Baring Myself at the Hammam
Years ago when I went to a hammam in Istanbul I didn’t bring a bathing suit. Thinking I was being culturally sensitive or some anthro major nonsense, I figured we would go naked. But the ladies at the public bath the Turkish woman who was marrying my American friend took us to were all wearing bikinis or one pieces. I spent the afternoon cringing in my white granny underwear, a towel awkwardly draped over my chest.
When I recently visited a hammam again, this time at Paris’s Grand Mosque, I carefully read articles about it beforehand, not wanting to make the same mistake. It was clear from the descriptions that one needed to wear bikini bottoms and could wear a bikini top as well, but that the top was not required. I thought I’d perhaps go topless this time without shame. I’d be in line with convention, after all, and I’m almost 50 now. My body has birthed a child and gone through chemo. What do I care?
But when I arrived at the hammam and it was time to change into my bikini bottoms, I was glad that at the last minute I had also stuffed a top into my bag – perhaps compensating for my previous lack of caution. Though I’d been fixated on the sartorial rules, I hadn’t really thought about the horizontal red scar that spans my left breast where cancer, and my nipple along with it, was removed almost three years ago and where an implant now stands at attention. I’d grown used to the scar’s appearance in the shower or catching sight of it in a mirror while getting dressed, but it’s not like anyone other than my husband and doctors had seen it. I imagined double takes in the steam rooms.
About half the women I saw in the changing area were topless, but I decided to wear my pink halter. I squeezed into it and lounged in several rooms, each with a different level of heat, scouring myself with pungent eucalyptus soap, sweating, and rubbing my fogged-up glasses to see where I was going.
When it came time for my gommage, or scrubbing, the attendant told me to take off my top and lie on the warm, wet tiles face down. She scrubbed the back of my body and then instructed me to turn over. The scrubbing is almost violent in its vigor, and I vaguely wondered how she’d handle my scar. We chatted a bit and I spoke to her in my rusty Arabic.
“Are you from Lebanon or Syria?,” she asked.
“I’m American. But I lived in Morocco for a while, that’s where I first learned some Arabic.”
“I’m Moroccan! From Casablanca.” We smiled at each other as I tried out my even rustier Moroccan dialect.
When it came time to scrub my chest, she was incredibly gentle around my scar, and I met her eye and thanked her. “Barak Allah fik,” I said. May Allah’s blessings be upon you.
She said many things to me then that I didn’t catch, but I heard the words for God and for health. I felt my eyes prick with tears, surprising myself. I had planned the trip to Paris with my husband and daughter as a celebration of the end of active treatment, of remission. And now that my hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes have grown back, no one can tell what I’ve been through. In many ways cancer now feels a little fuzzy, like a bad dream whose peculiar plot points remain but whose details are now lost.
But exposing the scar to the kind hammam attendant brought back the fear and misery the cancer had caused, as well as the worry that it will return in my brain, my bones, my lungs – a worry that dogs me, as it does any cancer survivor.
I willed the tears back into their ducts and thanked the woman warmly before heading upstairs for a massage. “Bislama,” I bade her goodbye. Go in peace.
After the massage I sat in my bikini – bottoms as well as top – in the main area of the hammam, listening to the burble of the fountain and the hum of women’s voices and sipping sugary mint tea from a tiny glass. The taste and smell of the beverage transported me to my mid 20s and hot summer mornings in Fes, when I’d gulp it down before walking a long stretch of dusty boulevard lined with palm trees that led to my language institute. I stretched out my legs, palming my calves that were now slippery with the remnants of the orange blossom oil used by the masseuse.
A few minutes later I dressed and made my way out of the hammam through the mosque’s café, teeming with families after Friday prayer, and into the bright afternoon sun to look for mine.
-Mimi Kirk
Mimi Kirk is a writer and editor based in Washington, DC.