The Bridal Hammam: The Day Before the Wedding

A neighbourhood hammam in Fez closes to the public at six on a Wednesday evening. At seven, twenty women arrive at its door. Two of them carry tall candles wrapped in coloured paper. One of them, in the middle of the group, in a plain djellaba with her hair covered, is getting married on Saturday. The tayyaba, who has been paid in advance for the whole party, is waiting on her bench inside. The candles go in first.

This is hammam al-‘aroussa, the bride’s hammam: the fourth event in the Moroccan wedding sequence and the first of the two women’s evenings. Everything that happens inside — the black soap, the kessa mitt, the rhassoul, the rinse — is described in the article on the traditional hammam and is not different here. What is different is everything around it: who is present, what is carried, what is sung, and what the body is being prepared for.

This article covers the urban form. The Amazigh and Sahrawi forms, where they diverge, are noted at the end.

What the bridal hammam is

At its plainest, the bridal hammam is a bath: the bride’s last full hammam before the wedding, so that she arrives at the henna night with clean, softened skin ready to take the paste, and at the wedding night with the body the negafa will dress. It is practical, and Moroccan women describe it practically. You go to the hammam before the henna because the henna will not take on skin that has not been scrubbed.

It is also the bride’s last hammam as a daughter. She has been going to the hammam with her mother since she could walk. This visit is the end of that. The women present know it, and the songs say it, and the candles are there for it. The event holds both facts — the bath and the farewell — without any need to choose between them, and writing about it that emphasises one at the expense of the other gets it wrong in both directions.

When it happens, and who goes

The bridal hammam is held two or three days before the wedding night, and almost always the day before the henna night, since the point of the sequence is to have the skin ready for the paste. In a compressed urban wedding — henna on Friday, wedding on Saturday — the hammam is Thursday evening.

The party is female and it is the bride’s side. Her mother, her sisters, her aunts, her cousins, her close friends, and often the older women of her street. In many families the groom’s mother and sisters are invited, and their presence is significant: it is the first event at which the two families’ women are together as women, without the men and without the formality of the khotba. In more traditional families the groom’s side does not attend the hammam and meets the bride’s side at the henna night instead.

The hammam itself is a neighbourhood hammam hired for the evening after its normal closing — the owner is paid a fee, and the tayyaba a separate one for the whole party — or, increasingly, a private hammam in a spa or a large family home. A neighbourhood hammam hired this way can be full in the older sense: twenty or thirty women in the hot room at once, the bride in the middle.

The procession: candles and the walk

The bride does not simply arrive at the hammam. She is brought.

In Fez, Meknes, and Rabat, and in families elsewhere who keep the older form, the women walk from the bride’s house to the hammam as a group, ululating, with two or four of them carrying tall candles — shma’ — decorated with coloured paper or ribbons, lit or unlit depending on the wind. The candles go ahead. The bride walks in the middle of the group, in a djellaba, her hair covered, her face uncovered. Neighbours come to their doors. The distance may be fifty metres and the walk takes ten minutes, because the point is the walk.

In Casablanca the walk is often a drive, and the candles are carried from the car to the door. In some families the bride is carried into the hammam on a chair or, in Fez, on a mida, the low round table, lifted by four women. The candles are set on the ledge of the hot room and left burning through the bath. What they light is not the room, which has its own light; what they light is the occasion.

Inside: the sequence

The sequence inside is the hammam sequence, performed on the bride by the tayyaba, with the women of both families around her, and with the differences noted in each step.

1. The wait in the hot room

   The bride sits in the hottest room for fifteen or twenty minutes, as anyone would, until the skin has softened. The difference is that she is seated in the middle, on the best place on the bench, and the women sit around her and sing. The candles are on the ledge.

2. The first pour

   The first bucket of water over the bride is poured by her mother, not by the tayyaba. In some families it is the eldest woman present. This is the one moment of the sequence that is reserved, and the tayyaba waits for it.

3. Black soap and the pause

   The tayyaba applies savon beldi across the whole body and waits, as she would for any client, for the soap to loosen the skin. The pause is filled with singing. The bride is not expected to speak.

4. The kessa

   The tayyaba scrubs the bride with the kessa mitt in the long directional passes of the ordinary hammam. This is done with more care than usual and takes longer: the skin has to be perfectly even for the henna, and any abrasion will show under the paste and in the wedding photographs. A tayyaba booked for a bride is booked for her skill at this.

5. Rhassoul on the hair, rose water in the rinse

   The hair is washed with rhassoul clay, as it would be on any full visit, and rinsed with water into which rose water or orange-blossom water has been poured. In Fez a small amount of henna may be worked into the hair to condition it and warm its colour. The rose water is the item most families add for a bride and omit for an ordinary visit.

6. The ghusl

   At the end, the bride performs the full ablution, alone or with her mother’s help, in the prescribed order. This is quiet. The singing stops for it.

7. The wrapping

   She is wrapped in a large towel or a fouta, her hair bound in a second one, and taken to the cool room. The women follow. Tea and pastries are waiting there.

The whole visit takes two to three hours, roughly twice the length of an ordinary one, because of the singing, the tea, and the fact that every woman present is also bathed. The tayyaba, or two of them, will have worked through the entire party.

The body’s preparation, stated plainly

Part of what the bridal hammam prepares the body for is the wedding night in its physical sense, and Moroccan women speak of this directly among themselves. It is stated here without softening because the doctrine of this site is that ordinary life is documented rather than aestheticised, and this is ordinary life.

