Thread by @massolit

Okay, let’s do another thread on the Power and Conflict poems. This time, we’ll be talking about Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Tissue’ 🧻📚👷🏢

In particular, we focus on the power of paper and poetry, and the idea that some things are better if they *don’t* last.

🧵

First up, some context.

‘Tissue’ first appeared in ‘The Terrorist at my Table’, Dharker’s fourth collection of poetry, which was published in 2014.

‘Tissue’ is the very first poem in the collection.

If you read yesterday’s thread on ‘War Photographer’, you will have seen how how certain words and phrases used in that poem had picked up ‘emotional baggage’ from poems appearing earlier in the collection.

The comparison of the photographer to a priest in the first stanza, for example, is coloured by the appearance of the awful priest in an earlier poem, ‘Ash Wednesday, 1984’, who was “a bigot” and caused the children “harm”.

Similarly, the otherwise entirely neutral word “something” is coloured by previous uses of the word to describe a rape (in ‘Girl Talking’), an abortion (in ‘Free Will’) and a disgusting scene in a pornographic film in ‘A Provincial Party, 1956’.

Since ‘Tissue’ is the very first poem in its collection, there are no previous poems that might influence the way we read certain words or phrases.

The one thing that *might* influence our reading, however, is the title of the collection as a whole: The Terrorist at my Table.

I don’t want to go into this too much, but if you read ‘Tissue’ with (Islamist) terrorism at the back of your mind, you might think differently about the references to (e.g.) the fragility of buildings (“let the daylight break / through capitals and monoliths”).

This *might* evoke for us such acts as the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001, or that of the ancient site of Palmyra by Islamic State in 2015-16.

That said, I think it’s perfectly possible to read ‘Tissue’ without any reference to contemporary politics, which is what we’re going to do for the rest of this thread.

In a nutshell, I think this is a poem that reflects on how paper is simultaneously very fragile and very powerful.

It’s fragile in the sense that it is physically fragile, and it’s powerful in the sense that it can have an impact on the real world.

(We’ll see how in a moment.)

This contrast is set up in the very first sentence of the poem.

Here, we are introduced to paper that is so thin that it “lets the light / shine through”, and yet can also “alter things”.

Indeed, note just how much the poem emphasises the extreme thinness of this paper.

For a start, we’re not dealing with any kind of paper here, but tissue paper – one of the thinnest forms of paper.

Indeed, this paper is so thin that it “lets the light / shine through”.

By the end of the first stanza, it has got even thinner, being “thinned by age or touching”.

By the end of the third stanza, the paper is so thin that it has become almost immaterial and entirely see-through: “pages smoothed and stroked and turned / transparent with attention.”

So from the very beginning of the poem – from its very title, in fact – we are reminded of the physical fragility of paper.

At the same time, however, the poem also presents us with several uses of paper that are incredibly powerful.

We’ve already mentioned how in the first stanza we are told how this paper has the ability to “alter things”.

In the second stanza, we are reminded of the use of paper in books.

Not just any books, either, but “well-used books”, books such as “the Koran”, the foundational text of a major world religion, Islam, with almost 2 billion adherents.

In the fifth stanza, we get another important means by which paper can “alter things” – maps.

Now in one way, the way a map “alters things” is entirely trivial. It simply represents the real world much smaller and flatter than it actually is.

But when we look at the list of items featured on this map – “their borderlines, the marks / that rivers make, roads, / railtracks, mountainfolds” – we notice that the first of them is something that does *not* in fact exist in the real world.

Put another way: if the map didn’t exist, the rivers, roads, railway lines and mountains would still be there in the real world, but the borderlines would not.

Borders are something that exist only on maps. The map has “altered things”.

In the sixth stanza, we get another use of paper – receipts (“fine slips from grocery shops / that say how much was sold / and what was paid by credit card”).

While paper receipts themselves may not themselves be that important, I think they are working here as a kind of metonym for the economic system as a whole.

Moreover, there is a sense that the paper record of a transaction – the receipt – is more authoritative than the transaction itself.

Note how the paper doesn’t ‘reflect’ or ‘record’ the transaction (“how much was sold / and what was paid by credit card”) but actively “says” it.

In this case, then, the paper receipts “alter things” because their version of events trumps what actually happened.

One of the things going on in ‘Tissue’, then, is a contrast between the (literal) powerlessness of paper – its thinness, for example – and its (symbolic) power – i.e. its importance in religion (with religious texts), politics (with maps) and the economy (with receipts).

But which one is more important? Does the (symbolic) power of paper outweigh its (physical) lack of power?

This is a question that ‘Tissue’ addresses explicitly.

In the fourth stanza, we are invited to compare the physical *weakness* of paper with the physical *strength* of building materials (steel, concrete, glass, etc.) by imagining a world in which buildings are made of paper (“If buildings were paper”).

We might think that having buildings made from paper would be a bit of a disaster, but notice how *positive* the poem’s assessment of this state of affairs is: “If buildings were paper, I might / feel their drift, see how easily they fall away on a sigh”.

Put another way: the fact are buildings are *not* made of paper *prevents” us from feeling and seeing these things.

We *lose* something when buildings are not made from paper.

Later in the poem, we get another comparison between paper and building materials.

This time, an architect is deciding between whether he wants to use paper or regular building materials (“brick / or block”) – and he decides to go with the paper.

Why does he make this choice?

For a start, unlike “capitals and monoliths” (i.e. buildings), paper “lets the daylight break / through”.

