Ritual, strategy, or convention: Social meanings in the traditional women's baths in Morocco

Introduction

When I lived in Morocco for two years, friends back home asked me to write about the lives of women there. I found the task intimidating, because of the variety and contrasts I saw in this North African country, an ancient Muslim nation struggling with European influence for much of this century. Both traditional and modern, Morocco has a complex society which cannot be generalized.(1)

In Morocco there are both rural and urban women, of nomadic Berber origin and of Arabic ancestry, and the traditional veiled Muslim woman as well as her unveiled counterpart who dresses in what we call Western clothes. Women stay home and women work outside the home. Some have many children, some limit their families and others never marry. How to write intelligently about all of them?

There is a place I can write about, a place where almost every woman in Morocco goes, regularly or for religious purification or for special occasions, and where she is freer than in any other public establishment. It is a place I got to know through long hours there. This place is the public bath, scene of ritual weekly bathing, known in Morocco by its Arabic name, the hammam.(2)

My early visits to hammams in Morocco resulted from first, a desire for a hot bath and second, a general interest in the culture of women there. I did not intend to take on the role of participant-observer or imagine that I would, some years later, reflect on what I learned there to look for social meaning. I needed to bathe, loved the experience of the hammam, and kept detailed journal notes.

I lived in Morocco from June 1983 to July 1985, spending two years teaching in Casablanca, and summers in Azrou (in the Middle Atlas mountains), Tangier, and Rabat, the capital city, respectively. My first hammam visit took place in Azrou, a medium-sized, rural, Berber tow and I bathed at hammams in virtually every town and city throughout Morocco where I spent more than three days' time.(3)

I bathed weekly at a hammam in my Casablanca neighborhood, the Maarif, a working-class district with few foreigners then living there. Altogether I bathed at Moroccan hammams about one hundred times. When I returned to Morocco in 1989 for a fifteen-day visit, I bathed at four hammams in different towns or cities, including a visit to my regular hammam in Casablanca. Through my observations in and notes from baths in many parts of Morocco, both rural and urban, I can describe the social organization of the hammam and why its use persists.

The women's public bath receives only marginal mention in Western writing. Hildred Geertz and Susan Schaefer Davis refer to it briefly in writing about other issues in Morocco. Westerners generally know of such public baths only through literature or travelogues, which contribute to the myth of the bath as an orgy-like place where women (or men) behave in ways that Westerners do not (so the 'other' thinking goes). Our view of women's baths in non-Western countries has been clouded with fantasy and what Edward Said calls Orientalism.

Few have looked at the hammam as a social institution on its own. Here I describe the hammam as I experienced it, since sheer enjoyment of it was my first motive in writing about it. I detail the important ritual aspects of the bath and, in acknowledgment of cultural biases, I look at Western attention to the Eastern women's bath. Then I describe how it functions in Moroccan society as a social world for women. Finally, I try to place the women's bathhouse in contemporary Moroccan culture--why does the tradition continue, when its original purpose of providing bath water because homes had none, no longer holds true?

The Bath Scene and Ritual

When one enters the large, high-ceilinged room, she will be struck by the simultaneous sensations of heat, noise, and darkness. The heat, and noise--women's voices, echoing, and raised to beat the din--are walls she instantly passes through, and her eyes work hard to see in the low light.

The visual sense takes over as she begins to sort out the view: a jumble of naked women, sitting, crouching, or lying on the floor, alone or in pairs or trios. They rub, scrub and massage themselves and each other, in a luxurious and seemingly erotic atmosphere of abandon.

The room is concrete, its ceiling arched, floors and walls covered in tiles. Women crowd around the water source, a large concrete basin built into the wall, usually divided into two parts for hot--scalding hot--and cold water faucets. They fill buckets with water, carrying half a dozen or so to the part of the floor they have chosen, and mark off this territory by a half-moon arrangement of the heavy, worn wooden or black rubber buckets.

Small children are everywhere, playing together or sitting in their mothers' water buckets, waiting to be washed. Children come to the hammam with their mothers, grandmothers, sisters, or some other female extension of the large and important Moroccan family.

These children often scream and cry as their mothers scrub and brush them as vigorously as they do themselves. Sometimes, exhausted by the heat and wrapped in a robe or towel, children nap on the benches in the dressing room while their mothers finish their own baths. But the children, like their mothers, love the weekly excursion to the hammam.