AQA Power and Conflict: 'Tissue'

'Tissue' comes from Imtiaz Dharker's volume The Terrorist at my Table, and like many of the poems in that collection, it deals with issues of perception and bias, focused on how we use language. In this instance, Dharker seems focused especially on ideas of naming and explores the different resonances of the word 'tissue' so as to explore a wide range of ideas through a series of extended images that build up throughout the poem. Dharker’s wider poetic themes are often concerned with transparency, with barriers to understanding, with how we may ‘see through’ things or see them differently from a different perspective. The image of ‘tissue’ is a powerful one for her, uniting as it does the idea of flesh and the idea of paper, and focusing on how light has a transformative effect. 

The first sense of the word ‘tissue’ in the dictionary, or if you look it up online—certainly the first sense that pops up in a Google search—is now usually the biological sense—meaning the material with which living things are made. However, in an etymologically based dictionary, you will tend to see first the oldest sense of the word, meaning fabric, and this will be related to its origin in Old French ‘tissu’ (woven) ultimately coming from Latin ‘textere’ meaning to weave. This is the same origin as our modern word ‘text’, something of which it is unlikely Dharker is unaware. In one sense, then, we are immediately talking about text as soon as the word ‘tissue’ is mentioned. The third sense of the word is that of paper, specifically a thin, fine paper used often for wrapping or packing.

  

The poem is written in quatrains of roughly equal length—mostly iambic, though not consistently. There us no rhyme-scheme, though some assonance and alliteration seems to hold the verse together to some extent. Generally, though it is a conversational, informal style of poem, characterized by enjambment as it imitates the musings of a speaker, softening and blurring the lineation.  The direct address throughout ‘you’, ‘your’ helps to create this sense of an intimate poetic conversation.

As with any word, the immediate sense of the word in the title for any reader will depend on the context. In a laboratory or operating theatre, it would be biological. If you were at a costume designer’s, perhaps you would expect it to refer to glittering material. In a gift shop it would refer to wrapping paper. The title gives no clues as to which meaning we should prioritise, but Dharker immediately captures and defines the title’s meaning in her first word of the poem, removing any initial ambiguity and tying it down to ‘paper’, specifically transparent paper ‘that lets the light / shine through’.

This first sense of the word ‘tissue’, fragile paper, is then explored, as Dharker discusses how it might be paper that is ‘thinned by age or touching’ (so not manufactured tissue paper). This leads on to a discussion of old paper, ‘well-used’ and the way in which this kind of thin paper might be found in texts such as the Koran. Dharker links this powerful cultural reference with the idea of family—names, she suggests, may be written in the back of the Koran as they would be in the front of a family Bible in the West, so as to record the history of a family, giving birth and death dates for its members. The ‘tissue’ of pages and of bodies ‘the height and weight’ is here linked in a single image—and of course may further link with the original material used for old manuscript book pages, which was vellum, or calfskin—both tissue in a literal sense of skin, and tissue-like in its thinness and transparency.

In stanza four, Dharker introduces a playful idea: ‘if buildings were paper, I might /feel their drift’. The idea of paper buildings inspires wordplay, as she punningly describes how she could ‘feel their drift’. The idea of a building made of paper seems at first paradoxical, as it seems to act against the idea of strength; Dharker seems here to be suggesting that there is strength to be found in fragility. In Japan, building partitions are made of paper, and she may be thinking of this deliberate fragility in the face of earthquakes—she describes ‘how easily /they fall away’. In fact, paper houses are less easy to destroy, because of their flexibility in the face of an earthquake.

The poem then moves rapidly on to consider ‘Maps too’. Maps are ways of finding out not only about places, but about the people who made them. The image of seems to suggest that the transparency of paper makes the maps appear three-dimensional—the marks on the paper like the real erosion ‘that rivers make’—and that this is literally illuminating, as ‘the sun shines through / their borderlines’.  Light here is seen as something that is truth-bringing. Dharker seems here to be thinking about how the human uses of paper can inform us about human nature. Even details such as grocery bills, she suggests, can tell us a lot about each other. Receipts, representing what is bought and sold, are transformed into ‘paper kites’, something which suggests liberation and childish play, but which is also another echo of eastern culture (one thinks of the fighting kites in The Kite Runner).

The image is developed with the thought of how the multiple pieces of paper used by a person could be transformed: ‘an architect could use all this’. The image is almost of a papier mache house, with strips of paper layered over and over each other to create a firm fabric for building. The way in which light can come through paper, it is suggested, would give an additional beauty to the building, ‘to trace a grand design’. An architect building in this way, it is suggested, would never want to use traditional materials again. This final image essentially suggests that the buildings are made up of experiences ‘layer over layer’.

The building described in the final stanzas becomes therefore a metaphorical building of experience, a ‘grand design’ which is touchable, strokeable, ‘never made to last’, allowing light to shine through it. At the conclusion of the poem it becomes clear that this building is built out of ‘living tissue’—that the paper ‘tissue’ that represents human experience, history and knowledge is here combined with human touch and affection for the ‘tissue’ of skin. The final line stands alone ‘turned into your skin’, again directly, almost abruptly addressing the readers and drawing them into the poem. In effect the metaphor enlarges to suggest a person created out of the experience and knowledge of the past. It is possible that Dharker is thinking here about the traditional image of God as an architect, designing the world and its people (as in Blake's famous image). The idea of a greater power creating humanity through layers of experience and emotion seems to echo these ideas.