Finding the Hammam

The Salon was where I went to feel safe. Like the Planned Parenthoods across America, The Salon’s exterior was unwelcoming, every inch of glass crowded in newspaper cutouts. The newspapers across glass were there to block out the outside world, to create a space where the women inside could not be seen by the men who owned the streets. Inside, behind two doors, The Salon was immaculate. It was more of a mini-mall than a salon: there was a sugar-
waxing studio, a nail salon, a gym, and then a locker room with a Turkish bath (Hammam) and showers, where the woman would gather, naked, in the water and talk for hours.

In 2010 I was living in Jordan, studying abroad in Amman for a semester of college to improve my Arabic. It was the first time my Pakistani-American ass was for real for real outside of the Western world, which despises Islam and Muslims. In my first few weeks in Jordan I’d been followed home twice from the bus by strange men hoping to marry me. My host brothers had to chase them out of our backyard. It became quite clear to me that I couldn’t just walk outside freely without a man to help “protect” me. Places that were inside, with mostly women, became my only realm of real safety while I lived there.

It was not all that different from America. I was in middle school when the towers fell; my formative years were defined by the vitriolic racism and Islamophobia that plagued America in its wake. While most kids were worried about the sudden new stench of B.O. coming from their armpits, I was hiding in my school’s bathrooms, afraid of being followed home or called a terrorist. I became used to harassment, not just in terms of race and religion, but also as a woman walking about the world. In my high school hallways I was constantly groped by the hands of young men when I was trying to get to class. Once, a classmate followed me out of class on my way to the bathroom and pinned me against a locker while he felt me up until I had to literally shout for him to get off me. He wasn’t even reprimanded—the teacher who heard my scream just told us to stop goofing around and get back to class. The next day when I walked to the train station from school, he laughed with his friends and shouted, “You see those sideburns, dude? She has to be a fucking man, as hairy as she is.”

Boys will be boys, as they say, and reap the benefits of a patriarchal world. A world that is built on “boys will be boys” violence; a world where women, femme, gender nonconforming, trans, and queer people, by design, can never fit safely inside.

The street harassment in Jordan was only surprising to me because my naïve self expected more from Muslim men. I was so excited to be living in a Muslim-majority place for the first time in my life, I hadn’t even considered that would happen. I expected it to be more like a family reunion, where we would all dance and sing together and practice Islam in whatever way we saw fit. Aunties and uncles would greet me at the bus stop with sweets. We would all roll out our prayer mats in the streets and pray together, delighting in how our relationship with God was our own and free from judgment. That was far from the case. On sight, many people judged me as a haraami, a Muslim woman brimming with sin, going straight to hell. My uncovered hair, my sandals showcasing my exposed feet, and my Western clothes were all sites of scorn.

This all changed in The Salon. In here, women took off their hijabs and the covered and uncovered blended in together without worry. Women talked openly about sex, showing each other lacy lingerie they had bought for a special night with their husbands. Bodies soaked in the warm water for hours as recipes were exchanged, hair and nail tips passed through the pools. I didn’t feel judged; I felt like I could come as I was, lose track of time, and spend hours just being. Here, for a few brief moments every day, we were free.

One day the receptionist at The Salon ran down the halls flinging her hijab around her and screaming, “A man is here! A man is here! A man!” A maintenance man had come to fix a pipe that was broken in the building and was being sequestered between the two doors by non-hijabi women. The air shifted, the tension so thick it hung like a spoiled wedding cake throughout the complex. From corners I had never before noticed, women began pulling out shawls and draping themselves in them. A few women locked themselves in the waxing room, turning the light off and pressing themselves against the wall to avoid being seen, like the lockdown drills we practiced in middle school. Water splashed as wet bodies left the Hammam, rolls jiggling with the force of running, emergency hijabs flying through the air. Within a minute, women who had previously been fully naked were completely covered, not a wisp of hair in sight.

I can’t remember how long the maintenance man took. Ten minutes? An hour? We were all absolutely still, unmoving, not even the whir of a treadmill going.

When he left, we all breathed freely again. And that is when I knew that this place was nothing short of magic. That I could live in The Salon, forever.

At a reading a few weeks ago, an audience member asked me how I would describe my poetics in a few words. I said I wanted them to be haraam auntie poetics—the auntie who you can talk to about sex and sexuality, who you can go to when you can’t go to your parents. Another audience member asked what I hoped my poems would do in the world. I told them that if one of my poems could make someone else feel seen, feel safe for a brief moment, feel a little less alone, I would have accomplished my goal. The two answers are really the same. Far too many times I put myself in violent situations, particularly sexual ones, because I felt an aloneness, an otherness that I could not talk about with anyone. Because I could not name my desire. Because I could not reconcile the many things I was into an identity that was accepted. Muslim. Pakistani. Kashmiri. American. Queer. Femme. Orphan. Sometimes woman. Sometimes man. Sometimes neither. Disposable.

What’s the cost of a Muslim girl writing poems the way I do? I have already lost so much. What more can I stand to lose? It’s the twenty-first century and we still live in a world of  honor killings. A world where rape is rationalized. A world where trans women, particularly Black and brown trans women, are being murdered without justice. A world where police murder Black civilians and go unpunished. A world where the murders of Muslim people are not considered hate crimes. A world where queer people are thrown out of their homes. A world where girls are married off, before they can even name their own desire.

What’s the cost, of writing poems the ways we do?

Let us create a poetics that recreates the Hammam, where we can come in our real, naked skin, sit in the water, and talk openly. Where all of us—the hijabis, the haraamis, the uncovered, the gender nonconforming, the queer, the married, the never-married, the virgins, the non-virgins, brown, Black, all races—can just be. Can be seen. Can be heard. Can be celebrated. Can live, exist, and make our own freedoms.