A FORAY INTO HEDONISM, AFRICAN STYLE

A FORAY INTO HEDONISM, AFRICAN STYLE

Frequent and regular visits to beauty salons—beauty parlors as they are still called in the south—were something new to me when I lived in Africa. In the States, I only went to get my hair cut a couple of weeks after I really needed it. Spending a lot of time and money on beauty treatments made me nervous and offended my puritan sensibilities. I told myself silly and righteous things about both money and time, such as, “They could save an entire African village for what some women pay for manicures,” and “Why spend all that time sitting under a dryer when there are so many important things to do in this world?” I realize that back then when I started talking about The World, I was into some level of grandiosity and should have calmed myself down.

Another variation of this interior conversation was, “I’m supposed to be an intellectual.” That was a killer, because while I wanted to be taken seriously in the university community and then the professional world, I never wanted to look as undone and ill kempt as many of my colleagues did. The most successful women in the English Department in my day weren’t spending any time deciding which lipstick looked better—Fire and Ice or Pink Perfection. And in my own heart of hearts, I worried that the pursuit of fashion and beauty would crowd out thoughts of Beowulf, Chaucer, and The Great Vowel Shift.

Once I moved to Africa, my perspective changed. The African sun and air were beating me up and drying me out. I worked 14-hour days most of the time and had little focus on personal care. When I realized that I was beginning to look haggard, I decided that attention must be paid.

On Saturday afternoons, if no emergencies arose, I had an unaccustomed bit of time to myself. I started frequenting a local salon for regular mani-pedi appointments. And since I was already there, I decided to have my legs waxed and then get an occasional facial. I began to enjoy the feeling, and it was certainly affordable, even if one paid top dollar and tipped handsomely, as I always made sure to do.

Malawian beauty salons are almost always run by East Indians, who made up the merchant class in that part of Africa. Malawian girls did the actual work. Well-off Malawian women came in occasionally, but the clientele was largely Indian.

The young Indian women were often startlingly beautiful and soignée. Even the teen-agers came in for regular facials and hair treatments on Saturday. They joked and gossiped in Chichewa with the Malawian salon attendants and were as fluent in the local language as they, understandably so because they had all been born in Malawi.

Many of the older Indian ladies retained vestiges of great beauty. They were usually obese by our standards but evidently not by theirs. They seemed to like themselves just as they were. They didn’t talk about their weight or their diets, their exercise routines, their fat-to-muscle ratios in the obsessive way that so many Americans do. They just lolled about, looking faintly bored, having the dry skin rubbed off their heels and elbows, or having more holes pierced in their ears—the better to wear the fantastic gold jewelry they all seemed to have.

Making appointments, I should say having appointments, was difficult because time meant nothing in that environment. Many times when I showed up at the appointed time, I was told that the hairdresser hadn’t come in yet (no transport), or that the water was off, or that the manicurist had gone to a funeral in Blantyre. Come back tomorrow. Or the day after. Whenever.

Another annoying aspect of the beauty salon was the behavior of the Malawian girls. They increasingly got on my nerves. Some days a whole pack of them would be sitting around the shop, reading European or South African fashion magazines, laughing and squealing together. It was not restful. Further, they had a way of scrutinizing white people closely, looking intently at their hair, their skin, their clothes, and asking personal questions: how many servants do you have (a sore point for me), how many boyfriends do you have (another touchy subject), and the inevitable—will you take me back to the States when you leave?

When they talked and laughed among themselves, I would hear the word “Mazungu,” or foreigner, leading me to believe they were having a joke at my expense. About that time, I learned of a South African trained woman who made home visits to give massages, aromatherapy, manicures, pedicures, and best of all, foot massage. I never went back to the Malawian shop again.

The new masseuse, Salima, wasn’t very good, I’m sorry to report. She pummeled my body like bread dough, with no sensitivity at all; and she wanted to play the radio throughout the entire appointment. I found some dreamy sounding tapes in town and told her that I wanted to hear them in silence. She finally complied. After that, my Saturday afternoon sessions of soin passed more peacefully.

I did not miss the Malawian beauty shop, but my visits there brought to mind a trip to a 300-hundred year old Turkish bath I had visited some years earlier in Istanbul, the year of the fall of the USSR. Shortly after the fall, I was sent with a party of specialists to visit the Russian Far East, Siberia, and all the “Stans.”

After five weeks in chaotic territories, I felt terrible, toxified by pollution and a diet of greasy, starchy food, washed down with rotgut vodka (the only comfort at the end of seemingly endless days). I was also nervous and achy, strung out from too much danger. After nine flights on the Aeroflot of the outback and twenty hours on a train through three war zones in the Caucasus, we were finally able to reach Baku. We flew to Istanbul for a few days’ rest before flying to Frankfurt and then home.

I experienced Istanbul as a rebirth: I woke up in a bed with fresh linens. We had hot water, room service, café au lait. No menacing KGB agents were posted outside our doors. No one asked to see our papers, as ragged soldier had done throughout our wild train ride through the mountains.

Once in Turkey, I felt safe but exhausted, grimy, ill, and tense in spite of having made it out to safety. On my first morning there, I saw an advertisement on the bedside table for a 300-year-old Turkish bath in the neighborhood. I instantly decided to go and had the hotel man point the way.

Once at the bath, I realized that I was a complete outsider. The Turkish women sat around nude, sipping thick coffee in tiny cups. Almost all were quite fat with pendulous breasts. Many bore brutal scars on their bellies. Cesareans perhaps. A sisterhood of cicatrices. They seemed utterly un-self-conscious, as though they were chatting in a coffee shop.

I felt as if I had landed on another planet. A young woman took my ticket, gave me a towel, showed me where to put my clothes, and indicated the place I was to sit. I sat, feeling immensely self-conscious as every eye in the room was on my naked, scrawny, pale white body. The woman appeared every few minutes to splash me with a bucket of warm water. Finally she motioned to me to take my place on the heated marble dome, the central feature of this ancient structure. I lay down on my stomach, and for the first few moments the stones felt blistering hot. While I waited, I wondered about the people who had stretched out where I was.

The young woman returned, and with big sponges and brushes, she scrubbed, soaped, and splashed one side and then the other. She asked without words if I wanted my feet done, my hair. I signaled “everything.” In the hour that followed, she managed to convey wordlessly that she was unhappy, that she had three kids and a husband who drank and beat her.

When I left, I wasn’t sure what the appropriate tip should be, so I aimed high. She mimed surprise and displeasure at what I had given her, so I gave her some more. As I was getting dressed, I saw her gleefully showing the other women the money, evidently gloating over her good fortune in having a foreign client too stupid to know the local pay scale or too tired to care.

In spite of this minor irritation, I returned to the hotel in an altered state, slept a deep and dreamless eighteen hours, and woke up feeling purified and more or less returned to myself. All this for less then the price of a good haircut in Washington or New York.