Gamal Nkrumah explores the nostalgic world of Cairo's traditional public bathhouses, or hammams, in the company of Egyptian author May Telmissany "From a moral or moralising perspective, the eroticism attributed to the experience of the public bath comes from the mixture of seduction and chastity that characterises discussions of nudity in popular wisdom," notes May Telmissany, a professor of literature and film at the University of Ottawa in Canada and the author of two novels, Dunyazad (2000) and Heliopolis (2003), in her introduction to The Last Hammams of Cairo: A Disappearing Bathhouse Culture, a new book on Cairo's traditional public bathhouses published by the American University in Cairo Press. "The eroticised image of a woman getting out of the bath is often associated with the implicit promise of a potential act of love," Telmissany writes, "the woman being ready for the consummation of such an act thanks to the cleanliness of her body and the relaxing of her senses. The melody sung by a man only accentuates the erotic meaning of the lyrics." Darkness starts to break at the edge of town. There are the beginnings of the slums and shantytowns. In the peripheral areas of Islamic Cairo lie the murky waters of the city's traditional bathhouses, and, visiting them recently, one saw the visual indications of a time gone by. What remains are only watery shadows. What dark deeds once went on within these decrepit walls? The image of Dunyazad, sister of Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, springs to mind. However, Telmissany insists that the text she has contributed to The Last Hammams of Cairo is not an Orientalist work. Nor, she says, are the accompanying photographs by French photographer Pascal Meunier. "To begin with, I was apprehensive," she explained in a recent interview with the Weekly. "I am not impressed with Orientalist images of people from this part of the world, which are generally quite undignified. Either people are presented as sexually available, or they are pictured as being part of the exotic scenery, like the furniture." However, Meunier does not adopt an Orientalist viewpoint on the bathhouses, managing instead to bring them to life using bold, vibrant colours and producing an evocative, nostalgic atmosphere. The characters portrayed in his photographs have personality, and plenty of it. The sad reality, however, is that the baths are generally far uglier than Meunier's camera suggests, even though the fact that he manages to beautify them is in itself eloquent testament to his creativity and technical capability. "What strikes one the most leafing through Meunier's photographs is the festive colours in them that lend the traditional baths a cheerful ambiance," Telmissany says. "However, you know that these traditional hammams are very grim places, the colours are forbidding, and they can fill you with a sense of foreboding. Meunier presents the baths in a stylish fashion, not as they once were in mediaeval times, but as they could be with fresh imagination." "I took one look at the photographs and told myself that these were images full of life and colour. Yet, I know that in reality these places are often hideous and nightmarish places," Telmissany says, going on to talk about what she calls the lack of transparency, the bureaucracy and the red tape that is endemic in the authorities' attitude towards them. "The Supreme Council of Antiquities should be doing more to preserve these architectural and artistic treasures," she says. She gives the case of Al-Sukariya, "one of the most beautiful hammams in the city. The Supreme Council of Antiquities pledged to renovate it some years ago, but to this day it is in ruins." Telmissany compares this to the situation in North Africa, where, she says, the authorities have taken a keen interest in refurbishing and restoring the hammams to their original beauty. "In the city of Tunis alone, each suburb has two or three fully-functioning hammams," Telmissany says. "Tunisians and foreigners alike are free to enjoy the amiable setting of the traditional hammams," these functioning as integral parts of the community "like social clubs and spas where people come to relax and socialise". She will be flying to Damascus in November to attend a conference in which she intends to expose the sorry state of Egypt's disappearing hammams. "We have hammams in Cairo and Alexandria that, if they were restored, could easily rival the best hammams in any Mediterranean country," Telmissany says. "The irony is that so-called Turkish baths are booming in many European cities, and not just in the Mediterranean world. New hammams are being built in Morocco to rival the ancient ones in beauty." Returning to The Last Hammams of Cairo, this book, marked by "Meunier's manipulation of colour, is an astounding artistic feat," she says. "The irony is that before I agreed to write the text we had never met in person. Meunier took these breathtakingly beautiful photographs, and I wrote the text in collaboration with Eve Gandossi, whom I have never met either." May Telmissany has lived in Canada with her husband Walid El-Khashab, a professor at York University in Toronto, since 1998, and she says that since leaving Egypt she has never looked back. "My children are Francophone," she says, "and we speak French at home. Shehab, my elder son, speaks some Arabic -- heavily accented, of course. My younger son only knows a few words of Arabic; he is thoroughly Canadian. My father, Abdel-Qader Telmissany, introduced me to the world of literature and culture. He was a distinguished theatre director, but that was all a long time ago." Telmissany then becomes more personal. "During my childhood, I regularly took baths with my two brothers. One year separates me from the older one, and one year from the younger. My mother would put all