Ever since I arrived in Morocco I’ve wanted to try out the local way of bathing – in a hammam. As we’d discovered when we bought our house here, bathrooms at home consist of a squat toilet and a tap. Locals bathe in the hammam about once a week (I believe bathing weekly is required by the Koran) at specific times – days are for women only, nights are for men. Apparently Thursdays are the busiest as Friday is the Muslim holy day and most people want to be at their cleanest before they visit the mosque and pray before Allah.
I’d spoken to ex-pats who’d tried it and had mixed reports – some found it relaxing, others found the concept of washing among other people’s exfoliated skin and clumps of hair not to their liking. However I’d heard that the hammam ritual was a great social occasion for women who sometimes spent hours there chatting and gossiping with friends and family members and I was curious to see it for myself.
I wanted to visit the hammam with a local who could show me the way things were done rather than just turning up unprepared, and recently an opportunity presented itself. A fellow student at the language centre where I was taking my Darija classes had been staying with a local family and her ‘house mother’ had offered to take her before she left Fes. I asked if I could tag along and she agreed.
I was briefed on what to take – a bucket to hold your bathroom products, a towel, flip-flops, a plastic stool or mat to sit on and a change of underwear as most women wash wearing their knickers.
I headed through the medina clutching my red bucket filled with shampoo, shower gel and so on and was amused to see the reactions of shopkeepers and passers-by when they clocked a Westerner clearly on her way to a hammam. After the double-take they usually grinned and a couple shouted out things like “Hammam? Mezzyan!” (good).
My friends ‘house mother’ lent us both rough black gloves for exfoliating and on the way bought some strange-looking brown goo in a plastic bag from the hanoot (corner store). It turned out that she wasn’t coming with us after all, she’d already bathed three days before and was just going to drop us off and instruct the women what to do with us. Apparently we were getting the ‘works’ – a scrub down and massage.
She led us through an anonymous doorway and down some tiled stairs, past a curtain and into a large changing room similar to those at public swimming pools but without the lockers. There were benches and hooks on which to leave your stuff and a few women in various states of undress, who all looked surprised to see two Western women there. This hammam was a small one in a hidden backstreet of the medina and clearly didn’t get many ‘tourists’.
My friend and I shyly stripped down to our pants and flip-flops and, bucket in hand, were ushered through by the attendant. We passed through a corridor and ducked under a heavy plastic flap into a big room where about a dozen women of various ages, shapes and sizes were sitting on stools or plastic mats in their underwear. Steam filled the space and the blue-painted walls and domed roof dripped with condensation. Each woman had two or three buckets of water in front of her and a scoop for pouring water over themselves, which then ran into a drain in the centre of the room. In the corner was a large trough with a pipe pouring hot water into it – this trough was attended by an older skinny woman wearing baggy drawers who distributed the buckets of water to the women bathing. It’s hard to tell the ages of people here as many appear prematurely old due to their tough lives, but she looked well into her 70’s.
We sat on our plastic mats and had several buckets of steaming water deposited in front of us. Taking our cue from watching the others we began ladling the hot water over ourselves and I produced my normal shower kit and started washing. Any inhibitions we may have had quickly dissipated – most of the women there were far from the ‘body beautiful’ and they let it all hang out! We’d been told that we were signed up for the full treatment but when nobody appeared to help us we just relaxed and got on with it. After five minutes however a big mamma with orange hennaed hair and saggy beige undies came over, fished out the rough black glove from my bucket, plonked herself on the floor beside me and motioned for me to start rubbing the brown goo on myself – this was clearly meant to be soap but the greasy consistency made me wonder if it was made from animal fat. I pushed the thoughts of the recent sheep slaughtering from my mind. She then began scrubbing my back with the exfoliating glove – so far, so good. Things got a little interesting however when she grabbed my shoulder and directed me to lay my head on her ample hairy thigh. She extended my arm over her shoulder and began scrubbing my upper body to within an inch of it’s life. This was ok, but her enormous pendulous bosoms slapping me in the face when she stretched to scrub my stomach was rather alarming. Trying not to catch my friend’s eye for fear of laughing at a rather inappropriate moment I instead focused on her bushy eyebrows, knitted together in concentration as she removed several layers of my skin.
This process continued over the rest of my body until I was completely buffed and rosy. I was then handed over to the skinny water attendant for the massage phase, which involved her rubbing more of the brown soap into my skin and then bending my legs in to my buttocks while I lay on my stomach. After being rinsed off with a bucket of hot water I was then left to my own devices, so I proceeded to wash my hair while watching my friend go through the same ritual. Once the scrubbing and ‘massage’ was done with we were able to settle into girly conversation while continuing our own personal ablutions. It was fascinating to watch the other women – one performed a similar extensive body scrubbing on a girl who was obviously her daughter, a girl next to us in her late teens spent at least half an hour washing and combing her luxuriant black hair, and a bent backed rotund grandmother vigorously brushed her teeth – all the while chatting away about the ups and downs of their daily lives.
Women can spend two hours or more at the hammam – it’s the one chance they have to relax and do something for themselves in total privacy from the men in their lives. A weekly break from the busy routine of caring for their husbands, families and homes. No wonder they take their time in there! Also, in winter when the houses here get very cold (none have central heating) the warmth of the steam-filled hammam certainly encourages you to linger.
My friend and I spent a relatively short time (45 minutes) there – to stretch out the process to two hours takes practice! – and emerged back onto the street refreshed and glowing. We both felt cleaner than we had in a while and our skin was soft and flushed from the exfoliation and heat. It was a very relaxing experience and while I personally like to bathe more often than once a week, I will definitely be visiting the hammam again when I feel the need to get away from it all for a while.
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