Published: May 1, 2008

Walking in, it was not uncommon to see a woman shaving her vagina.  One leg over her head, she would prune herself while gossiping with her family and friends who all sat around her doing the exact same thing.   Now, if that description is shocking to read, just imagine how out of place I looked the first time I walked into a Moroccan public bathhouse, which in Arabic is called a Hammam.  Cultural sensitivity and assimilation is a challenge in and of itself.  Imagine the hilarity of a white girl with pink rather than the almost universally brown nipples of the Moroccans trying to act like “Oh yeah, I see this every time I take a bath at home, too.  No big deal.”

Morocco is a society that functions on a communal rather than an individualistic level.  This translates into traditionally everyone eating out of the same platter with his or her right hand, or sleeping in the same room with everyone of the same sex in the household on long low to the ground couches stuffed with sheep’s wool, or going to the Hammam to bathe once or sometimes twice a week.  I personally found going to the Hammam to be one of the best and most truthful revelations about the culture itself and how the female society really functioned.  To be honest, I am not sure that I would have even gone to the Hammam if I had the choice.  Doing everything else in my life while in Morocco in such a shared way grew tiring, and if there had been a shower or bath in my host family’s house, I may have gone to the Hammam once for “the experience.”  That would have been enough, and I would have happily washed myself alone and in peace in a lovely tiled bathroom.  But there was no shower in the house, and I took a cold bucket bath five-days-a-week in the host family’s bathroom, which had a Western-style toilet and a sink and was about three feet across and seven feet long.  The host family never got used to my waking up to wash my armpits every morning before facing the African sun, considering it both frivolous and futile.  If I wanted to be clean for myself and not considered filthy by the Moroccans I lived with, I had to go to the Hammam.  And so I did.

The first time I went was with my host sister, Maetir (pronounced maaA-e-tirr), a very beautiful 35-year-old woman with long black hair, mocha skin, and the most definitive laugh I have ever heard in my life, that often transitioned into a howl from actual crying.  She did not laugh at things that were funny necessarily, but nervously and frantically convulsed at everything that made her uncomfortable so as to deflect her own unhappiness.  Maetir was not demure enough to get a man, something her Mother told me often in disgust and simple explanation.  If she was not so passionately emotional or lived in a different culture, finding a man—something that is so essential to a woman who lives in a culture that defines a woman’s worth based on her ability to keep a home, cook well, and raise good,  Muslim children—would have been guaranteed.  She was both beautiful and smart enough to understand this.

This self-understanding translated to a heartbreaking, but very exhausting desperation.  Praying five times a day is common for all practicing Muslims, and Maetir gradually explained to me that every time she prayed, every day of her life since she was a little girl, her prayer was offered up for Allah to find her a husband.  Instead of getting married, something that was really now out of the question because of her age, Maetir spent her time working as a seamstress creating traditional brightly colored Kaftans of red, blue and orange silk and watching the Egyptian soap operas that played on the television eight or nine hours a day.  Maetir was not happy with her life, but liked to imagine things were better, and expressed her emotions in the same radically dramatic way as the soap opera stars she so admired.

When Maetir and I left for the Hammam, we took the following items with us: two stools for sitting in the bath house, two buckets-one for each of us to fill with water, two pails-one for each of us to scoop the water from the buckets out, two shower gloves for scrubbing, shampoo, bindi soap, razors, a loofa to scrub feet hard from walking everywhere along the dusty Medina ground in flip-flops, towels, a change of clothing, and nine Dirhams each (1 Moroccan Dirham = 7.6 U.S. Dollars)—eight of which pay for entrance into the Hammam, and one to tip the woman who sits and guards the clothing that is left in the changing room.

We left the house and walked through the winding Medina to the Hammam.  Everyday I walked by a dusty, hot, dungeon of a room, which was filled with sawdust, and opened up onto the street of the Medina wondering what use it had.  Only on my first entrance into the Hammam did I understand that the sawdust was what burned to fire the natural-water springs, which the women and men had used for generations to wash themselves.  At night I rarely left the host house after 8 p.m.; it was dangerous to do so as a woman, and the traditional Muslim culture does not really have the hippest of night lives.  But I found out that this time was exactly when most Moroccan women go to the Hammams. At this particular Hammam, and as I would learn, as with most Hammams, the useful hours for bathing, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., were reserved for the men.  But after dinner had been made and things settled within the homes, from 8 p.m. to 12 a.m. women go.  Arriving at around 9:30 p.m., Maetir and I were set for prime Hammam time and simply walking in I felt the buzzing of a busy place.