three of us in a tub full of warm water and let us play for a while with plastic cups and paper boats. When she heard squabbling, she would come back into the bathroom armed with a large bar of Naplouse soap and a reproachful expression. She would get us out of the tub one by one, scrub us diligently, and rinse us with hot water. She would then dry us off with large, clean towels, wrap us up snugly in our pyjamas, and put us to bed." Telmissany pauses. "The end of our baths together came about abruptly, several days after my sixth birthday. I understood then that I was no longer a child." The conversation turns to the rather negative impression of bathhouses in Egyptian popular stories. There are many songs, sayings and films about the hammams of Cairo, but most of these references are negative, to put it mildly. There is sometimes something sinister about the hammams in these representations, and they are seen as both seductive and beguiling, sexy, but sinful. Tales of this nature go some way towards explaining how Egypt's hammams have been brought to their present plight. But there is no shortage of other potential culprits. Indeed, in order to understand the future of the hammams, it is imperative that policymakers, financiers, investors and the general public know more about what has gone so badly wrong with them. Negative public perceptions of the hammams have also made a mockery of the idea that they need to be restored. Blind faith in the traditional bathhouses started to crack soon after the July 1952 Revolution. More and more Egyptians were then managing to rise out of poverty and gain secure incomes. Electricity and running water were becoming more readily available even in the poorest neighbourhoods. All these factors led to the decline of the public bathhouse of yesteryear. Yet, probably the single most important factor explaining its decline is the disapproving attitude of the public. Telmissany believes that misconceptions of this sort have led to a deterioration in the state of the traditional hammams. "Knowing these proverbs and popular songs, I myself formed a negative view of the public baths. That opinion fed on the cinematic images I had consumed passionately and assiduously from my earliest years onwards." The songs and sayings were bad enough, she says, but the films featuring the hammams conjured up even more damaging images of the decadent and degenerate bathhouses. These left a lasting impression on the Egyptian collective psyche. Indeed, an entire chapter of The Last Hammams of Cairo is devoted to perceptions of hammams in Egyptian cinema. Here, Telmissany is unequivocal. "Three films fixed the fictional image of the baths in the collective memory of Egyptians. The first two, Your Day Will Come and The Matatili Hammam, came out in 1951 and 1973, respectively, and both were directed by Salah Abu Seif." "A remake of Your Day Will Come was made in 1978 with the title The Criminal," she says, "and The Matatili Hammam in particular defined public perceptions of the hammams. This ideological discourse on the traditional bathhouse tarnished the image of the hammam, while the present book aims to give it a new polish." However, perhaps the most melodramatic of all films dealing with hammams is Ow Ow, a black comedy starring Leila Elwi in the role of a masseuse in the Magoush baths. "Also called the Matatili Baths, these are the same baths that were made famous by the writer Ismail Walieddin in his novel of the same name, which was then adapted for cinema by Salah Abu Seif." These few Egyptian films featuring the bathhouses of Cairo were the expression not of a hard-headed opinion against them, Telmissany says, but rather of a wooly- minded one. "The public bath, then, represents a place that Egyptian directors have not often dared to visit -- largely out of a sense of modesty or out of aesthetic disinterest, since the reality adopted by nearly all directors would not have allowed total nudity of either men or women, since nudity was judged to be illicit by a puritanical censorship, as well as by a conservative public," Telmissany notes. She explains further. "A place to celebrate the end of sexual abstinence imposed by the rituals of the holy month of Ramadan," such has been the orthodoxy of popular conceptions of the hammams. Even so, they have still remained a place on which many Egyptians have professed themselves to be experts, something that has not always been the case elsewhere in the Arab and Muslim world. " Miskeen," says the bather as he crosses the threshold of the hammam -- a "poor soul" who has yet to experience the comforts, colours and steam of the bath. Such ideas are associated with a nostalgic conception of the bathhouse, and Meunier captures them magnificently in his photographs. "He who cannot live in ruins cannot understand their beauty, nor can he savour the pleasures of time after the flight of centuries." Does Telmissany think that the bathhouses will once again attract bathers of all classes and from the community as a whole? The problem is that the traditional bathhouses are now widely regarded as unhygienic, and well-off Cairenes would not be seen dead bathing in such places. Indeed, the bathhouses of today are largely associated only with the poorest of the poor. Telmissany nevertheless waxes lyrical: "the bather, with his svelte body the colour of wheat, who skims the hot water in the basin with his foot, is beauty for the eyes and softness to the touch." The bathhouse today has become inextricably intertwined with issues of poverty and the daily grind. But "for the photographer who watches these movements of pure ecstasy, an infinite space opens before his anxious gaze." Maybe so. But for the time being the subject of the bathhouse, like that of its bathers, has probably become "a dish that has been scrubbed too many times."
