Medina Life: The Public Bath

Last Friday, I went to the hammam, the public bath. I got a massage. It was great.

The hammam is a ubiquitous feature of Morocco's medinas. Every neighborhood has one, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who hasn't ever visited one, or even doesn't use one regularly. Yet, despite its prominence, I feel like the hammam is very difficult to describe. Yes, it is a public bath, but you don't go there just to bathe. Yes, you can get a steam and a massage, but it is not a spa or luxury retreat. There is a purpose to going to the hammam, but its function is not purely utilitarian. Hammams were once centers of neighborhood society, especially for women, who were able to enjoy themselves in the freedom and comfort of gender homogeneity. There is even a hammam economy: the shops and street dealers who sell soaps, cosmetics and bathing accessories in the alleyways surrounding the baths. But before going too deep into the social and cultural subtleties surrounding the hammam, let's get an idea about the public bath experience.

I visited the hammam Moulay Idriss, which dates back to the reign of its eponym, the first emperor of Morocco who founded Fes in the 8th century. All traditional hammams share the same design. You first walk into a dressing room where you pay the entrance fee (around 10DH, $1.50). In exchange you receive two water buckets and a secure place to store your clothes. The next step is to disrobe down to your underwear (bathers are not completely naked), and to enter the bath itself.

The hammam is comprised of three chambers of succeeding levels of heat and humidity. The first chamber is the coolest, somewhere around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The second chamber is around 100 degrees, and the third is hotter, seemingly infinitely so. Water comes from this room. An attendant fills your buckets, mixing water from a hot tap and a cold tap in the ratio of your choosing. Most patrons aim for a 50/50 mix of scalding hot and cold water. The result is something slightly warmer than what I like for a hot bath, but not unbearable. Where does the heat come from? Giant stoves built below the hammam's third chamber provide its and the water's intense heat. Traditionally these are shared with community bakeries, usually built next to hammams, in order to use efficiently use this energy. Once your buckets are filled, you stretch out and settle in.

The process of bathing at the hammam reflects its structure. While you can wash yourself in any room, traditionally the hottest room is used first, for a nice, long 'preparatory' steam. You lay on the tile floor - hot, but not to the point of discomfort. Sanitation takes care of itself: a bucket of scalding water is used to wash away anything the previous users left behind. The heat around you is oppressive. Sweat doesn't just stream down your face, it runs out of your pores at an incredible rate. Before you know it, you're covered in it, but it's ok; by this point the heat and steam has lulled you into a somewhat sleepy delirium. Your worries and inhibitions wash away. Your bones soften to puddy and muscles to jelly, and that's when you take a deep sigh of relief and let go of everything that you had on your mind.

That night, as I laid in the hottest room, my brain starting to melt, I couldn't help but wonder about the thousands upon thousands of men who had laid in the same spot as I over the centuries. Who were they? What was their business? Did they, like me, come to the hammam to escape the concerns of everyday life? I felt connected to them, united by a shared purpose, a purpose unchanged for over 1000 years.

The steam portion lasts anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. Any longer is unsafe and uncomfortable. Afterwards you enter the middle chamber, which, at this point, feels quite refreshingly cool. This is where the serious bathing takes place. To do so, you first rub yourself down with what is called a kis (kees). The kis is like a loufa, but slightly rougher, and is worn on the hand like a glove. You usually use it without soap to remove dirt and dead skin (and a lot of it at that) prior to lathering up. Also it is too thin to retain soap on its own. After some serious exfoliation, you lather up and shampoo just like normal, using the water from your buckets to rinse off. In addition, the middle chamber is also where you can get a massage, which was the highlight of my hammam visit. After bathing, you go to the last chamber to lower your body temperature a bit before leaving the bath altogether.

Prior to my night at Moulay Idriss, I had heard of the legendary/notorious hammam massage. So I knew going into it that this wasn't your white linen, pool side rub down. This was a serious, utilitarian, relaxing of the muscles and stretching of the body (emphasis on stretching).

