Ange Mlinko's everyday oblique

Poet and critic Ange Mlinko, who has spent the past year in Beruit, writes in The Nation about  Barry J. Blake's new book Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols through the lens of her experience amongst the codes and symbols of the Middle East:

Even today, religious practices may inform our first experience of codes. Prayers are a type of poetry; parables introduce us to metaphor; liturgical rites imbue us with the magic of structures. But even before we learned our prayers, our mothers recited nursery rhymes and sang lullabies, which too are codes: How I wonder what you are. And maybe we also had a foreign language or two in our background—a grandfather we didn't understand, a mother who code-switched. We carry around with us a primal memory of emerging from the linguistic fog into enlightenment. Playing hide-and-seek with language recapitulates this memory . . .