Getting Naked in Morocco: The Politics of the Hammam

By: Katherine Butler-Dines

October 7, 2015

My mama and I left the house with shampoo, conditioner, and a towel in hand. We walked through the souq, buying the other necessities along the way, such as a bucket, seat, and scrubber. I might have been wearing loose fitting and modest clothes, but with my obvious hammam supplies in tow, I already felt naked. We arrived at the hammam, paid ten dirhams, and undressed immediately. The other women in varying states of preparing for the hammam or redressing appeared unfazed by my presence. While I tried to keep my private parts mostly covered, they took their time getting changed with no concern for covering their bodies with towels during the process.
We entered the actual hammam chambers and while I knew everyone would be naked, I was still taken aback. Where was I supposed to look? I picked to focus on my feet and followed my mama’s lead in filling up the buckets. Several of the women gave me sideways glances, but there was no outward hostility. Here, undressed in the presence of multiple generations of Moroccan women, there was no way for me to blend in. I had neither clothes to cover my paler skin nor any knowledge of hammam rituals.

My mama shared with me her special argan soap and showed me how to scrub myself. A family of women near us spoke in hushed tones to my mama, they nodded in my direction, and she replied that I lived with her. When I caught people looking at me they just seemed curious about why a foreigner was partaking in this Moroccan tradition, especially since we did not bathe at one of the hammams that catered to tourists.

Women helped each other scrub those hard to reach places like the back. One younger woman, who had come with an elder, first assisted the older woman before she began cleaning herself. The atmosphere was relaxed; people still spoke to each other. Interaction occurred more quietly than on the street or in a house but was no less acceptable. Women who had not come together still assisted each other by refilling nearby empty buckets.

While I made plenty of mistakes, my mama was there each time to help correct me. I learned the necessity of keeping your scrubber in the bucket so it doesn’t get dirty by sitting on the tile floor. Another woman intervened when I was filling my bucket at the tap, showing me the correct ratio of hot to cold water. I stood too close to a stranger while rinsing my hair and splashed her a bit. She showed no disdain; I apologized and she smiled. Every woman moved through the ritual at a different pace but it was largely the same actions for everyone. First rinse with hot water, then scrub, then soap, then scrub (especially feet, hands, and more delicate areas), then shampoo and conditioner, and then the final rinse. The whole ritual was complete in just over an hour, but I expect my mama would have stayed longer had she been alone. Many of the women who had entered the hammam before us were still relaxing or scrubbing themselves inside when we left.

I had been uncomfortable with the idea of the hammam before going largely due to my own American influenced prejudices. I expected the hammam, which is by definition a group of women cleaning themselves naked in front of each other, to be an uncomfortably sexual experience. I was struggling with an ingrained taboo of public nudity. America, especially the media, struggles to separate the human body as the shell of organism that needs care and cleaning from the human body as a sexualized object.

The hammam is not a homoerotic or at all sensual experience. Despite the women helping clean each other, the environment was neither intimate nor sexually charged. Nudity in this setting was not attached to love or lust but necessity. Cleaning your body was simply a physical action. This is not to say the women were not enjoying themselves; judging by how long women spend in the hammam, I expect that it is a time for decompression and relaxation. There is also a deep practicality to the hammam; it saves water and money, especially in a country where having a shower in a house, let alone hot water, is still not accessible to everyone. Further, the hammam is an incredibly non-judgmental environment. In the United States there is a focus, especially in the media, on the “perfect” body, which often leads to people feeling self-conscious when naked or showing a lot of skin in public. In the hammam, however, women of all body types and ages comfortably are undressed in each other’s presence.

In Morocco, there is a significant separation between the public and private, and these two spheres each dictate very different behaviors on the part of women. The hammam lies at an interesting intersection of these two spheres. While cleaning one’s body is private, where this action takes place is public. The hammam still falls in the private sphere because of the intimate act of cleaning the body and also because it is all females. Public space in Morocco is notoriously the realm of the male, and the hammam, as being a place for only women (there are also hammams for men) has an atmosphere devoid of any patriarchy or hierarchy that might exist in the public space. While from the outside Morocco appears to be a very conservative country and the tradition of the hammam might appear to be at odds with its Islamic and conservative identity, it is most assuredly not. Just as I have observed women remove head coverings in their homes, dance freely to American hip-hop music, and breastfeed openly, the hammam shows that a conservative appearance is only one facet of a diverse and tolerant existence.
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