A la Hammam
Virtually every town in Morocco has at least one hammam, or public bath; in some places it's the only way to get a hot bath. In a country where women's bodies are shielded and shunted to the side, the hammam is a place for women to be free and comfortable without having to worry who is looking. There are a number of optional treatments that can be part of the experience - everything from clay masks to massage to the traditional full-body scrub, or gommage, which I would soon become familiar with. Women are meant to feel beautiful when they leave the hammam, and to go back to their lives feeling rejuvenated by this private time.
I wanted to see what this was like. I also wanted to go because, as I discovered in Japan, when I have the opportunity to get naked with strangers whose language I don't speak, I take it. (Lesson learned from the public bath in Kyoto: the only thing more awkward than being naked with strangers is having all of those strangers burst into giggles as you leave the room.) I had been wanting to try a hammam, and when the hot water went out in our hotel in Essaouira it seemed like a natural opportunity. I walked to a riad (traditional compound house) a few doors down from our hotel and inquired with the concierge. He took my money and motioned for me to follow, and for a moment I panicked that I had just agreed to bathe with this sullen, swarthy man. Not to worry. He deposited me in a steamy tiled den under the care of a pleasant middle-aged woman. With a combination of French and sign language, she instructed me to strip to my skivvies, have a seat on a stool in the tiled washroom, and start dumping buckets of water over my head. Then she left the room.
The water was warm and the room pleasantly steamy, though the bucket washing felt a little Dickensian and the woman was gone for longer than I expected, making me worry that there was some next step in this process that I should have learned before I took my pants off. Just as my fingers started to get pruny, she returned, now dressed in a bathing suit and wearing a loofah mitt. Gommage time.
A gommage is not a mild-mannered experience. It is a full-on, no-nonsense scrub, the type your grandmother used to give you when she plunked you down in the tub and cleaned your ears and elbows until you squirmed. Except instead of your grandmother, it's a total stranger determined to get you clean. This lady scrubbed with purpose and aggression, pausing to rinse dead skin from her loofah glove. I tried neither to giggle nor wince. When I was totally pink, she announced "c'est fini." I dumped a few final buckets on myself, dried off, and went back down the street to my hot water-less hotel. I'd never felt so clean in my life.
Posted on Wednesday, Jan 20, 2010
