“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.