The Hammam: A Potentially Revealing So-Moroccan Tradition

It is always hard to recreate the sense of the unknown retroactively. Whatever excited anticipations you had, whatever fears before the fact, once you’ve experienced something, now-you-know and can’t remember not knowing. Recreating the journey from hammam virgin to hammam regular is challenging in that way. Perhaps it is easier simply to state the bits I had heard before my first trip to the hammam;

-In December, I spoke with Molly, a fellow Macalester student who came to Rabat a year before. Her homestay house hadn’t had a shower but many did; regardless, I wasn’t to worry because my family would undoubtedly offer to take me to the hammam with them and after a trip, I’d be the cleanest I had ever been.

-At a Barnes & Noble I browsed a travel book on Morocco shortly before I came. The must-do’s included a trip to the local hammam, a “quintessentially Moroccan” gender-segregated public bathhouse the publishers assured would be in every neighborhood. The hammam was a common part of life where all Moroccans went to get clean and apparently there were assistants that could be hired for cheap to scrub you (some would offer massages for more), I read. Also, if you were a woman, be aware that Moroccan women don’t subscribe to the same social norms and will probably ask you why you do/don’t shave whatever it is that you do/don’t shave. The book said nothing to this effect concerning men.

-Then there were the images of bathhouses in other Arab countries that I considered as the time neared. For me, the two prominent ones were from Turkey and “Kazakhstan.” The first image was planted by one of my most loved professors who had been to Turkey and said that the Turkish hammam was a phenomenal spa-like experience. She had made reference to this a few times in class so I was thinking it was pretty good and had high hopes even if I found it hard to imagine that lower-middle class Moroccan families were regularly going to high-end spas in blue-collar neighborhoods. But maybe. Then, Borat, in his boundless efforts to facilitate cross-cultural learning between the West and Kazakhstan, filmed an episode in which he is running around a public bathhouse that looks like the inside of a giant sauna at some local rundown YMCA; he slaps naked men high-fives and “love spanks.” I guess I figured Morocco’s hammam would be somewhere between Turkey and “Kazakhstan.”

-Then I got to Morocco and during my program’s orientation we were told that our host families would offer to take us to local hammams. We should go and experience it insomuch as we were studying “Culture and Society.”

-Also during orientation a health specialist – a prominent physician in the country – came to lecture us on staying well and to give us a bit of insight into the history of public health in Morocco and North Africa. It was a dull but reassuring lecture delivered to inattentive jet-lagged college students who had managed to find a bar in Rabat the night before. He told us that Rabat’s water was now actually drinkable, a pleasant surprise to me. Someone asked if that was the same water in the hammams and he said that yes, all of the tap water in Morocco was the same and fine. As a cultural note on health, he said that Moroccans believed the steamy chamber section of the hammam was good for curing sicknesses and added that we would come to love the hammam, which is “a so Moroccan tradition.” He also went over infectious diseases including leptospirosis, a grave illness that causes liver damage and renal failure, but which was pretty much not a problem in Morocco anymore. Of course, he added, still be cautious about not coming into contact with rat urine at the hammams, as it is those rats and their urine that really pose the most risk in terms of contracting leptospirosis…

…Then I went to the hammam. My homestay house does not have a shower and, as luck would have it, there is a hammam within a one-minute walk of my front door. The hammam was an excursion so enthusiastically offered that it would have been an utter slap in the face to react anything but excitedly to the suggestion. And as luck would continue to abound, my host brother Hicham (who is a 34 year-old, six-foot-four, 240-pound hairy Arab man – details that become relevant at the hammam), used to work at the hammam so really knows what’s up there and is an able-bodied scrubber, to say the least. I now go to the hammam at least twice a week with Hicham. I wish to examine the hammam from a few angles:

