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
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Abouya and the King
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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.