Put another way: the physical fragility of paper, as represented by its transparency, is precisely why it should be preferred to “brick / or block”.

But why is physical fragility good?

Because (‘Tissue’ says) physical fragility allows the light to shine through, which allows us to better understand and appreciate the true nature of things.

Think back to the benefits of buildings made of paper: “If buildings were paper, I might / feel their drift, see how easily / they fall away on a sigh”.

So that’s what I think ‘Tissue’ is basically about: the power of fragility.

Three final points before I finish.

First, we might note that, if fragility is a good thing (because it allows ‘the light’, i.e. the truth, to shine through) it’s a natural step from physical paper to something even more fragile – human tissue.

And indeed, this is exactly the step the poem makes in the final few stanzas.

In the seventh stanza, the architect has already expressed a preference for paper over his usual building materials (“brick / or block”).

By the end of the eighth stanza (and into the ninth), the paper turns into something more fragile still – human tissue – with the architect encouraged to “find a way to trace a grand design / with living tissue”.

This movement from tissue paper to human tissue is mentioned explicitly in the final line of the poem, a line which is emphasised by its status as a monostich, or single-line stanza: “turned into your skin.”

To summarise: there’s a movement in the poem from physical strength to physical fragility, from the “brick / or block” used in buildings, to tissue paper, to human tissue.

This movement is presented as a *positive* progression, since the thinner and more fragile something is, the more transparent it is, and the more transparent it is, the more light it lets through and the more authentic/truthful it is.

Now for my second point.

We’ve already seen this poem outline a couple of different uses of paper – as a medium for religious texts, for maps, and for receipts.

But there’s another use of paper that the poem doesn’t mention explicitly, but is represented by the poem itself: the use of paper as a medium for writing in general, and poetry in particular.

This association is most strongly suggested by the fact we are reading a poem printed on a piece of paper.

But the poem goes a bit further than this, at one point presenting the use of paper in a particularly poetic way.

Let’s go back to the architect mentioned in the seventh stanza, who – if we remember – decides to leave behind his usual building materials (“brick / or block”) to work with paper.

Look at the way the architect’s (imagined) use of paper is described:

An architect could use all this,
place layer over layer, luminous
script over numbers over line,

In particular, look how well those lines work as the description of someone composing a poem.

The "layers" are the lines that make up the poem, the "script" is the words, and the "numbers" are the metrical feet.

Now if paper is poetry – as it seems to be here – this takes us right back to what Shelley was saying in ‘Ozymandias’, i.e. that paper is more powerful than stone because poetry lasts longer than monuments.

In ‘Tissue’, this comparison between paper and stone is encouraged by the use of particular terms words with multiple meanings.

The “capitals” in the eighth stanza, for example, can refer equally to the topmost part of a column, an architectural feature known as a capital, and to capital letters.

Here's a 'capital' from the Erechtheum in Athens:

To summarise, then: 'Tissue' is a poem, like several others in the Power and Conflict cluster, that reflects on the power of poetry over even the most durable physical structures.

Finally, a third point – and this is a bit more tentative.

One of the ways this poem emphasises the ability for paper to “alter things” in the real world, I want to suggest, is by presenting the real world as inherently paper-like.

We don’t actually get much of a view of the real world in this poem, but one place we do is in the fifth stanza with those “maps”.

As I’ve already said, maps are in a sense paper versions of the real world. They take features from the real world – roads, rivers, mountains, etc. – and represent them on paper.

This map features “roads” and “railtracks”, but also “mountainfolds”.

Not mountains, that is, but “mountainfolds” – almost as if there was something paper-like about the mountains to begin with.

There might be something similar going on with the credit “card” in the following stanza too.

As I say, it’s quite tentative!

To put all this another way: the comparison between the world of paper and the real world is facilitated by the presentation of the real world as something that is already somewhat paper-like, a world in which money is “card” and mountains are “folds”.

To sum up, then: ‘Tissue’ is a poem in which we are invited to consider the power of paper.

On the one hand, paper is fragile – tissue paper especially so.

On the other, paper can be incredibly powerful – as the basis for religious texts, for maps, for the economy – and for poetry.

It can “alter things”.

The power of paper (and poetry) is a theme that has appeared in several of the Power and Conflict poems – most notably ‘Ozymandias’, where the poem has very obviously outlasted the (stone) statue of Ozymandias, which now lies shattered on the floor.

In ‘Tissue’, however, we are left with another question: what’s so good about lasting a long time anyway?

At the end of the poem, the architect has moved on from paper to focus on “living tissue”, with the aim of raising a structure “never meant to last”.

These structures that are “never meant to last” (I want to suggest) are other people, which “alter things” more than any writing could, poetry or otherwise.

This idea is emphasised by the mention of the Koran in the second stanza.

As I’ve said, the Koran is the central religious text in one of the world’s major religions.

In this poem, however, the Koran’s importance is *not* as a religious text, but as a place to record the lives of family members who have lived and died: “the names and histories, / who was born to whom, / the height and weight, who / died where and how, on which sepia date.”

In this sense, we might say the ‘Tissue’ is the poem that is unique in the Power and Conflict cluster in its suggestion of poetry’s relative *lack* of importance.

Yes, ‘Tissue’ says, paper (in the form of poetry) can outlast the “brick / or block” of buildings, but better still are those “grand designs” made with “living tissue” which are “never meant to last” – i.e. other people.

Right, that’s all I’ve got for ‘Tissue’.

Next up: Carol Rumens’ ‘The Émigrée’.