How ‘Tissue’ became my favourite poem in the AQA anthology: Approaches and interpretations


The first half of this blog explains my approach to teaching ‘Tissue’ in the classroom. The second half details an interpretation of the poem, designed to help teachers and students with revision. I hope you find one or both sections useful in some way.


‘Tissue’. The very mention of Imtiaz Dharker’s poem is enough to make any English teacher shudder. Included in the AQA anthology with the likes of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ and Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, texts that are relatively simple for students to understand (at least in comparison to Dharker’s contribution), ‘Tissue’ proves somewhat more of a challenge. Since the introduction of the new specification, I have completely and utterly hated it. Why? Because I haven’t understood it. And if I don’t understand something, how am I ever meant to teach it? It seems I’m not alone in my annoyance. There are blogs, tweets and forums galore where teachers have vented their frustrations at attempting to teach the complexities and ambiguities of Dharker’s poem. Before the summer, I was always of the mind that ‘Tissue’ would never come up in the exam, that it was simply there for students to choose as their comparison should they wish to stretch and challenge themselves. However, the appearance of ‘Singh Song!’ in the 2018 exam forced me to ask myself the following question: would my students be able to answer a question on ‘Tissue’ if AQA made it their compulsory poem? Swallowing my pride, I’d have to say no. Detailed below is the approach I took to fix this problem.


1)    The approach


I began the lesson by asking students to consider the qualities of paper. As predicted, they came up with everything one would expect them to: paper is fragile, it can be torn easily and what is written on paper can be more powerful than the paper itself. We didn’t spend too long discussing this. Whilst I could tell students had seen the poem before, their responses only served to highlight how ineffectual my first attempt at teaching the poem had been.

Next, we read the poem as a class. As mentioned previously, students have seen the poem before and had annotated their anthologies, yet when I asked students to raise their hands if they wouldn’t have a clue what to write if a question on power in ‘Tissue’ came up in the exam, the vast majority, somewhat sheepishly, admitted they wouldn’t. Well done, me. Good job!

I provided students with the following Knowledge Snapshot:


I made this having read as much as I could about the poem: blogs, tweets, books, revision guides. You name it, I read it. One interpretation I had not considered before was that the poem is about the insignificance (rather than the significance that many others argue the poem is about) of humanity. At this point, I must credit Sarah Barker (@mssfax) and her fantastic blog which really helped things fall into place. As a class, we read through each snapshot paragraph of information slowly. After each, I asked students, in pairs, to highlight one sentence they believed would help increase their understanding of the poem. Students asked to highlight more, but I stood firm with one sentence so as not to convolute ideas. Once we had gone through each snapshot, a resource which tracks ideas and themes in the poem from beginning to end, students used the PiXL ‘Thinking Hard’ strategies to help them understand, retain and apply their new knowledge of the poem. Firstly, I asked students to reduce what they considered to be the three most important pieces of information. Having summarised this new knowledge, I then asked students to transform what they had just reduced into a series of images to help them retain it, stressing that it was important to transform the information and not the poem itself. Finally, I asked students to pick one of the following three activities (of differing challenge) for their ‘Debate It’ task:

1)      ‘‘Tissue’ may discuss the powerlessness of humans, but the main theme of the poem is conflict.’ To what extent do you agree?
2)      ‘‘Tissue’ is the most effective poem in the anthology at portraying the fragility of power and human life.’ To what extent do you agree?
3)      If something is fragile, it means it can break easily. Why do you think the poet has compared fragile human life to paper? How is paper fragile?


I like this particular strategy as it forces students to apply knowledge rather than just learning or remembering it.

Next, I asked students to ‘crunch’ the poem, a strategy I discovered in Neil Bowen’s excellent revision guides on poetry. This process involves students going through a poem and choosing one key word from each line and writing it down, meaning they will end up with the same number of words in a list as there are lines in the poem. There is no right answer for this, but I did say to students they would have to justify their choices by explaining how their chosen words linked to the poem (as you can see in the example below). This task was particularly useful at assessing and rectifying anything students had not understood from the initial Knowledge Snapshot. 

Finally, with blank copies of the poem and a visualiser, we began to discuss and annotate together. 

