In Which Our Heroine Has More North African Adventures

During my travels in North Africa, I've been in many gender segregated situations.

After half a dozen trips to Morocco and one to Algeria, it's often difficult to pinpoint exactly the moment of each iniital culture shock, or to highlight properly when constant exposure to the unknown kept me abnormally alert, or when the exotic sights, sounds & smells plunged me into disorientation.

I've spent a lot of time since that first trip deciphering the values inherent in North African culture and, as any sociology student can attest, one cannot discern these in a snap. The fascination I continue to have for the culture is illustrated in one way by my interest in a society that has one face set for the public and many other varied ones which are completely private.

Some occasions that still make me anxious are gender based social situations. The society is gender segregated, and the public freedoms are those enjoyed by men rather than women. In this post I don't want to write about the fairness of this (I don't believe it is, or how thin a line an independent woman can walk there, or how that razor sharp line has been re-drawn in the last five years -I've written about this in another of my posts).

Let's just say I usually feel ill at ease in a parlor full of North African women, and it's not merely because of the language barrier.

Yet one of the more pleasant situations for me is hammam.

Hammam are the public baths of the Middle East and North Africa and are separate for men and women, a reflection of society.

My first occasion visiting the hammam is with my sister-in-law and her daughter (let's call them La Petite and La Lune). We enter the women's baths and pay our fees (about $3.50 for all three of us) to the old woman in charge in the front changing room, place our street clothes in a cubbyhole to be retrieved when we're finished, and take our supplies with us to the first steam room.

We must bring with us everything we will need; 3 large plastic buckets for getting water, loofahs, washcloths & sponges for cleaning; soap, shampoo, conditioner, razors and towels. Our soap is olive oil based - a dark smooth mixture not formed into hard bars but with a gooshy mud-like texture, with a rich lather and mild scent - it's packed into a small square tupperware container for easy transport to hammam. The loofahs are rough rather than refined.

The first room we enter is a large white tiled room with pipes running along the upper sides of the wall and 3 or 4 drains built into the floor. It's very hot and feels exactly like a steam room.

We stake our place and set out our toiletries, perching uncomfortably on small wooden racks we've brought with us so we sit about 2 inches from the floor. We're wearing only underwear - the rest of our clothing is checked in the entrance cubbyhole.

The steam generates a pleasant enervance, and I relax in the warmth and humidity. We'll spend our entire visit in the first room - there are three, and each one is successively hotter and steamier than the next. The maximum time for the uninitiated (me, basically) to stay in the second room is 20 minutes; I'm warned off the third room as being far too dangerous for a person with so little experience. I take a glimpse of the third room, however, and find it sparsely populated with only a very few elderly women.

We fill our buckets from a communal tap in the first room (and will do so at least four times) and bathe sitting down by first soaping and then rinsing by pouring buckets of hot water over our heads. Etiquette has sway even here, and modesty is important, at least until after the first cleansing.

And so it occurs to me, as it should, that I've just begun to scrape the surface of this experience, hedged about with its own rules and regulations, and to save it as something to tuck tidily away for later contemplation - how hammam traditions differ between countries and how comfortable La Petite and La Lune are with changing their style to suit societial rules too subtle for me to detect.

We complete our soaping and water-over-the-head cleansing process at least three times - after each thorough cleansing we rest, relax, shave legs, condition hair, and talk, our skin soaking up the warmth of the hot water, pores opening in the steam.

No one seems self-conscious other than I. With a tradition of lifelong visits to hammam, how could they? And how could anyone sense I felt so gawky and wrong? All ages are represented, from wrinkled grandmothers to slender teens. Many women are with their children of both sexes (very young boys are allowed). Many surreptiously sneak a peek at me and I can't blame them, as I'm so obviously Western in my height and coloring, yet so obviously belonging with a normal Moroccan mother and daughter. The older women glance knowingly and I think they can tell in an instant that I've never borne a child.

After a long while I become more relaxed and comfortable in hammam - at the end, superlatively clean and uniquely comforted, we recline on divans in the main room for a short time wrapped from head to foot in towels. Retrieving our clothes from the entrance cubbyholes, we dress in street clothes, wet hair bound in towel turbans.

I've had several trips to hammam since then yet I seem to find on each occasion the same mixture of awkwardness, camaraderie, and essential comfort within this purely feminine world.