We exited the administration area, leaving behind the offices and the tiny room with the old phone, and another that was like a workshop with sewing machines, and a holy room set aside for prayers. We passed through a very small yard. The top should have been open to the sky and filled with blazing afternoon desert light, but instead there were two layers of metal netting, each overlaying the other. It was like being fenced in on all sides. We came to another room with a metal mesh ceiling, but in this one there were ropes stretching from wall to wall. They were the clotheslines. Women could go into the bathroom, wash their clothes in the same sinks as they used for the toilets, wring out the water with their hands, and then hang the clothes up to dry on the rope lines. The room was only open one hour a day.
Then we arrived at the cellblock itself, behind a heavy, noisy gate. The individual cells ran along a corridor lined with bars, and as I stepped inside, I could see faces pressed into each open space. There’s nothing to do in jail. It’s like watching your life in slow motion. The boredom—the complete nothingness—makes you want to kill yourself. You come up with anything to fill the space: even a new cockroach crossing the wall will be something to talk about. So, at the sound of the gate opening, all the prisoners rushed to the bars and started looking. The noise was so loud: the sounds of them pushing against bars, pushing against each other, the screech of everyone talking at once, “Jadid, jadid,” Arabic for “new one.”
I desperately wanted to cover my face.
For more than a decade, I’d fought with my family, fought with my ex-husband, fought with my society not to cover my face. My face is my identity. No one will cover it. I’m proud of my face. If my face bothers you, don’t look. Turn your own face away, take your eyes off me. If you are seduced by merely looking at my face, that is your problem. Do not tell me to cover it. You cannot punish me simply because you cannot control yourself.
But now, passing through this crush of women, I wished I were veiled. I didn’t want to be seen. Not in this place. I was not a criminal. I did not do anything wrong. I just wanted to throw back my head and scream. The pain was almost overwhelming.
We have a phrase in Arabic: “He swept the floor with my dignity.” I felt like my dignity was being wiped on that foul-smelling, hard concrete floor.
Zahrah got out one of her many keys, walked to the door of one cell, and opened the lock. She pulled the bars behind me, and that was it.
The women inside crowded around, speaking in broken Arabic. “You’re Saudi? You’re Saudi?” they asked. They were mostly housemaids and domestic workers from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Somalia, and India. They were all speaking over each other. It was like being in an aviary with flocks of every type of bird, screeching and calling and beating their wings. Out of 168 inmates in the prison, only seven were Saudi, and four of these were not even prisoners, they were merely in temporary detention. There is no detention center for women, so the authorities jail them instead.
A women in a black hijab made her way toward me. She was dressed the way many Saudi women do inside their houses, and when she spoke to me, it was with a Saudi accent. “Come with me,” she said, taking my hand. We walked to a room with twelve bunk beds and white fluorescent lights flickering from the ceiling. Ropes, sagging with clothes, were strung all around. It felt like standing in a closet. The walls were covered in plastic bags, filled with partly eaten bread, plastic spoons, and more clothes. Still more clothes were stuffed under the beds. The beds themselves were draped in fabric, like a curtain, because that was the only way to sleep: no one ever turned off the harsh, faintly buzzing lights overhead. Their tubes glowed day and night. There was only one tiny window at the top of the room, closed off with tight iron bars so that only the littlest bit of light and no fresh air drifted in. The room smelled damp, like a carpet that has been flooded with water; like food; like diapers, because there was a newborn baby; like hair oil and creams; like sweat, days of sweat that had not been scrubbed off in a long time.
And everywhere, there were cockroaches. Thousands and thousands of cockroaches scurried across the floors, the walls. Cockroaches on the bed, on the floor, on the food.
The Saudi woman was named Nuwayer. Her bed was the first on the right. She told me, this is my bed, please sit down. I didn’t know if I should trust her, but I sat. She had small eyes and was maybe a little older than me. I couldn’t see her hair, but it looked like it was in two braids. She was wearing a black dress with flowers on it, and she had a big scar running down her face. I never asked her how she got that scar. I have scars myself, from my childhood, so I never ask people about theirs.
She started asking me questions: Why are you here? What happened? She couldn’t believe that I had been brought to this prison for driving a car. She refused to believe it. After a while, there was nothing more I could say. How could I prove that I was not lying?
Finally, I looked at her and I said, “Nuwayer, I’m so, so tired. I haven’t slept for two days.” I didn’t care about eating anymore.
She said, “It’s okay, just sleep in my bed.”
I could see the cockroaches climbing over everything. In the outside world, if I saw one cockroach, I used bleach, disinfectants, anything to kill them and clean every surface they’d touched. I hated cockroaches that much. Also, cockroaches usually run away when they see people: they scurry off into dark corners when you turn on the light. But here, they just crawled, heedless of the light, over everything, under everything. As I was talking to Nuwayer, I felt them on top of my head, trying to crawl up the hem of my abaya. I kept batting them off, shrieking, “Cockroach! Oh, cockroach!” And Nuwayer was so kind, so calm. She told me that I would get used to them.
Nuwayer told me to take off my abaya, but I insisted on leaving it on. I was still hoping to leave, if not by the end of this day, then by the next day. But first I had to sleep. I must have basically fainted on her bed. It was so noisy: the women, the kids, the crying newborn, the click click click of the cockroaches on the floor, the walls, the plastic. But I slept. Not peacefully though. It was like when you have been swimming in the ocean for too long, and when you lie down at the end of day, all you can feel is the pitch and roll of the waves all over again. As I slept, I felt my day all over again: the pain, the humiliation, the indignity. I dreamed of crying in front of a man who did not care. I dreamed of a girl pushing her rough, gloved hands over me and in me. In my sleep, I tried to push these thoughts away. I tried to think of my son. I tried to think of my sister-in-law telling me on the phone that he was okay, that his father had come and gotten him.
It turned out that I didn’t need to call anyone in my family to tell them where I had gone. The newspapers, the television, the radio, and the Internet had already done it for me. By the time I’d fallen asleep, all of Saudi Arabia knew that Manal al-Sharif, the woman who drove, was in jail.
3
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Dirty Girls
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