Barbershop Blues

Barbershops are about as common as internet cafés throughout the medina, which is to say that every street has at least two. Tiny little rooms with one or two chairs serve a regular clientele of men. Back in Los Angeles, it seemed the barbershop was a dying breed, and it certainly lacked the glamour of the latest salon with its list of A-list clients. I don’t think we’ve seen a salon here, and since so many women cover their heads, it might be that Marrakech isn’t quite ready for the trend. For men, though, the barbershop is a regular visit. It seems especially popular on Thursdays and Friday mornings, before Friday’s midday prayer. This particular prayer is so important that mosques run up a white flag to remind people. We wonder if even locals begin to tune out the frequent calls to prayer, in much the same way a new worker on a construction site soon ignores the constant beeping of a bucket loader driving in reverse. We certainly have.

Whether as part of a ritual cleansing, or to keep up on the neighborhood gossip, the barbershops are popular indeed. That doesn’t mean that we feel the need to peer into them; we tend to pass with heads down trying to avoid the pitches of adjacent salesmen. So it took Craig, an American expat who’s recently retired to Marrakech, to point out a series of photos in the window of a barbershop the other day.

As we paused to lean in, we expected to see the barber with his regular clients smiling broadly, showing off stylish new coifs. Instead, we were treated to photos of clients whose expressions could be better described as grimaces. The sun-faded prints taped to the grimy glass showed five-year-old boys moments after being circumcised. For the most part, they were well dressed from the waist up, but their faces covered in tears emphasized that the barber’s scissors had more than hair to snip. Evidently it’s customary for photos of bloodied, freshly clipped penises, photos taken by beaming fathers, to be proudly displayed in the windows of the obliging barber’s shop. The event is the subject of much paternal pride (a rather late-term bris, if you ask us!), though we wonder if the boys themselves are eager for their friends in the street to see their scared, tear-streaked faces in the shop window. That’s one appointment at the barbershop you want to make sure to get straight.

As we were “admiring” the photos in the barbershop window, the scissor-wielding barber himself emerged. Moroccans love a good joke, and he indicated to the three men in our group that he’d happily do the honors. You’ve never seen such swift back stepping to a chorus of high-pitched “Fait accompli! Fait accompli!”