The phone barely had the chance to ring. “Abouya,” I said, speaking as soon as I heard his voice, “It’s me, Manal. I’m out of jail.”
I paused, waiting for a lecture or the recriminations. Instead, I heard my father’s excited words, “Daughter! Are you fine?”
“Yes, Abouya,” I replied, “I’m fine.”
“Then I’m fine. Goodbye.”
That was it, every word that passed between us, a very short phone call. In my mind, I had prepared myself for a long speech, laced with scoldings and accusations. “How could you do this to your family?” I expected him to shout. I had prepared to defend my actions and apologize. But he was “fine.”
I leaned back, watching the highway pass on the way to the Aramco compound, watching my brother steer the car. It was not his car, the Azera, which was still impounded by the police. It was my car he was using to drive me home.
14
* * *
* * *
The Rain Begins with a Single Drop
* * *
* * *
On Friday, June 17, 2011, about three dozen women drove in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Some drove for less than an hour around the streets of Riyadh, the capital. Others got behind the wheel in Jeddah and Khobar and elsewhere. Many weren’t stopped, even when they passed police officers on the road. Those who were stopped were escorted home and sternly told not to drive again. At least one woman was ticketed for driving without a Saudi license. But none was arrested.
I did not drive that day, I stayed home.
The day after my release from prison, I was back at my desk at Aramco. The company had a policy that if you missed ten days of work, you could be let go. I had frantically put in for vacation time, but I was close to the edge of being terminated.
I returned to work in the same unit, at the same cubicle. But nothing else would ever again be the same. People at work were as divided in their opinions about me as they were in the society outside. Some were carefully supportive, and some were aggressively critical, while the majority were quiet.
Every person I knew in the office came by my desk, and I said the same thing to each of them, “The vacation was nice, thank you for asking.” I smiled each time. Some female employees left bouquets of flowers and cards saying “We are proud of you” on my desk. Omar al-Johani, my Aramco colleague who had tweeted the details of my arrest from behind the bushes by my house at 2:00 a.m., posted his personal PO box number online and encouraged people worldwide to send me letters and cards. I received piles of them; the most beautiful was a computer mouse in the shape of a car.
Eventually, after the initial uproar was over, the executive director called me into his office. He asked, “Manal, are you okay?” I told him, yes, I’m fine. He said that for eleven days, he had been getting up and looking at the news. The day I was released was the day that he “breathed again.” Later in the year, I was even nominated to be one of Aramco’s one hundred youth leaders and to sit on a company advisory board. I told the director, “I’m proud to work for you,” and his reply was, “We are proud that you work for us.”
But many other things changed. I was told that I could not mention Aramco in public—indeed, that I could not speak in public. I was also told that I was under surveillance: my phone, my email, my texts, my home. It was clear to me that the company was watching everything that I did, said, and wrote.
One colleague accused me of being an agent for Iran and other Saudi enemies and sent an email demanding my termination from Aramco. The email was addressed to Aramco’s CEO, and cc’d a company vice president, the IT executive director, as well as my department head, my group leader, and himself. He cc’d me as well.
What hurt the most were the people who shunned me. On my team, one colleague refused to speak to me. In every meeting or interaction, he treated me as if I did not exist. One of Aboudi’s best friends was the son of an American woman who lived in the compound. They played together at her house and at my house twice a week. When I got out of jail, I emailed her to set up the next playdate. She said the two boys could no longer be friends. “I don’t feel safe for my son to be around your son,” she wrote.
I never used the word jail in front of Aboudi. I instructed everyone to say “the vacation” or “Hawaii.” I didn’t want him to know about it; I didn’t want him to worry. But one night, after his bath, as he was brushing his teeth, he suddenly asked, “Mommy, are we bad people?”
I held my breath for an instant and then asked, “Why?”
He told me that two boys had hit him and choked him at school that day, adding, “They said they saw you on Facebook and they told me, ‘You and your mom should be in jail!’?” I could see the bruise on his neck where their angry fingers had left their mark.
I told him that we were good people, adding, “Sometimes other people don’t understand and say horrible things. You mustn’t listen to those boys.” But there was nothing more I could do. The boys’ school was outside the Aramco compound. I could not enter it. When I complained about Aboudi’s being bullied on the bus, two fathers accused me of violating the rules forbidding women from entering the bus and forced me to sign a pledge that I would not trespass on the boys’ domain.
A few days later, I told the story to one of my friends at Aramco, whose son also attended the same school. She looked away awkwardly and said that she hadn’t wanted to tell me this, but “my son’s religion teacher told his class, ‘Manal al-Sharif is crazy! She should be locked up!’?”
But the person who suffered most at Aramco was my brother. After three months of continuous harassment by his colleagues, he quit his job and moved his family to Kuwait. He was the first casualty of my determination to challenge the system.
While my brother lived one extreme, my father lived another. Four days after my release on Friday afternoon, my father, the chief of our tribe, and my father’s two cousins returned to the royal palace in Jeddah to wait with the other visitors for a brief audience with the king. They had come to thank him. It was, my father recalls, a warm and pleasant meeting. At the end, the king bestowed good wishes and gifts upon the four men. So it was that my father, a taxi driver with no formal education, was redeemed in Saudi society, even as his children have left, one by one.