Tissue by Imtiaz Dharker: GCSE poem guide

This is ‘Tissue’ by Imtiaz Dharker, from the Power and Conflict cluster of the AQA anthology. I’m Hannah, and I teach English. The question we’ll answer: How does every part of ’Tissue’ show that what people build is as thin as paper? We’ll go through the context, the poem section by section, one quotation explored closely, a model paragraph and the quotations to learn. First, the context.

Imtiaz Dharker. Dharker was born in Pakistan and grew up in Glasgow. She is a poet, an artist and a film- maker. The collection. ’Tissue’ was published in 2006 in a collection called The Terrorist at My Table.

A poem about paper. The poem is about paper: maps, receipts, holy books, even buildings. Paper is thin and lets the light through. Fragile borders. Dharker suggests that the things people build, including borders, are just as fragile as paper, and that this may be no bad thing.

‘Tissue’ is still in copyright, so I won’t read it here. Open your anthology at the poem and read it twice: once for what happens, once for who is speaking and what changes. Lines 1 to 12: Paper people keep. “Paper that lets the light”. The poem opens on the noun paper and on light.

Thinness sounds like a gift, because light can pass through, and that idea grows through the whole poem. “what could alter things”. A quiet, bold claim: something as weak as paper might change the world. The reader is asked to rethink what strength means. “the back of the Koran”.

Dharker, born in Pakistan, chooses the holy book of Islam, where a family has written who was born and who died. Faith and family history sit on fragile pages. “smoothed and stroked”. A list of tender verbs joined by and. The pages have turned see-through from love and use: attention, over many years, has worn them thin.

Lines 13 to 16: If buildings were paper. “If buildings were paper”. A conditional clause shifts the poem from real paper to imagined paper. The extended metaphor now reaches the solid things people build. “fall away on a sigh”.

Buildings collapse as gently as a breath. The image is calm, almost peaceful, so the reader sees how easily human structures could go. “If buildings were paper”. The booklet says Dharker sees the things people build as fragile. Here even buildings, made to look permanent, drift and shift in the wind like paper.

Lines 17 to 24: Maps and receipts. “their borderlines”. People in power draw borders on maps. Dharker, born in Pakistan and raised in Glasgow, lets the sun shine through them, so borders look thin and open to change. “their borderlines”.

A list follows: rivers, roads, railtracks and mountainfolds. Natural marks sit beside human ones, and on paper every line looks equally thin. “fly our lives like paper kites”. Shop receipts and credit card slips seem to steer us. The simile makes people the kites, pulled about by small pieces of paper.

Lines 25 to 32: The architect’s design. “build again with brick”. Brick is heavy and solid, the opposite of paper. Enjambment carries the sentence across the stanza break, as if the walls themselves are giving way. “build again with brick”.

The architect is a hopeful figure, someone who could build differently. The reader is invited to imagine a world built from light and layers of paper. “the shapes that pride can make”. The abstract noun “pride” names the feeling behind grand buildings. Daylight breaking through them suggests that pride is thin too.

“the shapes that pride can make”. In the booklet, Dharker suggests that what people build to last is fragile. Huge buildings made from pride are shown as no stronger than borders on a map. And lines 33 to 37. “with living tissue”.

A pun on the title: tissue paper and the tissue of the body. The extended metaphor turns from paper to human life, a structure not built to last. “paper smoothed and stroked”. Repetition of line 11. The tender verbs that wore the family’s holy book thin now describe a person, linking those family records to living people.

“turned into your skin”. A single-line final stanza. Set apart, it lands with weight, and the possessive pronoun “your” speaks straight to the reader. “turned into your skin”. We are the paper: fragile, short-lived and precious.

The ending sounds calm, and the reader is asked to value people above what pride builds. So, to sum it up in one sentence: Dharker builds an extended metaphor of paper, from family records to maps, buildings and at last human skin, to show that what people build from pride is fragile and that thin, light-filled lives are worth more. One quotation, explored closely: “the shapes that pride can make”. Try it yourself first: method, zoom in, effect, and the context or purpose. Method: Abstract noun.

Dharker names the feeling that drives people to build, not the buildings themselves. Zoom in: “pride” suggests that huge buildings show off their makers. They are built to say: look how strong we are. Effect: The reader starts to doubt solid buildings. Something made from pride can fall, just as paper can.

Purpose: Dharker wants the reader to value what is fragile and open. She questions human power that tries to look permanent. And here’s a model What–How–Why paragraph for the question: How does Dharker show that the things people build are less permanent than they think? Dharker shows that the things people build to look strong are as fragile as paper, and she asks the reader to value that fragility. The extended metaphor grows from books and maps to buildings: “If buildings were paper”, they would fall in the wind.

Later the poem names “the shapes that pride can make”. The boastful abstract noun “pride” suggests that tall buildings show off their builders’ power. The architect then builds a structure “never meant to last”, so the poem praises what most builders fear. Dharker ends with a single line, “turned into your skin”, which turns all the paper into a human body. The reader is left feeling that people and their power are short-lived, and that the light that shines through us matters more than walls or borders.

The quotations from ‘Tissue’ worth learning by heart. “Paper that lets the light / shine through”. The opening metaphor: fragile things can be beautiful and honest. Everything in this video comes from our Power and Conflict poetry scheme of learning for schools. If you’re a teacher, Lesson 3 of every scheme is free at btl.education.

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