Stitch by Imtiaz Dharker

• Stitch by Imtiaz Dharker is a poem about childhood memories, centred around two cardigans.
• The speaker remembers how her friend Cathy had a blue, machine-made cardigan and how her own mother knitted a hand-made red one, modelled on Cathy’s.
• The red cardigan becomes a symbol for the relationship between the speaker and her mother: striking and unique, but complicated.

You can read Stitch by Imtiaz Dharker on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

The poem has nine stanzas of three lines each. There is no regular rhyme scheme or consistent rhythm. The rhythm speeds up and slows down in places. At time this suggests the changing rhythm of the knitting. It captures the mother’s domineering energy and forms a contrast between the relationships of the two daughters and their mothers. Stitch is written in the present tense, plunging the reader into the memory of the speaker.

Dharker uses colour symbolism to powerful effect.

• Blue is used to represent calm, controlled and conventional feelings.
• Red is strong, fiery and overflowing emotion.

Structure of the poem

• Stanza 1 - The speaker compares how her friend Cathy’s mother describes Cathy her daughter to how she herself is described by her own mother.
• Stanzas 2-6 - The speaker describes how her mother, on seeing the cardigan worn by Cathy, sets about knitting a similar one for the speaker. The process of measuring, buying wool, actually knitting (including making mistakes before the skill is mastered) are all driven forward by the mother’s energy and force of will. The creation of the cardigan is compared to the mother planning her daughter's life.
• Stanzas 7-8 - The cardigan is complete. The speaker compares Cathy’s blue, machine-knitted garment, to her own, hand-made, imperfect, red version.
• Stanza 9 - The speaker reflects on her mother’s hurt reaction to her leaving years later.

Dharker uses colour symbolism to powerful effect. Learn more about symbolism with short revision video.

The opening stanza establishes the contrast between Cathy’s and speaker’s own mother.

• Cathy’s mother calls her daughter ‘her sweet heart’, a conventional expression suggesting a relationship which is under control and ‘correct’. The heart seems a clear, uncomplicated western symbol of love.

• The speaker’s mother calls her ‘a piece of her liver’. This is shockingly vivid and perhaps more authentic, suggesting maternal love that is visceral in its possessiveness. Dating back to ancient middle eastern cultures, the liver is seen as a symbol of love and other deep emotions, so the comparison of heart and liver reflects a difference in culture between the speaker's family and Cathy's.

This section begins with a single sentence describing Cathy’s cardigan:

Cathy has an ice blue cardigan.

The words ‘ice blue’ sound cold and unemotional, all very controlled and tidy. This contrasts with the rest of this section, in which the emotions and energy spill over, shown by the enjambment from stanza to stanza.

The speaker’s mother ‘holds Cathy still’, physically imposing herself on her. There is a sense of her exerting control.

The alliteration in ‘studies the stitches’ stresses her intensity: she can absorb the pattern just by staring at it. Her ‘eyes screwed up’ suggests the physical effort and absorption in her task.

The mother then ‘measures me’ and ‘marches me’ to the shops. The alliteration and repetition emphasise the sudden movement from studying to doing. The repeat of "me" makes clear that the mother is dominating the speaker. Note that she uses the*‘span of her hand’to measure - using her body rather than calculations or patterns. Just as the mother compared the speaker to a"piece of my liver"** earlier, the two are again connected by their physical bodies.

They go ‘over the bridge to Argyll Street’ which provides a sense of specific local detail by placing them in a real location. They go to buy ‘wool and needles’, clearly starting from scratch. The image of crossing the bridge could represent crossing from one culture to another; the speaker and mother could be crossing from the southside of Glasgow, home to Pakistani communities, to the conventional Scottish city centre.

The mother’s knitting is ‘fierce’ – full of power and fieriness. Even when sitting down, she is bristling with energy. We have a sense of the mother swooping into action and bringing the cardigan into being by the force of her personality.

In stanza 5, the knitting process is captured by a rhythm which is broken into small phrases

slips one, purls one, / unravels, starts again,

Clearly, she is not an expert but finding her way through mistakes. The onomatopoeia and alliteration in ‘needles clicking, clacking’ suggest the speed she achieves by the sheer effort of will and her impatience to make the cardigan happen.