1. Concerning Oral-Cavity Etiquette. When Hicham squats down onto my chest and washes my neck with an extremely rough sponge that he wears as a glove (called a “kis”), it is unclear what to do with my mouth. Anything like a grimace could be insulting, signaling that his strokes that scrape off the dirt and top layer of skin are causing me discomfort (insulting to his style and signaling an unmanly pain threshold on my end); a smile could suggest over indulgence or appear forced and false. Tightly closed and flexing my jaw could suggest detachment from something highly interactive and give a cold vibe incongruous and unnatural with an activity embodying such distinct warmth. Slightly ajar and concentrated so as to allow for the deep breaths necessary to counter Hicham’s weight on my lung cavity makes sense as it would seem to be a choice of function over form, thus alleviating the pressure to make a decision reflecting cultural knowledge and insider etiquette. The choice to breathe would be obvious and accepted. The unfortunate reality that renders this decision of prioritizing respiration over manners impractical extends to my eyes. As the hammam’s inner chamber is steamy and over 100°F and the scrubbing strenuous, Hicham sweats profusely; beads of salty water which rapidly slide down and then momentarily hang onto the ends of his thick chest hairs before falling upon my face. This renders my lips pursed closed and my eyes squeezed squinted and shut, such that I probably look like a drowning cat to Hicham. On the upside, the breadth of his shoulders hides my face from the general public at the hammam. Then again, my long thin white legs kicking from under his immense dark back might also betray the image of worldliness and cross-cultural understanding that I hope to project in aspiring to good hammam etiquette…

2. Economics. Considering the hammam reveals a number of things about economics in Morocco.

A. Lowering costs through the collective. Many Moroccans are not wealthy but appreciate certain luxuries – they are not poor by global comparison – so resources are pooled in order to provide desired goods and services. While the hammam certainly has a longstanding tradition in Moroccan culture and society and would probably exist even if Morocco’s economy was stronger and its citizens wealthier, it is an example of a resource made more affordable through the collective. Water and showers are expensive and extravagant yet people in this country are not dirty and desire bathing so by having a public place for it, all can enjoy the luxury without bearing the cost of a private shower. Similarly, as Western influence continues to emerge in Moroccan culture and society, I imagine that very few upper class Moroccans go to hammams, preferring a nice shower in the home. Further, Morocco, like the rest of the world, is undergoing a process of enormous urbanization and families are increasingly likely to move into the cities. This phenomenon is usually explained by a lack-of-opportunity versus more-opportunity trend wherein “opportunity” is basically thought of first and foremost as employment. Certainly though, larger groups of people living together allow for more sharing of costs and I suspect that this will begin to manifest itself more evidently in more realms, and in turn, continue to fuel the growth of cities. Obviously, this is not a groundbreaking economic concept but it has been minimally discussed in scholarly articles I have read on the reasons precipitating urban growth in Morocco. I can’t help but hope that as this happens more, there will be more positive environmental implications. The hammam saves a lot of water and sharing resources is an obvious step towards sustainability.
B. Job types. Jobs in Morocco differ from jobs in the United States in that there is a lot more specialization among lower classes in large cities. A surplus of shoe-shines, minipack-of-Kleenex-sellers on the corner, individual-cigarette dealers and hammam scrubbers are features of an economy wherein everyone needs to work to get by… so they do. To a degree, this differs from my experiences in Central America where the very poor and very uneducated in large cities are more likely to beg, steal, wait for remittances from family in the United States or become involved in organized crime. Certainly, there are hundreds of thousands of more poor people working in highly specialized “poor” jobs such as shoe-shines in Guatemala and El Salvador than in the United States but the extent to which people in Morocco find a way – someway – to work is astonishing and more overwhelming than in any other country I have visited.
C. Exoticization and marketing. As a rapidly developing economy, Morocco is increasingly trying to market itself as an “exotic” tourist destination to Western Europe and the United States. The hammam that I go to is authentically Moroccan and there is, frankly, nothing exotically-alluring about it… save the fact that guys don’t get together to bathe each other stateside and I wouldn’t call that alluring. “Foreign” is a better adjective than “exotic,” but “exotic” is the marketing angle so many industries are trying to deliver to tourists here. Really, the hammam looks like a run down gym. You walk into a main locker room with benches and guys getting dressed. Then there is a main door which gives way to a set of three tiled rooms (tile on the floor, walls and ceiling) separated by walls with a single, central archway that is always open – no doors once inside. The first room is warm, the next room is warmer and the final room is steaming hot because there is a large stone bathtub into which comes boiling water from a spigot like we have in U.S. yards to hook our hoses to. You take your bucket, dip it into the tub of water, dump it wherever you are going to sit to wash off the dirt of whoever sat there previously, go get more water and then sit there and clean yourself or have someone do it for you. Some guys stretch and crack each others’ backs. It would be like combining the sauna and shower of a local gym. The whole thing is about the size of a basketball court divided into equal thirds with about forty people in it at any given time. But if you Google search “Moroccan Hammam” you will notice that the places advertised play to the Orientalist conceptions Westerners may have of Morocco. Hot stones, candles, olive oil lotions, massages, glimpses behind large and intimidating doors, as if one is peering into the wet and wild world of harems where – gosh, I don’t know – a masseuse-concubine will rub you down after a tough day of camel riding. Take, for example, this place:
The layout of Marrakesh’s main square, the obvious extra-care-taken of the Casbahs on Rabat’s beach, the camel riding tours, the lush “riads” … all are marketed to me everyday and, as best I can tell, have very little to do with Morocco and everything to do with how I imagined Morocco prior to coming.

