The Hammam Experience
Hootoksi Tyabji, Sana'a, October 1992
If you stood at a vantage point and looked down on any Yemeni city, you would see among the throng of beautiful traditional buildings, structures with domes. These were Hammams, public baths built mostly of stone, some dating from the time of the Ottoman occupation of Yemen in the 1800s.
The Hammam is a place where Yemeni women go to hear the latest gossip, to escape housework, to give the children their weekly scrub and to view and discuss a prospective match! Young girls are scrutinized by older women and bodies are perfumed and given the steam treatment deemed imperative for good health. I had romantic notions about Hammams and nothing and nobody was going to deter me from experiencing one.
Hanna, Asli and Fawzia, three of my students decided to take me to a Hammam and they asked me to bring along a half-slip, towel, soap, and a few riyals. They insisted that we got to the Hammam early in the morning,so that it would be a clean and a pleasurable first experience.
We arrived at around 7 AM and walked over to a filthy little shop next door to the Hamman where we paid our dues, about 50 cents each. The old man who collected the money, didn’t look at the coins we gave him, he just threw them into a large tin that once held baby milk powder. That done, we marched single file down the narrow steps, out of the sunlight and into the dark interior of the Hammam. I found myself standing in an empty room with nothing but large nails on the wall, on which we hung our clothes. I was instructed to wear my half-slip across my bosom from where it kept slipping off as I don’t have much of a bosom to hold it up! Armed with soaps, perfumes, scrubbing cloths, loofas, pastes, creams, brushes, and empty tin cans we marched into another room where there was only one other family.
There were a total of five rooms in the Hammam; each one had a different intensity of heat, but was constructed in the same way. Along the walls was a stone trough into which hot and cold water flowed from pipes sticking out of the walls. It collected there till you were ready to wash the soap off your body and this was done by slopping the water over you with the old tin can provided by the establishment. The heat was generated by furnaces fired by wood and coal. The whole place was rather dark and drab looking.
Having quickly put some soap on my body and scrubbed it off I was ready to leave in 20 minutes flat, but this was not to be! I looked over at my three friends who were thoroughly enjoying themselves, and seeing I was getting ready to leave, they pushed me back down on the floor and told me the experience had just begun, and I had to watch and follow their movements from now on. Here are some of my observations and feelings over the next three hours we spent in the Hammam.
We stayed in each of the five rooms for varying periods of time. We began the ritual by sitting on the floor in a haze of hot vapor which I was told opened the clogged pores of the skin! Every time the floor became too hot and I started to squirm, Hanna or one of the others would collect some cold water in the old tin can and slosh it under my butt! As we lay there, I noticed things that were going on around me.
I began to see lots of people were trooping in. There were all sorts of shapes, sizes, and ages of women. Nude nymphs, old crones and children including several with matted hair and dirt caked into their skins. These poor little creatures were dragged in and unceremoniously held and scrubbed and I mean SCRUBBED! The louder they shrieked, the harder went the loofa over their pink little bodies. One mum got so frustrated with her wriggling screeching charge that she spat right into the child’s face to shut her up! I also noticed there were elderly ladies fully clad walking around, inspecting prospective brides for their sons or grandsons. They thought nothing of walking up to a young lady and lifting her arms to check the tautness of the skin underneath. I noticed some women oiling themselves and others applying henna and turmeric all over their bodies. Between the heat and the mounting noise, I was more than ready for phase two of the operation!
On gently nudging my comatose companions I was told to move on to the next room where we started the soaping routine all over again. Having finished in about a minute, Asli grabbed the bar of soap from me and slowly, gently, and sensuously proceeded to show me how to soap myself. The soaping can take anything from 20-60 mins per session, during which the women scrub each other with loofas, sponges, plastic and wooden brushes and a special black cloth which Fauzia offered to scrub my back with. “It will take off the first layer of dirt” she said. I hesitatingly asked how many layers there might be and was told rather sternly “It depends.”
I resigned myself to my fate and continued surveying my surroundings. By now the noise and the heat had risen to unbearable levels, and the children had begun relieving themselves anywhere and everywhere with abandon. The women who were into the cleansing phase had dropped their petticoats and lay about naked in various positions all over the floor. Most squatted, some knelt, some lay stretched out full length while they were being scrubbed by older women. You can hire a scrubbing lady at the door when you first enter the Hammam. Standing is taboo, and bosoms are proudly displayed and vigorously scrubbed. I had never seen such an array in all my life!
I was unceremoniously woken from my reverie by a green hand that began to make contact with my face. I almost let out a terrified scream as this yucky, spinach like substance was smeared all over my body and hair, but in the interest of cultural sensitivity, I kept my mouth tightly shut! I couldn’t quite tell which of my three friends was putting me through this because each of them was covered in this slimy green goo which made them look like monsters from another planet! I tried to shut out the noise and the stench by closing my eyes, nose, and ears, but to no avail. “Hootoksi my dear, these are very special herbs, so good for your skin, and they will make you very special for Robert tonight!” I opened my eyes and looked straight into the shining orbes of an apparition from Mars, and in that instant, I realized that my romantic notions of the Hammam were utterly, totally and completely shattered for all time.
If you had visited our home a week after my historic visit to a Yemeni Hammam, you would still have smelled the perfume of roses, cloves, sandalwood, musk, incense, ancient leaves and God knows what that lingered on me long after I waltzed out of a room!