Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah

Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah is a two-hander play by the Australian playwright Alana Valentine, first performed in Sydney in 2009. It stages a loving argument between a young Muslim-Australian student who wants to wear the hijab and her Afghan refugee aunt. It is studied in HSC English Standard Module A: Language, Identity and Culture.

Alana Valentine is one of Australia's leading playwrights, known for documentary and interview-based theatre, and Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah premiered in Sydney on 6 August 2009. It was commissioned by the estate of Alex Buzo as a contemporary answer to his 1968 two-hander Norm and Ahmed: Valentine takes Buzo's form - two people, one charged conversation about who belongs in Australia - and moves it inside a single Muslim family, so the national argument about identity is played out between an aunt and her niece who love each other.

The play unfolds in the years after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and that moment is a pressure on every line. Shafana is a young, Australian-raised university science student who has decided she wants to wear the hijab; Aunt Sarrinah, an Afghan refugee and brilliant engineer who fled the Taliban, is quietly but deeply opposed. Valentine deliberately inverts the cliche of the rebellious child and the traditional elder: here the young woman reaches toward faith and the veil, and the older migrant argues for reason, privacy and blending in.

Moving between the present debate and flashbacks to 2001 and 2002, the play frames everything with Shafana's university presentation on deep-sea organisms that thrive beside lethal geothermal vents - life flourishing next to what could destroy it. In the present, a dinner becomes a contest: Shafana announces she wants the hijab, Sarrinah raises objection after objection without ever saying "don't", and Shafana finally calls the bluff by asking her aunt to help tie the scarf on. Sarrinah cannot. She admits she is "opposed to the path you advocate", kisses her niece, and names them opponents who will remain close and yet unable to truly "see each other". The debate is never resolved, because Valentine is staging not a lesson but a genuine collision of two Muslim-Australian identities.

The play's engine is Shafana's insistence that faith can be chosen rather than inherited. She authors her own belief - "I want to make real the change that has happened to me, that God really is there and I believe that." - and experiences the Qur'an as rapture, "The scope and the breadth and the depth of Islam is overwhelming". Against her, Sarrinah compartmentalises: "My faith is private and cultural. But it is not the answer to all the freedoms we have struggled for.", and her drilled parallelism - "There is faith and there is reason. There is religion and there is civil society. There is belief and there is the law." - enacts in its very architecture the separation it argues for.

The scarf is the object every line circles, and Valentine stages the dispute as a fight over language before it is a fight over cloth. Shafana's plain declarative "I want to put on the hijab." detonates the play; Sarrinah answers a spiritual choice with an etymology lesson - "Hijab is an Arabic word. Meaning partition. We are not Arabs. We are Persians." - and later reduces the veil, in her engineer's register, to "the outward cladding of piety". Shafana reclaims the same object as resistance: "for them, for some, the veil is a mask in the power struggle against the dictatorship of men."

Sarrinah's rationalism is not coldness but the residue of trauma. Her testimony - "Because I have seen what your brand of religion can do. I have witnessed what your brand of fanaticism can destroy." - gives her caution the force of evidence and splits Islam into rival versions inside one family, while her recurring two-word warning, "Be careful.", compresses a whole exile's fear into an imperative.

The women also argue over how to survive in public. Sarrinah warns that "In a new country your religion becomes the main focus of how you are being seen", counselling low visibility; Shafana attacks the strategy as self-erasure - "Your solution is just to hide? Fade into the background." and the mocking asyndeton "Assimilate. Disappear into the masses. Never speak up, never stand up."

Finally, the play is about what talk can and cannot do. After a whole play of hedging, Sarrinah's bare admission "But, deeply, I am opposed to the path you advocate. Now." marks the exact moment dialogue reaches its limit, and the closing line turns one verb against itself: "You'll see me. I'll see you. But we won't be able to... see each other." - intact love, broken recognition.