Tissue and London
I know lots of folks struggle with ‘Tissue’. This question is about identity - I’m not aware that it has ever come up in an exam.
Compare how poets present the ways that people create a sense of identity in ‘Tissue’ and in one other poem from the ‘Power and Conflict’ anthology.
In ‘Tissue’, Dharker explores the ways that people are made part of the social and cultural body through the paperwork they accumulate. In her world, people are made of the religion they practise, the money they spend and the places and buildings in which they live. In ‘London’ Blake is also concerned with maps, churches and buildings, but in a much more malevolent world. In ‘London’ these structures work together to oppress a population whose lives are impoverished by them, not enriched. It is unclear from Dharker’s poem whether she thinks that money, maps and religious books enhance or control our lives as her poem is suffused with a reverent light that seems to exalt paper to a spiritual status.
In ‘Tissue’ Dharker intertwines family and religion in the back of the family Koran, which has paper so thin, ‘the light shines through’. As successive generations write the names of ‘who was born to whom’, family is made permanent, even as it is written on the delicate paper of this book. The fact that these major life events: births, marriages and deaths are written in a religious book also emphasises the ways that religion is involved in these major life milestones and how deeply embedded it is in this family. The central, extended metaphor of the poem - the idea that our human tissue is analogous to the paperwork that makes up our identity is crucially established in this first reference to the paper of the Koran. It is clear that for Dharker, an immigrant to the UK, religion, or certainly religious traditions, are a crucial part of identity.
Contrastingly, perhaps, is Blake’s attitude to the Church. Whilst we know that Blake was a Christian, he was disgusted at the ways that the Church as an organisation seemed to collude with government to maintain extreme poverty in the early 19th Century. He says that the ‘blackening church appals’ the literal meaning of which is the soot stains of industrial-revolution London on the white stone of the churches, but the figurative meaning is how the church is morally ‘blackened’ by not carrying out the central Christian message (in Blake’s opinion) of alleviating poverty. Going to church was central to 19th identity, but in Blake’s poem it is also a poison at the heart of the city.
In Dharker’s poem, maps are also symbols of identity. She is interested in ‘their borderlines, the marks that rivers make, roads, railtracks’ this long list suggesting an intimate relationship with a landscape. But even here, her map is suffused with light as ‘the sun shines through’ these lines. This image is ambiguous. It must suggest, like the paper of her Koran, that the paper of the map is thin, and fragile. So are these maps fragile, too? Is Dharker’s personal sense of place fragile, too? Given that she is from an immigrant family, who moved country when she was a baby, she may be suggesting a more fragile link to a place. Or she may be referencing the ways that ‘borderlines’ were drawn somewhat arbitrarily by the British government as they left India and Pakistan.
For Blake, mapping is an unambiguously harmful activity. His Londoners are hemmed in by ‘charters’ that tell them where they can and cannot go. The ‘charting’ of streets in London restricted some economic activity for ordinary Londoners and would have reminded a contemporary audience of the Inclosure Act of the late 18th Century, whereby many people who sustained a living in the countryside were no longer able to, and were forced to move to the cities to look for work. And in those ‘chartered streets’ and along the ‘chartered Thames’ he meets ‘woe’ and illness in ‘every man’ he meets. His repetition in these lines of ‘every’ really hammers home the extent to which he feels that the industrial revolution - and the legal structures (charters) that follow in its wake - is harming ordinary people.
Dharker’s exploration of buildings, through the idea of architect’s drawings, is also ambiguous, perhaps more so than her earlier exploration of the Koran and maps. She talks in the conditional about what an architect ‘could’ build, but she only allows her imaginary architect to ‘raise a structure/ never meant to last’ made only of paper. Perhaps her descent, stanza by stanza towards a less and less real world is symbolic of her own shifting and uncertain identity. She seems to suggest that cities would be better if they weren’t made of ‘brick and block’ but instead remained paper, where again, the ‘daylight’ can ‘break through’. The final line that shifts the ‘tissue’ of her poem from paper into human ‘tissue’ underlines the idea that all of these paper images and ideas in her poem go to make up human identity but also underline the shifting and fragile nature of that identity.
Buildings in ‘London’ are much more solid and straightforwardly hostile. As well as the ‘blackening church’, ‘blood’ metaphorically runs ‘down palace walls’. For Blake, these key elements of British identity: church, monarchy and marriage have been entirely corrupted and do no good to the vast majority of their citizens.