We paid the entrance fee and walked into the first of three rooms that constitute the Hammam.  In this room Maetir casually removed all of her clothing, encouraging me to do the same, removing the soaps and things from her bag, and replacing them with her clothing.  I watched and tried to nonchalantly remove my things in such a systematic and practiced fashion, but she and the woman who guards the clothing laughed at my discomfort, making comments in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, called Dareeja, about the ludicrously out-of-place outsider.  The only article of clothing that is not removed are the underwear, which all the women wear to walk around the Hammam, but are removed once bathing begins.  I cursed my existence when I realized that on that particular day, I wore bright red underwear, in a boy-short cut, with a Superman emblem on the back.  I had not really planned to go bathe communally that night, so had not even considered what kind of underwear I wore for the day.  My undies were a not-so-subtle hint that this American did not quite belong.

We walked through the changing room, through a very heavy wooden door and into the first of the two rooms that are used for bathing.  They both looked just the same.  The entire place was white tile floor, walls, and ceiling.  Sitting around this space were different groups of women who all sat on either little plastic stools or simple mats on the floor as they washed themselves.  The floor is ingeniously pitched toward the drains, but only slightly, so that stagnant water is not a problem.  But, clumps of hair were.  Maetir taught me the trick to avoid this hair.  She simply chose a part of the floor that was the least hairy, and then immediately filled her bucket and rinsed the space.  Each of the two rooms had two faucets, one that spouts freezing cold water, the other burning hot.  It is then to the bather’s disgression to mix the two and make water to the desired temperature.  The room really had no scent despite all of the soaps that were being used; it was simply heavy with humidity.  The rhythmic sound of splashing water, and the hot, heavy air reminded me of slipping around a wet and soapy bath with my brother and sister as children when our parents washed us.  But, as Maetir incessantly poured water on me in order to show me how it was done, and criticized my leg-shaving techniques.  In fact, “Qui fait ca!?”, translated to “Who does this!?”, was said so often to me I began to respond to the visiting family and friends’ questions regarding my name as QuiFaitCa rather than the Arabic word for generous, Kyliema, I was actually called.  This became my host family’s favorite Kyliema joke.  The harsh sound of the Dareeja spoken by the women in the Hammam reminded me that this space was borrowed and not mine.

Sociologically, the entire Hammam experience is a hot, steamy Petri dish that multiplies all of the gossip and rumors that circulate between the families who have lived together within the Medina for generations.  The women of these families come to the Hammam to discuss, brag or complain about their lives, their husbands, their sons, their daughters, their extended families, and share their recipes with their neighbors.  As they scrub one another’s backs and critique each other’s bodies, they bond freely within a strictly feminine space.

And yet, young boys go to the Hammam with their mothers, filling and carrying the buckets for their families.  It is when the women sense the child is nearing puberty and becoming sexually interested in going that they are told they must bathe with men.  So the masculine world is initially socialized by being surrounded by all of the naked bodies of their mothers, sisters, cousins, neighbors and friends.  Realizing this aspect of their society helped to explain why all women who are not men’s mothers, sisters, or cousins are sexualized objects for the Moroccan men.  These men had grown up associating every woman they knew with the comforting, naked free-for all that is the Hammam, and then were abruptly removed from this nurturing environment when they began to realize their own sexuality.  This understanding did not make my being a sexual object to them any more acceptable, but it did make it more comprehensible.

I washed myself and felt clean for the first time since arriving in Morocco.  Maetir scrubbed my back, and as my layers of skin peeled off into long, black angel-hair spaghetti strings, I grew to understand that in order to make sense of this world and experience, I had to completely resign myself to acknowledging the universality of the human experience.  Seeing these naked women scrub their bodies for two or three hours, while discussing their lives, revealed just how shared the individualized experience can be.