Tissue: everything that runs your life is printed on something you could tear

Is the twenty-pound note in your wallet made of paper? Yes sounds safe, because banknotes always were. Since twenty twenty, Bank of England twenty-pound notes have been polymer, a kind of plastic, partly because plastic notes last much longer. Money was made tougher so it would survive. Imtiaz Dharker's poem Tissue wants the opposite. Borders, money, records of who owns what: every structure that runs your life is printed on something you could tear with one hand, and the poem is not angry about that. It is relieved. Dharker has her reasons for wanting paper thin, and carelessness is not one of them.

Tissue is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. The title has two meanings: thin paper, and the soft material a living body is made of. It opens on "Paper that lets the light shine through", and says this is what could alter things. The poem's first idea is that thinness is a strength, not a weakness. Then comes old paper, "The kind you find in well-used books": the back of the Koran, where a family has written in births, deaths, heights and weights. The holy book is introduced by how worn it is, not by what it says. Next the poem imagines buildings made of paper, drifting and falling away on a sigh. Then maps, where the sun shines through the "borderlines, the marks that rivers make". A river was there long before anyone drew a border along it. On paper, the border is only ink, and the light goes straight through it. Even grocery receipts appear, the slips that record what was bought and how it was paid, and the poem imagines them lifting our lives like paper kites. So the paper in this poem is never just paper. It is the holy book, the map, the receipt. What does the map control: what people pay, who owns land, or who was born when? Who owns land. Borders decide whose country is whose, and the poem shows them as lines of ink that sunlight passes through.

In the last part, an architect could build with all of this, and never want brick or block. Instead the daylight breaks through the shapes that pride can make, the grand buildings and monuments. And the new building is made of living tissue: a structure "never meant to last". The poem's last line is "turned into your skin". The paper has become a person. The form helps. Most of the poem is four-line stanzas with no rhyme, loose and open, and that final line stands alone, set apart from the rest. Why would a poem be relieved that human structures do not last?

Because the structures were never the point. Dharker lets the light through the paper on purpose. What she wants to survive is not the border or the bank note but the person it was made about, which is why the poem ends on skin.

Some students hesitate to use Tissue in an exam. One examiner's report answers that directly: In the spirit of offering some reassurance to the little bit of hesitancy with Tissue from some quarters, we saw examples of students using this poem in particular with great effect to talk about externalised forms of identity and how that links to sense of self. Externalised identity means who you are as written down outside you: in a family book, on a map, in a record. So the fix is to aim Tissue at two kinds of question, the ones about identity and the ones about how fragile power is.

Five short pieces of Tissue are worth carrying, and each one has its job. "Paper that lets the light shine through": thinness as a strength, from the first line. "The kind you find in well-used books": the holy book introduced by use, not authority. "borderlines, the marks that rivers make": borders exist only as ink, and the river was there first. "never meant to last": the poem's claim about every human structure, said quietly and without regret. And "turned into your skin": the last line moves the whole poem from paper to a person. In the cluster, Tissue answers power, because it shows what people build as temporary, and identity and belonging, because it ends on the person the records were about.

Now some gaps to fill, one word missing from three of the lines. Paper that lets the light shine what? Through. Paper that lets the light shine through: thin, and strong because of it. Now the maps: the sun shines through their what? Borderlines. On the maps, the borders are only ink. Try the architect's building: a structure never meant to what? Last. Never meant to last, and the poem is glad of it. One more, a new one: a passport is paper too. What would Dharker say it cannot hold? The person. A passport records who you are, but it is a structure, and the poem's light and skin are what it cannot contain. Money was made of plastic so it would last. Dharker's paper is meant to tear, so the light, and the person, can get through.

Name three paper things in the poem plus what each controls, and that's settled: thumb up to log it. Should they refuse to come, store the video and jot the three on a scrap of paper, which fits.

Next in the chapter: The Emigree: she knows the country may be gone, and keeps the sunlight anyway. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, sixteen.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.