Michelle Betz's Dispatch from Morocco #7
Hajja, the Hammam and the Bhor
Rabat MoroccoMarch 7, 2005
“Hajja” is the term given to Muslim women who have completed the Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Hajja in my life is like a mother to me.
Her name is Fatna and she is the wife of Hassan, my landlord. She speaks about three words of English and her vocabulary includes “crazy” and “I’m sorry." Her French is a bit more extensive, but not by much. But we somehow manage to communicate. I first met Hajja back in September, when I found my little house. She’s about my height (short, and we’ll leave it that!), probably in her 60s, with coarse orange hair (probably thanks to the henna that’s everywhere here) peeking out of her scarf and a wonderfully expressive face. I think that’s how I manage to understand her.
Over the past two months, Hajja and I have gotten closer. I see her at least a couple of times a week when she shows up around 8 a.m. to clean my house on Mondays and Thursdays. This week I heard her calling me from outside on Wednesday morning. I went downstairs and let her in, thinking something was wrong (the only time I see her in the morning is when she has come to clean). She headed straight for the kitchen, made herself a coffee and started doing the dishes. I followed her and tried to explain that it was not Thursday. She finally understood, hit her head with her hand and proclaimed “Fatna crazy." And she repeated it over and over again. I just laughed, gave her a hug and told her to sit down and relax. On Monday of this same week, Hajja had come to finish my laundry when she found me at home. She asked if I’d like to go to the "hammam" with her. I said absolutely!
The hammam is the public bath. Different times of the day are allotted to men and women and Monday afternoons were reserved for women. Hajja came up to my bedroom this particular Monday and gathered some of my clothes in a neat pile and tied them together with a scarf. She told me to get my shampoo and soap (I grabbed my loofah as well), she grabbed a bucket and off we went. We stopped at her place on the way. She grabbed a few items of clothing including a djelleba (a long hooded robe that Moroccans, both men and women, wear over the rest of their clothing) and a scarf. She handed this little package to me and, from what I understood, I was supposed to put this garb on at some point. She grabbed another bucket and a few other things, including a small plastic stool. We headed out.
We made our way across to the medina then wound our way through several labyrinthine alleys before she led me through a small doorway. There was a man behind a cashier’s window. I gave Hajja some money who then gave it to the man. We continued on down the hallway into a big open domed room with several similar rooms leading off of it. Hajja indicated that I should strip down. I did so, packed all of my clothes back into my pack and followed Hajja, who led the way armed with a couple of buckets and a stool. We entered another room filled with naked woman sitting, standing, and pulling buckets of steaming hot water towards their coveted piece of the hammam.
Hajja found a spot for us and indicated that I sit down. She went off to get the requisite buckets of hot water. On her return she took an old plastic container, dipped it in the bucket and poured water on me. Again and again. She then handed me a little scrubbing mitten and showed me what to do by using one on herself. Apparently I was supposed to scrub and scrub (quite hard actually) thereby exfoliating. With a happy glint in her eye, she showed me the small dirty rolls of skin that she was rubbing off. I scrubbed myself even harder – but no such little bits of skin for me. Apparently she wasn’t happy with the lack of skin I was producing, despite my best scrubbing efforts, so she called over one of the attendants. The two of them went to work on me. It felt good, actually, even if I did feel like a live fish being scaled. They flipped me over and scrubbed my backside and flipped me over again all the while being exfoliated to the max by these two old ladies. I still have little scabs and abrasions on my left arm and chest. Guess they scrubbed a little too hard. We went back and forth from one room to another – there are several cavernous rooms each hotter then the next and no light except that which made it through a small window at top of the dome. I liked the hottest room. It felt nice to be warm. Usually, I have to wear five layers of clothing.
After an hour of scrubbing and being scrubbed and hearing children wail as their mothers scrubbed them it was time to leave. I wished there was a way I could record the sounds of the echoes of women talking, laughing, of water gushing and splashing and of the kids screaming as if they were being tortured. But somehow I don’t think they’d appreciate a naked foreigner armed with a microphone and a mini-disc. After I had dressed, Hajja kindly reminded me that I had the djelleba. I threw that over my clothes as she grabbed a scarf and then my head. Before I knew it my wet hair was wrapped in a white scarf. But, the piece de resistance came when she carefully wrapped a more colorful scarf over that one. On our way out she pointed at something. Yikes! There I was, staring at myself in a mirror. A bespectacled, pale Michelle wrapped from head to toe. If not for the glasses I probably would not have recognized myself!
Two nights after the hammam adventure (we're back to Wednesday morning here), Hajja came to cleanse my house. At the end of the cleansing, however, it felt dirtier than it did before. And while the hammam had done a wonderful job of clearing my lungs, the "bhor" just jammed them back up again. Bhor, you see, is what I bought last week in the medina – the various bits of herbs, snakeskin and god knows what else. There is a lot of magic and witchcraft here in Morocco and even more so around the time of the new year. As a result, bhor, which is supposed to have some type of magical properties (though I have yet to figure out what exactly), is more readily available, though somehow I don’t think it’s even that hard to find any time of the year.
Hajja had seen my stash of bhor when she came to clean and said something to the effect of coming over and showing me what one does with it. Hajja showed her clay crucible filled with charcoal and a small box of charcoal lighter thingies. She put the crucible on the floor of my sitting room, added some bits of charcoal lighters and set it aflame. Once it settled down a bit she took it outside, sat on my doorstep and began to fan the flames. Once she was satisfied with the state of the charcoals she came back in and threw on a couple handfuls of bhor.
The smoke became intense immediately. Not fazed in the least and carrying the crucible, Hajja walked to each corner of each room blowing the smoke (not that you needed to blow it as there was so much of it). She did this with each corner, crevice, cubby hole and closet throughout the entire house. She then added some of her bhor (which frankly smelled better than mine) and handed the clay crucible to me. I took it gingerly, worried I would burn my fingertips off -- surely this thing conducts heat, no? Hajja then motions for me to do what she had just done so in reverse I attacked each corner, cubby hole and crevice of the house, blowing smoke -- more to get it away from me then anything. I felt like we should be chanting or something.
We finish the task and put the still smoldering (big time, by now) crucible on the kitchen floor. She grabs my new tea kettle, fills it with water and places it on the charcoal -- I suppose it’s being christened or something. My eyes are burning. I want to gasp for air, but I'm not sure what the protocol is when you’re doing this. I mean, can I rub my eyes, take a deep breath or cough to expel all the smoke going into my lungs? I pretend everything’s fine, even though I was convinced I was going to die of smoke inhalation. The whole house was in a haze of smoke so thick you could barely see anything. We plop down on the couch. “Mizyen?” she asks. “Good?” “Yes,” I say as convincingly as I possibly can without choking on the smoke. We begin to watch “The Fabulous life of Mel Gibson” on pirated satellite TV -- Mel and his $40 million Gulfstream jet. Wow. Weird. It just struck me as bizarre, as I sat there choking on the smoke of the bhor with an old Moroccan lady in the Kasbah of Rabat. Yep, what a trip... and it didn’t even cost me $40 million.
Big hugs
Michelle
