I insisted that he was my father and that I would never abandon him or stop being obedient to him. I explained how the card would be very important for me after I graduated, when I needed to prove my identity in the workplace and elsewhere. I reminded him how many times we had been stopped at checkpoints between Mecca and Jeddah, how he’d been interrogated to make sure that we were his daughters, and how we’d been able to do nothing but take out our university ID cards as proof.
My father wasn’t moved. He shook his head and pointed for me to go by myself. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to apply for the ID card without his signature, but I went to the registry office anyway and sat there waiting, holding back my tears. I took an application form and the guardian consent form and returned to the car chastened. Abouya looked at me and said sarcastically, “Where’s the card?” It was a clear statement that he was still the master of my fate. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just fake the guardian consent form as Mama and I had done for the apartment rental contract; to do such a thing with government papers would be fraud.
The identity card remained my obsession. I became cold with my father, and took every opportunity to remind him of what I wanted. In turn, his hurtful responses often drove me to tears. “You want to be a man?” he would ask. Or, “That’s it? You don’t want to depend on me anymore?” But I never tired of approaching him, consent form in hand, to repeat my request.
Finally, after several weeks, he surrendered. We went to the Office of Civil Affairs together and applied for my ID card. The serial number on the card was 1091, meaning that only 1,090 Saudi women had received their cards in the weeks before me. I tucked the card in my wallet and carried it with pride: for the first time ever, I had something to prove my identity. The most important thing of all was the picture. I looked miserable, but I didn’t care: it showed my face, my eyes, nose, and mouth, with nothing blurred or concealed or veiled. It was the day my homeland acknowledged me as a Saudi citizen. But more than that, it was a symbol of my newfound courage to assert myself. I had changed and perhaps, in some small way, so had my father.
8
* * *
* * *
Employed and Homeless
* * *
* * *
Growing up, we never had pocket money. If my brother or sister or I wanted something, we would save a riyal or two from our school breakfast money each day. I remember I wanted a magnetic board with English letters because I really wanted to learn English. The board cost 50 riyals. I saved for weeks to buy that board. No one was rich at the government schools we attended, but there weren’t many girls poorer than us. One of my friends had an allowance of 500 riyals for clothes. I didn’t have any clothing allowance. My father gave my mother 50 riyals a year for our clothes, so she would buy material and sew Muna and me our two dresses each year.
The only time we were allowed to buy anything was at the start of school, when we went to the stationery store for books and school supplies. Abouya would also buy me a coloring book. The rest of the year, though, I was afraid to ask him for anything. He beat all of us for no reason, so I certainly didn’t want to give him an excuse.
Abouya was very generous when people came to visit. Whenever Uncle Ali came from Libya, he bought great quantities of food and gifts. But we lived in an old apartment with secondhand furniture and had no toys except what my mother scraped together or what we saved for ourselves out of our breakfast money. One time, when I desperately wanted to buy some things for my Egyptian Barbie, I asked my mother if I could sell some of the gold jewelry that my Libyan uncle had brought me. Mama said yes, so I sold some of my rings and necklaces, and then she took me to the toy store. I bought a kitchen set and a bedroom set for Barbie.
Mama sometimes told us that our father made good money. For years, he worked for a gas station. But he didn’t bring his money home, and he wouldn’t put it in a bank. He “banked” nearly all of his earnings with his boss. He only took enough money to pay the rent, the grocery bill, the electricity bill, and a little bit extra beyond that. We lived in a horrible apartment while my father’s salary lived with his boss.
When I was in middle school, my father was fired. He went to see his boss with the receipts for years of salary to collect his money. He brought a big black suitcase to put the cash in. But all the boss did was kick him out of the office. Abouya yelled at him, saying that he would go to the Grand Mosque and pray that God punished him. And the boss basically said, sure, go ahead and ask God to punish me. Abouya came home with nothing. Everyone was angry. We had dreamed of moving to a house that we owned, but now the money was gone. We partly blamed Abouya for his blind trust in his employer.
Abouya changed a lot after this incident; he lost his trust in people. He managed to sell a piece of land in Jeddah that he had gotten from the government. (The government used to give land to citizens to build their own homes; he was going to use the savings from his salary to build a home on that land.) He bought a pre-owned taxi with the proceeds. Then he went back to his first job, driving pilgrims to Mecca.
All of this made me determined to find a good job.
My quest to find a job began as I approached my fourth year of university. Teaching wasn’t an option. Only boys’ secondary schools taught information technology, and even if girls could study computer science, I didn’t want to return to the same dismal government girls’ schools that I had endured all those years. Since my major was a new one, I couldn’t get a master’s or doctorate; the university didn’t have the necessary academic staff.
The longer I hunted for a job, the gloomier my prospects seemed. One day Maram, one of my classmates, dashed my hopes of finding employment anywhere. “The best you can aim for is to work as an instructor in one of the training institutes,” she told me. The job she was talking about didn’t even require a diploma, and the money wouldn’t be enough to afford any of the things I wanted. “You’d be lucky to get 4,000 riyals,” she said.
Just as she’d helped me earlier to enter the university, my sister came to my rescue again. During the summer before my senior year, she helped me get an internship at the university hospital, where she was doing her final year of medical training. My sister didn’t believe in the niqab: she wore it only outside the hospital. My parents never tried to force it on her, perhaps because they knew she’d never accept it.
In the past, Muna and I had clashed over the niqab as well. But the day I entered university hospital for my interview, I decided that I, too, would uncover my face. I’d never revealed my face to men before—I’d never even contemplated it—so I had no idea how it would make me feel.