My masseuse, Muhammad Massage, was a pudgy, balding, middle-aged Moroccan man. Identifying me as a foreigner, he communicated to me with polite "monsieurs" and exaggerated gesticulations: pointing, clapping of hands and  the occassional smacking of the tile floor to get me to turn over.

He began by rubbing me down to loosen me up. He then proceeded to put my body through a serious of contortions that I previously didn't know were possible. These included stretching all of my joints to the limit of comfort and a stretching of the spinal column that resulted in an equally significant compression of my nose cartilage. Afterwards he massaged the muscle in my back, and then flipped me over and massaged my chest. Every time he pressed down against me, he let out a quick "SSSS-AH",  much like a weight lifter doing squats. That's the type of force he employed. I've never had a deep tissue massage, but I imagine what I experienced Friday night was similar.

As Muhammad Massage stood over me, grunting, sweat streaming down his face, I couldn't help but smile. To him I was a pliable mass of bone, tissue and tendon, and one of many he had kneaded that day. I had ceded control, and by doing so I was able to withdraw. I didn't care about what he was doing because I trusted him. Why? Because so did everyone else who came here. And so I felt deeply content. I had achieved total relaxation.

The next night, I went to a going-away/Halloween party with the other Fulbright students studying in Fez. Towards the end of the party, a group of us starting to discuss the possibility of introducing hammams to the United States. To one of my companion's chagrin, I questioned whether that would be possible. In my opinion, it would not be enough to merely construct a Moroccan hammam and open it for business. As we established above, the hammam is not merely a place that provides a service. It is a social and cultural symbol that has strong influence and multiple connotations. I think America could adjust to the hammam as a place, but not to hammam culture.

Socially speaking, the greatest challenge would be getting the 'correct' Americans to use the hammams in the 'correct' way. What do I mean by this? In America, the practice of going to a spa to enjoy the steam room and get a massage exists, but only among the upper class. The same is true in Morocco, but those people don't go to hammams in the medina, they go to spas in the new parts of town. The people who use the hammam are everyday, average Moroccans. It is cheap. It is simple. And most importantly, it is not a luxury. The experience is certainly luxurious, especially for someone who is new to it, but it is not seen that way. As we said, a trip to the hammam has a utilitarian purpose. It is for bathing. It is also for relaxation, but this, as my bathing companion Driss told me, is "very good for the health". So could you have a public bath in the United States that not-upper-class people used daily for utilitarian reasons? I don't think so, at least not anytime soon.

An additional challenge is cultural, and it mainly relates to our perceptions of modesty and hygiene. It may be shocking for me to say this, but I think Moroccans are much less squeamish about bathing with each other than Americans. In other words, a Muslim country is more liberal in a very very specific way than the United States. The "gym-class embarrassment" that one American mentioned has kept him from going to the hammam doesn't exist in Morocco. Now keep in mind, we're talking about same-sex hammams. The idea of men and women sharing a hammam is considered shameful, but for men to sit in a steam room together and bathe is completely acceptable and normal. No one bats an eyelash at it. In America I'm not sure this would be the case.

There are a lot of qualifications to this assertion, but I think it is accurate. The key point is that the bathing experience at the hammam is completely asexual, and therefore there is no shame. In the United States, I think the experience would be sexualized (think of our perception of Turkish baths), and only superficially, but just enough to make it awkward. Because Moroccans keep both homo- and heterosexuality almost completely private, that's not the case here.

Another consideration is American culture's view of hygiene. This appeared in hammam discussion with the other Fulbrighters. I mentioned how I doubted many Americans would feel that a traditional hammam was 'clean', and one of my interlocutors agreed. He felt that the heat of the hammam and the near-boiling temperature water used to clean the floors when they're not occupied is not really enough to ensure 'proper' hygiene. And from a typical American point of view, I think he's right. We use Purell before touching food and believe that our children will get poisoned if they don't eat Halloween candy that is prepackaged in plastic. So, from this perspective, hammams are filthy. And I'm sure some are, but the key point is that Moroccans don't think so. As I told my companion, I feel that if Moroccans kept getting sick at the hammam the practice would have died out a long time ago.

I'm glad it hasn't; I'm planning to revisit the hammam tomorrow night.