2)      The interpretation

‘Paper that lets the light
shine through, this
is what could alter things.
Paper thinned by age or touching,’

Dharker opens her poem with a sense of positivity and optimism. Light often symbolises hope or redemption but could have religious connotations here too. This is a motif which will recur throughout the poem. The speaker clearly thinks something is currently wrong. At this stage, it is not made clear what exactly has gone wrong or why but there is a belief that whatever it is, it can be fixed. ‘Thinned by age or touching’ indicates care for the paper. Whatever the purpose of this paper that the speaker places their hope in, it has been well used.

‘the kind you find in well-used books,
the back of the Koran, where a hand
has written in the names and histories,
who was born to whom,

the height and weight, who
died where and how…’

At this point, students began to pick up on the idea of how a religious text can be extremely powerful. What is written on the paper of a religious text can dictate how some people live their lives, shaping thoughts and ideas with many believing that these words are absolute truth. The fact these books are ‘well-used’ show people continue to refer to and reflect on the teachings present within the text. However, we also began to discuss what exactly is written in the back of the Koran and it is here that Dharker introduces thematic elements of how humans are insignificant. The ‘names and histories, who was born to whom, the height and weight, who died where and how’ pays absolutely no attention to the achievements of the people who are listed. It is all basic information which is extremely factual. There are statistics but everything else that happened to these individuals is rendered unimportant and therefore not included in the list. This may be because Dharker thinks our achievements aren’t actually achievements. As time passes, they will fade into obscurity and no-one will remember them. In fact, ‘who was born to whom’ and ‘who died where and how’ would imply that the only thing of any importance is how we begin and end our lives. This is further emphasised by the anonymous ‘hand’ that has written these facts. Dharker could be saying that paper (and what is written on it) will outlast human life. We are insignificant and will be forgotten.

‘pages smoothed and stroked and turned
transparent with attention.’

The tactile imagery of ‘smoothed and stroked and turned’ indicates respect. Students discussed how it could imply the paper has been important for a long time. There’s a sense of delicacy here. Paper does not look powerful but appearances can be deceiving.

‘If buildings were paper, I might
feel their drift, see how easily
they fall away on a sigh, a shift
in the direction of the wind.’

Personally, I really like this quatrain. I think this is where Dharker’s message about the insignificance of humans and how arrogant they can be really begins to take hold. By this point, students were completely running with the idea that the poem is discussing how insignificant we are contrary to what we may believe. We discussed how humanity is always striving to better itself by improving on things that just don’t matter such as building skyscrapers that are even taller than the last, connoting strength and power. Yet in this quatrain, Dharker is implying that if all of our buildings were made of paper, we would see just how vulnerable they actually are. They aren’t strong. They don’t show power. In the grand scheme of things, they do not matter. (Of course, there are clear links to ‘Ozymandias’ here).

Lots of revision guides I have seen say this is an allusion to 9/11 and I can see why. Dharker could be saying that we build things to impress yet they take very little effort to destroy (‘see how easily they fall away on a sigh’) showing the hubristic nature of humanity. We focused on the verb ‘sigh’, suggesting defeat or sadness, perhaps because humans continue to place too much importance on things that don’t matter and the ‘sigh’ is a reaction to this. Dharker is also saying the buildings fall away because of ‘a shift in the direction of the wind’. ‘Shift’ indicates change, something the speaker is hopeful for. This change, then, is something which will disregard what humanity has ‘achieved’ in the past. It will make everything we have built ‘fall away’.

‘Maps too. The sun shines through
their borderlines, the marks
that rivers make, roads,
railtracks, mountainfolds,’

Here we began to talk about the importance of the sun and how humans are insignificant and powerless against nature. Humans have created borderlines that are soon printed onto maps but now light is shining through them, suggesting that walls established by political posturing, conflict, treaties and history are useless. One student commented that Dharker’s increased use of caesura in this quatrain could represent the borderlines themselves, yet the fact we only pause in our reading of the poem and do not stop completely may imply that nature renders the borderlines weak and fragile; sunlight continues to shine through these borders just as we continue reading the poem. Neither can be stopped.

As I sit and type this, I can’t help but think that this quatrain subtly links to the anthology that the poem is from, titled ‘The Terrorist At My Table’. Yes, the quatrain above has allusions to 9/11 and that is probably what many students sitting the exam will focus on, yet this idea of ‘borderlines’ also strikes a chord with me. Humans choose to segregate themselves from one another by creating these boundaries, whether we are talking on a large scale like the borderline of a country or a small scale, like the borderlines of our own homes. Would it be too far to say that Dharker is criticising these borderlines, these differences we all have, and saying we should work together to create a better world? ‘The Terrorist At My Table’ creates an image in my mind of conversing with someone who has completely different views, yet they have been invited to the table for some reason or other. It creates an image to me of two very different people trying to understand one another, trying to eradicate the ‘borderlines’ that we create far too easily and quickly. If the sun (hope) shines through these borderlines, Dharker could be expressing hope that we will build bridges to societies that we have previously shut out. I may be completely barking up the wrong tree here, but perhaps it is something to consider further.

