In Tissue, the imagery of paper is used to critique how history is constructed. Which idea best captures this?

• A. It records history and shapes lives
• B. It is irrelevant to memory
• C. History is mediated by human response and memory
• D. History is purely mechanistic and objective

Answer: (C)

History here isn’t a fixed, neutral record but something people actively shape through how they respond to and remember what is written. The tissue imagery of paper shows that documents, maps, and records become meaningful only because someone writes, reads, folds, or tears them—so the past is produced by human choices, memory, and interpretation. In this view, history is mediated by human response and memory because the truth we carry from the past depends on how we remember, revise, and use those fragile records over time.

The other ideas treat history as either an automatic recording, irrelevant to memory, or entirely mechanistic and objective; the poem’s point is that all such records are filtered through human experience, making memory and perspective central to what we understand as history.