I Feel a Hammam Coming On

It wasn’t until I moved to a hot, dusty country that I understood the significance of footwashing in ancient civilizations. Unlike the symbolic ceremonies sometimes observed today, this was no delicate ritual; it was a yucky, gritty, never-ending necessity.

I know this because occasionally my soft, Western feet leave the smooth asphalt of my campus paradise and venture to the little hanout in the village on the other side of the wall. Within ten steps, my feet are filthy – so filthy that I now own special dirt shoes (fake crocs, to be precise), which I reserve solely for dirty walks in dirty places. When I get home, I head straight to the bathtub and hose my feet down, shoes and all. That is why there is pretty much always a set of plastic footwear drying in my washroom.

Oh, but I wish someone had advised me to buy dirt shoes before my first trip to the Hay Hassani souk, which was such a smorgasbord for the eyes that it never once occurred to me to direct my gaze downward – until I found that I had stepped in a puddle of – something – and that the contents of said puddle (“puddle” being a generous descriptor of the many animal and vegetable liquids potentially decomposing on the premises) would squish and squirt out of my sticky sandals for the next six hours.

Yes. I went home and washed my feet. Thrice. And I felt terribly, terribly sorry for anyone who might possibly have the morbid task of washing the feet of others in similar conditions. No wonder it was a servant’s job.

Now, we as Westerners pride ourselves on our fetish for personal hygiene. We live ultra-purified lives and equate uncleanliness with poverty, misfortune, and destitution. We sidestep anyone and anything that we consider soiled, and wonder how they can stand to live in their own filth. But today I had an experience that takes our sanitized self-image and turns it on its head. I went to a hammam.

When I first heard of the idea of a communal bathhouse, I was, to be honest, a tiny bit queasy. Germs. Fungi. Spores. Bacteria. Just think of all the things that could be spawning in such a place, especially in a dirty, developing country where people are accustomed to squalid conditions. But if you know me well, you know that behind my timid exterior is a lust for adventure, and that I respond to most invitations with a hearty “I’m in!”

And that is how I found myself wrapped in a sheet, entering a room full of nearly naked strangers, shedding the sheet, and taking the plunge. Not a literal plunge into a literal pool, of course. No – that would be too bathlike. A real communal bath involves no submersion whatsoever. Duh.

Here’s how it works: you begin by plunging your hand into a large bowlful of black, tar-like goo. You head to the steam room and rub this goo all over yourself, and eventually it starts to behave like an oily sort of soap. When you are thoroughly saturated with this lathering blob of savon noire, you sit on a little stool and pour water all over yourself with a little bowl, again and again, until your pores are gaping open and you feel pretty much fantastic.

Then you go to a bigger room and wait to be ushered onto a massage table with a padded vinyl mat, which is dutifully sloshed with a pail of water between bathers. You lie down and a woman begins vigorously rubbing your back with the super-abrasive scrub mitt that you bought on the way in, and you think, “Gosh, this almost hurts. I’m sure glad she’s only rubbing my back.”

Except that she doesn’t just rub my back. She rubs everywhere. Every curve, every crevice, in every possible direction and from every possible angle. And lest you think that that’s some kind of sensual experience, let me remind you that you are essentially being swaddled in sandpaper. You can talk yourself into believing it’s not unpleasant. But that’s about it.

Then she sends you off to the shower, where you find that you have grey, icky balls of something sticking to you all over the place. You wonder if it’s lint from your scrub mitt, and eventually deduce that what you are picking off of yourself are actually clumps of your own formerly living skin. Yup. Down the drain it goes, chunk after chunk. Out with the old, and all that.

And then it’s back to the table to be soaped and massaged, pretty much everywhere, for a deliciously long time. Head and shoulders, knees and toes – in fact, between the toes, when they eventually come out of traction. There is pushing and pulling and twisting and chopping – and then it’s back to the shower – again – for the final shampoo.

When you finish, you go to the “resting room” to recline on padded loungers and, eventually, dress yourself for the outside world; but by this time, you’ve come to see the appeal of a clothing-optional life. Everyone is equal, you see, in the hammam. Everyone’s body parts are acceptable, large or small, firm or full. Our outer lives are indistinguishable; in the bathhouse, there are neither hijabs nor halter tops, djellabas nor jeans. You are just a fraternity of women sharing in the healing power of water and touch.

And so we come back to this idea of health and purity; in this sense, the hammam is the ultimate equalizer. Everyone shows up dirty and exits clean. No matter how many “little showers” a week we take, we are all walking around clad in layers of skin that has lived and died and is no longer needed. It’s not until we bare ourselves to one another that we know what it’s like to feel our real skin alive and soft and pliant beneath our touch; it’s not until we face our vulnerability and expose ourselves that we benefit from the amiable sisterhood that women here have shared for centuries behind closed doors.

And there is a sisterhood about it. A bond was formed, not just between me and my two North American pals, but between us and the other women – both those who bathed us, and those who were bathed alongside us. My masseuse met my deplorable French with a warm “bienvenue au Maroc,” and smiled kindly as she told me to “asseyez,” “tournez,” “levez,” and “nettoyez.” She pinched my cheek affectionately when one of her verbs confounded me, and went running after me, laughing, when I neglected to re-robe between one room and the next. She sped off to get me some shampoo when she thought I had forgotten mine, and was just so clearly delighted to see that I had enjoyed my time in this place.

I wondered, then, what it must be like to come to work in the morning, knowing that you’ll spend the day sloughing off others’ dead skin cells, along with their layers of accumulated grime. It could be a horrible, disgusting job – hot, sweaty, damp, and distasteful – or it could be what this woman made it: a beautiful, cleansing togetherness.

I suppose in the end, we choose what it means to be dirty or clean, covered or exposed, served or befriended, privileged or scorned. We choose how we want to think about the status of those different from ourselves; and we don’t even know we’re making that choice until we leave our tidy homes and venture into the places that our sanitized imaginations tell us to avoid.

I left that hammam feeling cleaner than I’ve ever felt before, and a little more connected, too. No doubt class distinctions still exist between the servers and the served, and between those who go to high-end spas for relaxation and those who go to humbler establishments to bathe because they lack running water at home. But I learned a little something about the assumptions we make and the realities of life outside our polished enclaves. And I learned that hosing down my crocs in the shower is a very poor substitute for proper Moroccan ablutions.

So if you come to Morocco (and you know that you will), try not to be too creeped out by thoughts of germs and nudity. You will get dusty, dirty, sticky, and sandy, and you won’t like the feeling of your own epidermis; so be sensible. Be liberal. Shed your skin, and your prudish Western ways: be clean!