‘Fine slips from grocery shops
that say how much was sold
and what was paid by credit card
might fly our lives like paper kites.’

Moving on, we discussed how humans pay too much importance to money or materialistic things rather than concentrating on what actually matters. We discussed the simile and the significance of the ‘paper kite’, thinking about how a kite looks free, yet in reality, it is still controlled. We may spend money on credit cards freely, yet banks control this from behind the scenes. However, it was the mention of ‘fine slips’ that provided one of the most perceptive comments of the lesson. When talking about how receipt paper was incredibly easy to rip and destroy, one student succinctly expressed the contrast between humans and paper: humans look strong but are weak and insignificant whereas paper looks weak and insignificant but in reality is very strong and important.

‘An architect could use all this,
place layer over layer, luminous
script over numbers over line,
and never wish to build again with brick

or block, but let the daylight break
through capitals and monoliths,
through the shapes that pride can make’

Dharker’s motif of light makes another appearance. Students discussed how the seventh quatrain sounds like a blueprint but not for a building. Instead, it is a blueprint for our future and a better society. Some discussed how quatrains one to six detail everything humans have done wrong in the past and from the seventh quatrain onwards, Dharker is saying how we could go about fixing this. ‘Never wish to build again with brick or block’ implies we are capable of constructing something better than just another structure designed to break records and impress. In this sense, we are all ‘architects’. We all have a part to play in helping to create a better society. I really like the image of ‘daylight break[ing] through capitals and monoliths’. It’s an image of destruction. If we destroy everything we have made out of arrogance (‘through the shapes that pride can make’) we can begin again. A blank slate. A fresh start. Perhaps Dharker is saying that humans have been weak but we could be strong. We need to abandon traditional ways of doing things and embrace change.

‘Find a way to trace a grand design
with living tissue’

We struggled with this but eventually we said Dharker is suggesting that instead of using materials to build structures, we can use ourselves to construct something better. This ‘grand design’, this blueprint for a better future/society should be our sole focus. This is where the ambiguity of the title makes sense: it could be referring to both paper AND flesh and makes it clear that the two aren’t as different as you may think.

‘Raise a structure
never meant to last,
of paper smoothed and stroked
and thinned to be transparent,

turned into your skin.’

Again, the ending is something we struggled with but here is what we said. Together, we began to unpick the idea that when Dharker commands us to ‘raise a structure never meant to last’, she could be saying that we shouldn’t be concerned with trying to create a legacy. A legacy forces us to turn to and remain in the past whereas we should be working on improving the here and now. ‘Paper smoothed and stroked and thinned to be transparent’ is a reference to earlier in the poem. At that point, we said the paper had been well used because people kept on returning to it and reflecting on what was written. Dharker may be wishing that we do the same to ourselves. If we constantly reflect and review our lives, we will see our wrongdoings and appreciate the need to build something better. We are too selfish, concerned only with ourselves rather than working together for a greater good. The image of paper ‘turned into your skin’ is an odd one. We came up with the idea that Dharker wants the power paper has to be given to us through the new ‘grand design’ we are building. Only by working together to change how we live can we be truly proud of ourselves, of what we have achieved, the only achievement which is significant.

And that’s our interpretation. Of course, there are bound to be ideas that one may disagree with here, but I really feel as if the process and discussion students went through helped them walk out of the lesson with an increased understanding of what ‘Tissue’ could be about. As such, ‘Tissue’ is now one of my favourite poems (if not my sole favourite!) in the anthology. It’s very different yet I feel I haven’t embraced that difference as much as I should have. Even days later, I’m still considering what students have said and constructing new ideas. Unlike some of the other poems, there’s room for so much interpretation. There are many reasons why teachers and students dislike ‘Tissue’. For me personally, I’ll admit, it was because I was scared of what I didn’t know, yet sometimes things can click in the most unexpected of ways.

All resources from the lesson can be found here.

Stuart 
(@SPryke2)

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Image of DNA from Phys.org