Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah

Alana Valentine

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781921429491
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Théâtre

What do you do when you profoundly disagree with someone you love? Wearing a hijab is a touchstone of religious identity, but it is also imbued with a complex array of historical and contemporary meanings. The cultural meaning of the hijab has become a wedge between generations.%##CHAR13##%%##CHAR13##%At the heart of Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah is the relationship between an aunt and her niece. Both devout Muslims, the younger woman wants to put on a headscarf, the older woman tries to dissuade her. For Aunt Sarrinah, the hijab represents a world from which she has escaped; for her niece, Shafana, it is a personal statement of renewed faith.

CHARACTERS

SHAFANA

SARRINAH, her aunt

SHAFANA is in a laboratory, surrounded by jars of creatures in preserving solution. She is rehearsing a speech, half to her aunt, half to the audience.

SHAFANA: You get to a point, okay, why don’t I be honest, you get to an age and you’ve absorbed so much and you’ve observed so much, that you think that you know, basically, what the world has to offer. You’ve seen it all. Or at least variations of it all. And it’s not that you’re tired or arrogant or lazy, although they’re not the worst things you can be. It’s a survival thing. If you’re smart and if you’ve been through a lot, and who hasn’t, you can at least congratulate yourself on your ability to vaguely see what might be coming next. To be able to predict situations and not be disorientated. Oh, you don’t mind being pleasantly surprised. But you don’t like to be caught entirely off guard. It’s what separates successful people from other people, isn’t it? Foresight. And you work at it too, at ‘keeping up’ and ‘keeping in touch’ because if you do, you’re not going to be fooled. You’ve sussed out most probabilities so you’re ahead of the game. Which is canny.

But there always comes a point where you lose it. Where a whole generation lose touch. They start to listen to what looks like the next thing. It sounds like the next thing and it acts like that next thing but it’s not the next thing. The truly astonishing thing about what’s coming next is that it’s nothing like what this generation were like, old or young. It’s utterly unfamiliar.

If you’re a scientist you have to guard against false assumptions. You’ve all heard the cliché about having to recognise the veil of knowing and surrender to unknowing. But knowing or thinking you know the answers is only one veil. There are others, like physical barriers to seeing. We still don’t know half of what is in the deep, deep oceans because they’re veiled with darkness. But the creatures are there. Growing, changing, like nothing we’ve ever seen before. To be discovered. Like the future. Which is not just veiled by time but also by the eyes we’re looking at it with. Yes?

What if I told you that in the future you might make a choice that today, right now, you would utterly deny. What if I told you that a change is coming, for you, that is so unbelievable that it would make you laugh out loud if I mentioned it.

SARRINAH enters.

But believe me, believe me, there are yet new worlds to be fathomed and new impossibilities to be revealed.

SARRINAH: Shafana.

SHAFANA: In the vast undersea there are vents which scientists call black smokers.

SARRINAH: Are you ready?

SHAFANA: Two thousand five hundred metres down, clouds of pluming black particles are belched into the sea, coughed out like clouds of choking fumes, and four hundred degrees Celsius hot.

SARRINAH: And I’m interested in this why?

SHAFANA: This is molten quartz, studded with iron, copper, zinc, nickel and hydrogen sulphide.

SARRINAH: If you said it was liqui...