Stanza 6 moves from knitting to planning the daughter’s life. The metaphor ‘shape of the life’ suggests that, just as she is shaping the cardigan, she is trying to construct her daughter’s future. The word ‘plotting’ has connotations of evil intent, while ‘knitting herself into me’ suggests the mother is trying to ensure she is part of her daughter’s being, something she can’t escape from.

The cardigan is complete. The one word ‘Done’ sums up the finality of this moment. The mother has made a ‘perfect copy of Cathy’s’ and the language sounds calmer, with the alliteration of ‘cardigan…copy…Cathy’s’ holding things together nicely.

However, the dramatic ending of ‘but red’ immediately suggests the powerful, and possibly aggressive, feelings unleashed.

We see again the contrast between the two cardigans: ‘machine-made’ and ‘worked by hand’. The edges of the speaker’s cardigan are irregular, they ‘wriggle’, almost as if the mother has created something alive. Linking back to the idea of the mother "knitting herself into me", there is a suggestion of the mother's life and energy, always moving, possibly uncomfortably, a constant presence in the cardigan and in the speaker's life.

The stanza starts conventionally:

when I leave, my mother cries / on the phone

Although this suggests a normal sad reaction to the speaker leaving home, inversion and enjambment stress the mother and her reaction to this event. She is such a powerful personality, that she remains the focus, even when it is the speaker who has taken action.

Up to this point, the speaker and mother have inhabited the same physical space. Now they are separate, a phone call apart.

says her liver / has been torn apart.

This violent image, conveys raw pain. The mother is focusing on her own pain, not her daughter’s life. It is also a manipulative comment which emphasises that the mother is making sure the daughter knows how much it has hurt her. Throughout the poem, the mother’s actions have dominated; now the mother is overwhelmed by something she cannot control.

The presence of the speaker’s mother, her energy and force of will, dominates the poem, just as she did her child’s life. Her determination to make her daughter a cardigan reflects a more ominous desire to curate her life. Their relationship is less conflicted when the speaker is young; but achieving a positive adult relationship seems impossible. The mother is devastated when her daughter leave home - but it is her own feelings about her own suffering that she focuses on.

The poem emphasises the dynamism and energy of the mother: her whole approach, to knitting and parenting, seems to be about taking life on and making change happen. However, she is unable to cope when change is imposed on her.

The speaker grows up and leaves home to move on with her own life, a necessary change. The speaker is aware of her need to get away; the mother is still trying to manipulate her. We see that change is sometimes essential for an individual to survive and flourish, but that it creates problems for those who cannot accept it.

The speaker’s memory of her mother knitting her a cardigan shows how significant a childhood experience can be. The vividly recalled details of being measured, shopping and watching her mother create the cardigan demonstrate how an apparently simple set of actions can reveal complexities about a person. The speaker was dominated as a child; as an adult she has had to tear herself away from her mother in order to live her own life.

Both Stitch and The Knot are centred around childhood memories. In Stitch the mother knitting the cardigan is not just about creating something for her child: it reflects her desire to dominate her child’s life and control ‘the shape of the life she is plotting for me’. In The Knot, the providing of picnic food reflects the mother’s important role as nurturer; later, though, the desire to control is destructive to the harmony of family life.

The poems Bairn and Bloom also deal with the power of maternal love. In Bairn the speaker’s whole experience of life is transformed by the experience of loving their baby; in Bloom the realisation of the specialness of their baby is transformative. Both these experiences are positive and contrast with the relationship in Stitch, with the parent experiencing change due to love, not having the urge to change and control the child.

Letters to Glasgow has a similar positive view of human connection and relationships. The older woman passenger keeps her relationship with her now-dead partner alive through her memories and photographs. Her life goes on despite her loss, whereas the mother in Stitch focuses on the negative (her own pain and loss) rather than the positive change and growth in her daughter.

In a wider sense, Send this too has a positive sense of accepting or even embracing reality and change, this time focused on a city rather than a person. It too contrasts with the mother in Stitch and her attempts to control her daughter's life and prevent changes that she does not welcome.

Revise Stitch and other poems by Imtiaz Dharker with interactive quizzes for Higher English.