3. Gender, power and sexuality. It is my conclusion that Moroccan men can contribute a very significant part of their sense of self to being men. Me too, obviously, but my sense of self based on being a man has relatively little (I’d like to say “nothing” but I want to be safe) to do with an inherent sense of power. Suffice it to say that despite inroads and recent rapid changes, most Moroccan women and men still definitely subscribe to “traditional” gender roles in which men have a lot more power. It is a very immediately noticeable and even jarring feature of society here to me as a U.S. American. An interesting and, I think, related phenomenon in the hammam is the extent to which everything is highly egalitarian between men. My thought is that men, whose sense of power (and to a corollary but lesser extent their sense of worth) is largely based in contradistinction to women, such that when women are removed from the social scene, and men are, in turn, more tense and subconsciously very aware of their relative lack of power. I might be imagining/exaggerating it but I think not. Because there are no women around the hammam to affirm a man’s sense of self, relations between men are good or okay only when there is no threat related to social power. At the bathtub with their buckets, there is an extreme amount of attention paid to filling buckets in order and considerately, never allowing the line to grow for one’s own convenience or because one can’t carry all the buckets at once. Fist fights break out commonly at the hammam which suggests that there is some tension around this. Men are also highly careful to scrub one another’s backs with care and to do so thoroughly. The reciprocity of back-scrubbing is highly valued – made manifest in really very much too much time spent on it – as a way of showing respect. Also, in a situation in which men are getting together to bathe, no one ever takes off their underwear. In fact, it is almost funny to see how private everyone is with their private parts after sitting on each other’s chests in wet boxers – going into corners to soap up down there. While totally immodest about their bodies and rubbing them together, full frontal nudity crosses the line. My hunch is that this is all about egalitarianism and no one wants anyone else to feel inferior based on… err, size. Why else? A final thought on gender, power and sexuality was planted in my mind my freshman year when I took a course called, “Muslims Societies and Identities” when one day the professor casually remarked that it is the idea of a man in a submissive position that is most bothersome to Muslim men. Based on my experience at the hammams, this sort of makes sense -- that homosexuality would be more feared by those that thought it was undermining masculinity and thus power and self-worth and ultimately dangerous to their own sense of self; rather than in the U.S. where fear of homosexuality relates more to it being “unnatural” or an offense against God… both things outside of the individual’s sense of self.

4. Conceptions of Cleanliness. No dirt v. no germs. When I think of clean, I am thinking hygiene and lack of grime. Here, just lack of grime seems to count and they are very serious about it. With the kis (sand paper glove sponge), they really take off the top layer of your skin and they’ll roll shmutz snakes off your back all day and say “wow, bizzef” (“wow, so much!”) until the cows come home. They are perpetually shocked by my filth. While the shmutz snakes, roll off my back, I have to appreciate the ironic. I am face down on a communal tile floor where men walk barefook, sit next-to-naked and where other shmutz snakes that have rolled off of other men’s bodies lie. Soap is also shockingly uncommon here despite the fact that they wash their hands in water all of the time insomuch as the Koran instructs water-cleansing rituals prior to prayer and after many activities. People seem to be sick a good bit here, too. If I worked in public health here, I would start a major soap campaign.