Tissue
What it's about
Tissue by Imtiaz Dharker is about paper, and the fragile things it is used for: maps, holy books, receipts and records of family life. The speaker imagines building with paper instead of brick, and suggests that human life is as delicate as tissue paper.
Dharker was born in Pakistan, grew up in Glasgow, and has lived in India and Britain. The poem was published in 2006.
Paper and power
The poem opens with ‘Paper that lets the light / shine through’: thin, delicate and almost transparent.
Paper holds human power: maps, borders, money and buildings. But on a map, ‘The sun shines through / their borderlines’, as if borders are not real or permanent.
Families record their lives on paper too, in holy books with ‘pages smoothed and stroked and turned’ by the hands of generations.
Dharker suggests that the power people build is fragile and temporary. What matters is human life, not the structures that try to control it.
Key terms
Form and structure
The poem is in , mostly in four-line stanzas, with lots of . The lines flow loosely into each other, like layers of thin paper.
The speaker imagines an architect who would use paper, ‘never wanting / to build again with brick’, so that we could ‘fly our lives like paper kites’.
The final line stands alone: ‘turned into your skin’. Suddenly the paper becomes human skin, and the poem becomes about how fragile people are.
Key terms
Themes and comparisons
human power is fragile; borders and buildings don't last; the value of human life.
- Ozymandias: human power crumbling over time.
- : borders and belonging.
- Storm on the Island: the strength of human structures against bigger forces.
Remember
Tissue is about the power of humans, but it argues that this power is fragile. That makes it a good contrast with poems about strong rulers.