The bride is fully depilated before the wedding. This is done at the hammam, or at home by a woman who does it professionally, using sukkar, a sugar-and-lemon paste applied warm and pulled off against the direction of the hair, in the method known in English as sugaring. It covers the whole body. It is uncomfortable, it takes an hour or more, and it is a fixed expectation, not a choice, in most Moroccan families. It is also the reason the scrub is done with such care: skin that has been sugared and then scrubbed with the kessa must be handled evenly or it marks.

Older women present at the hammam will, in some families, look at the bride’s skin and comment on it, in the manner of women who have done this before and expect the bride to do it properly. The historical practice of inspecting a prospective bride’s body at the hammam before the engagement, which Westermarck records, is gone. What remains is this: the women of the family checking that the preparation has been done, and saying so.

The bath and the farewell are the same event. Writing that emphasises one at the expense of the other gets it wrong in both directions. Editorial statement — Moroccan Rituals

What is sung

The singing at the bridal hammam is not performed for the bride by musicians. It is sung by the women present, unaccompanied or with a hand drum, and it belongs to a repertoire of women’s wedding songs that varies by city and has never been fully written down.

The songs are addressed to the bride and about her. Their subjects are recurrent: the bride’s beauty, described in the conventional images — her hair, her eyes, her hands; her mother’s sorrow at losing her; the groom’s family, praised or teased; and the wish that the marriage be blessed. Many are call-and-response, with an older woman leading and the group answering. Some are specific to the hammam and mention the water, the steam, the candles. Some are the same songs that will be sung at the henna night the following evening. In Fez the repertoire includes lines in a register of Arabic older than the women singing it, whose meaning they know approximately and whose tune they know exactly.

The songs are interrupted for the ghusl and resume after it. They are not sacred, and no one treats them as sacred. They are what women sing when a daughter is leaving, and they have been sung at enough hammams that every woman in the room knows the responses.

The groom’s hammam and the barber

The groom has his own hammam, on the same day or the day before, and it is a smaller and shorter affair.

He goes with his brothers, his cousins, and his close friends, to a men’s hammam or to the men’s hours of a shared one. There are no candles and no procession, though in the Souss and in some northern towns the friends walk him there with a drum. Inside, he is scrubbed by the kayyas, the male attendant, in the ordinary way, and his friends are scrubbed too. The visit is loud and short. It ends at the barber.

The barber — the hajjam in the older trade, now simply the hallaq — cuts the groom’s hair and shaves him, and in some families this is a small event of its own, with the friends present and a photograph taken. The groom’s hammam and shave are the male equivalent of the bride’s hammam and henna, compressed into an afternoon. The asymmetry is real and no one in Morocco pretends otherwise: the bride’s preparation is a two-day sequence with an audience; the groom’s is a bath and a haircut.

Afterwards: the meal and the oil

The party returns to the bride’s house, or the groom’s family’s women go home and the bride’s stay. There is a meal — not the feast of the henna night, but a real dinner, often a chicken tagine or a rfissa, and the pastries that were carried to the hammam.

After the meal the bride’s hair, still damp, is oiled — with argan, or almond oil, or a scented oil kept for the purpose — and braided or wrapped for the night. Her skin is left alone: no cream, no perfume, nothing that would interfere with the henna the next day. She goes to bed early, in most families, and sleeps in her mother’s house for what is understood to be one of the last times. The women who stay talk late.

The following evening is the henna night, which has its own article. The skin that receives the paste is the skin the hammam prepared.

What it means

Purification is the word most often used, and it is right if it is used carefully. The bridal hammam is not a rite of purification in the sense of removing a state of impurity; the ghusl does that, and it takes five minutes with a bucket. The hammam is a rite of preparation. It makes the body ready, and it makes the bride’s departure from her mother’s house visible and shared, in the one place — the women’s hammam — where the women of a neighbourhood have always gathered without men.

It is also, for the women present, a continuation. The bride was brought to this hammam as an infant, carried on her mother’s hip. She was scrubbed here as a child, complaining. She came here as a girl with her friends. The bridal hammam is the last visit in that sequence and the first in another: the next time she comes, she will come as a married woman, possibly from a different neighbourhood, possibly pregnant, and the women who sang for her will ask how she is. The candles mark the boundary between the two sequences. Nothing about it needs to be made more than it is.

What is changing

The neighbourhood hammam hired for the evening is becoming rarer in the cities, for the same reasons the neighbourhood hammam itself is contracting: fewer of them, more private bathrooms, and a generation that finds the hired-hammam form old-fashioned. What replaces it is the spa. Hotels and private hammams in Casablanca, Marrakech, and Rabat offer bridal packages — the hammam, the scrub, the sugaring, a massage, sometimes the henna the next day — for a party of ten or fifteen, at prices from a few thousand dirhams to well over ten. The candles are supplied. The singing is not, and its absence is the most noticeable difference.

The other change is the family hammam. Larger houses, and the villas of the suburbs, often have a domestic hammam, and a family that has one holds the bridal hammam at home, with the tayyaba brought in. This keeps the singing and loses the walk. There is no procession through a neighbourhood when the hammam is downstairs.

Neither of these is a loss to be mourned in the abstract. Both are what the form currently is, in the cities, for the families who can afford them. The neighbourhood hammam with its candles on the ledge is what the form is for everyone else, and it is still the more common of the two.