. As long as I was there, I wanted to do something.

  13

  * * *

  * * *

  Abouya and the King

  * * *

  * * *

  Since college, my life has revolved around the science and certainty of electronic communication—the ping of email, the click of a keyboard, the vibrating of a cellular phone. Even in my personal sphere, when I gather with my family or friends, more and more often, instead of sharing stories and hearing the rhythmic conversations that were the background music of my childhood, there is only silence, accompanied by the faint glow of each person’s individual screen. We are connected by wireless signals as much as we are by the faces and voices in front of us. But once I entered Dammam Women’s Prison, I became literally and figuratively trapped in the dark. My world was largely frozen, as if I were a bee trapped in amber on May 21, 2011. Even the constant noise all around me could not pierce the silence outside the prison walls. I wanted to know everything, but I knew almost nothing. A few of the guards shared what they had read in the press, but even that was sometimes second- or thirdhand. I was left to my imagination.

  On my second day as an inmate, I was allowed to make two phone calls in the prison administrator’s office, likely because of the visit from the Saudi human rights representative. One call was to one of my best friends from Aramco, Abdullah. He had come to the prison gates with Hidaya, but because he was a male and
not a close relative, he had not been allowed to enter.

  “Manal, what happened?” he asked. “They said in the paper that you broke down yesterday, they said that you told them who was behind Women2Drive and to start interrogating those who were behind your actions.” I did not understand how the press could spread such lies, or even where they were coming from.

  I thought with my logical, computer-information-systems brain. “I need a lawyer,” I said.

  Abdullah responded with a name, Adnan, and a phone number. Two of my friends had been calling lawyers. But whenever they mentioned my name, each attorney said no.

  Adnan had said yes.

  My second call was to my sister-in-law, Muneera. My brother had been detained for twenty-four hours, until his friends had bailed him out. Thankfully, my son did not know what had happened. When Aboudi woke the morning, after I had been taken away, my sister-in-law had told him, “Your mommy is on a trip, fixing a big computer.” I asked her if the campaign had tweeted about my detention.

  “Yes,” she said, and added, “Manal, we had to shut down the Facebook event.”

  I was overwhelmed by fury and frustration. There had been more than 120,000 people signed up to attend that event. Why had I gone to prison if this was to be the outcome? Why did the authorities always get to win?