The Eritrean National Service (ENS) constitutes the nerve centre of postindependence Eritrean polity without which it is difficult to understand and analyse the causes of the successes and failures of the Grand National projects, such as nation building, nurturing of national unity and common Eritrean national identity, post-conflict (re)construction and the building of efficient defence capability. During the liberation struggle, also called the thirty years’ war (1961–1991), the idea of ‘the common good’ in which individual interests were sacrificed in pursuit of the grand cause – independence – was the single most important lynchpin. Its pursuit created a politically and socially acceptable moral justification for the sacrifice of individual interests.

Although the war ended, the ENS continued and has become openended; though intended as a common good, it has degenerated into indefinite forced labour or a modern form of slavery. Consequently, thousands of citizens are forcibly held in endless servitude against their will, under the threat of severe punishment. It affects every aspect of the country's economic, social and political situation, as well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of households and conscripts.

There has not, to date, been any in-depth and critical scrutiny of the ENS's achievements and failures. There is also a dearth of data on its overarching impacts on the social fabric of Eritrean polity. This book is a partial attempt to fill the lacunae. The main aim of this book is to examine the extent to which the stated goals of the ‘national service’, as stipulated in the proclamation on the ENS, various government policy declarations and practices, have been, or are in the process of being, achieved. Unlike other wide-ranging national service programmes discussed briefly in the book, in which the main focus is on citizenship, independence, equality, responsibility and participation, in Eritrea the main emphasis has been on control, loyalty and service. Since 2004, hundreds of thousands of young men and women have fled the country, risking their lives in order to disentangle themselves from an indefinite state of entrapment.

The aim of this book has been to explore the ways in which the riddles resist anthropocentrism in their depictions of the natural world and to generate new ways of reading these enigmatic texts using the principles of ecocriticism and ecotheology. Taking the cue from Low, who has argued for more ecocritical readings of Old English texts, I have turned the ecological gaze on to the Exeter Book riddles in order to excavate Anglo-Saxon attitudes to the non-human world. Neville's Representations has provided a comprehensive, indepth study of the natural world in the riddles and beyond; what I have tried to do is refocus the critical gaze on the natural world from nature's point-of-view. What has become apparent is that it is possible, indeed valuable, to discuss resistance to anthropocentrism in these enigmatic texts and that ecocritical explorations of these texts are long overdue.

In fact, the riddle poets’ interests in the material world and humanity's use of it has produced undoubtedly the most ecologically aware texts in the Old English corpus. It is worth recalling here Tupper's 1910 introduction to the Exeter Book riddles and his assertion that what all the riddles have in common is their human interest. It is true that human beings are a strong presence in the texts – their level of human interest has been testified by the amount of literature on the subject – but what I have endeavoured to show, and what I think this study has proved, is that the riddles fulfil the ecocritical principle that ‘human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest’. The riddles are interested in how their objects are useful to humans, but they are also interested in the natural beginnings of these objects, in how they came to be in human hands, and in the ethics of their use.

Part of the beadoweorc of this book has been arguing against criticism that has focused on the human interests of the riddles to the exclusion of any other, countermanding such assertions as ‘[Riddle 1] has nothing whatever to do with nature’ and ‘[Riddle 83's] humanity is more discernible than its identity’.

The case of ‘Johannes Rykener, se Elianoram nominans’ was tried in 1395. The verdicts are still being written. It was an unusual case with all the right (or wrong) ingredients for a ripping yarn – sex, money, cross-dressing, nuns – but even for all that, those involved might scarcely have believed the celebrity it would achieve six centuries later. The defendant was caught with one John Britby in Sopers Lane and is accused of committing a crime that the recording clerk, in a suggestively reticent turn of phrase, refers to as ‘illud vitium detestibile, nephandum et ignominiosum’ (that detestable, unspeakable and ignominious vice). At the time, he was dressed in women's clothes and calling himself Eleanor. Besides the encounter in question, Rykener states that he had sex as a woman with an Essex rector, three Oxford scholars, four Franciscans, one Carmelite, three chaplains and many priests; additionally, as a man, ‘with many nuns and […] many women both married and otherwise’. As the case wears on, the need to record the unmentionable sin eventually effects the textual metastasis that yields ‘illo vitium antedictum’ (the aforementioned [unmentionable] vice). Even in 1932, in an edition of late-fourteenth-century Pleas and Memoranda that specifies names, locations and other particulars for almost every other contemporary case, the entry for 1 February 1395 reads only (but tantalisingly), ‘Examination of two men charged with immorality, of whom one implicated several persons, male and female, in religious orders.’ Consequently, the case was very little known until the mid-1990s, when it was rediscovered and its tangled language and arresting mix of frankness and ambiguity brought to critical attention by Ruth Mazo Karras and David Lorenzo Boyd.

The Rykener case has remained a mainstay of medieval, queer and gender studies ever since, and as such I will not dwell on it here; it does, however, introduce some key issues. Firstly, it makes very pointed mention of the unspeakable act or vice and, moreover, the phenomenon of the aforementioned unmentionable act. This is one that Carolyn Dinshaw notes ‘neatly exemplifies Foucault's point about sexuality in general as it developed out of premodernity: the sexual act here is defined as unspeakable, yet it is spoken of voluminously’.

The previous two chapters have explored the relationship between Ṣàngó, Islam and Christianity through the institution of ọbaship and the lives of the Tìmìs of Ede. In this chapter, I look at what Ṣàngó's own words – or, more precisely, the oral texts central to his worship – tell us about the deity, and its relationship to Islam and Christianity. It is through verbal arts that Ṣàngó worshippers invoke the deity, express their personal relationship with Ṣàngó and comment on their roles as Ṣàngó worshippers in the community. Most importantly for the understanding of the texts surrounding Ṣàngó, his worship takes place in a community in which most people identify themselves either as Muslims or Christians. As a result, the texts that surround him form part of a larger web of songs, sermons and other texts in which members of other religions also praise their own god or spread their own faith. The performance of Ṣàngó's oral literature therefore not only asserts his worshippers’ position but also comments on the positions of others. Emerging from a competitive landscape of religious performance, Ṣàngó's verbal art is thus part of a collective poetic competition of religions, in which both accommodation and challenge play an important role.

Karin Barber explains that ‘Yoruba òrìṣà can scarcely be apprehended without taking into account the specific textuality of the oral genres through which they are created, maintained and communicated with’. An important aspect of the textuality of these oral genres derives from the fact that the òrìṣà exist primarily through the highly personal and emotional bond with individual followers. If we then understand the oral literature surrounding Ṣàngó worship as also reflecting poets’ and performers’ individual experiences, their spiritual and emotional orientation may determine or colour the perceived religious, social or historical content of the poetry. As the result of highly divergent and personal experiences of Ṣàngó, the oral arts surrounding him cannot offer monolithic articles of faith or understanding. Issuing apparently tolerant appeals for peaceful coexistence even as they appropriate the powers of other religions, they offer glimpses of the ambivalent nature of Ṣàngó's relationship with Christianity and especially Islam.

What do we mean when we speak of the unspeakable? From the ineffable glories of the divine, plunging down to the murky depths of the ‘unspeakable sin’, some things cannot be put into words – but these are often, paradoxically, those things about which there is an abundance of discourse. Alongside everything that is spoken (or written) there also exists an unspoken: as Pierre Macherey insists, a text will inevitably expose its ideological crises, and say what it does not say. For medievalists, the failure of communication often takes a material aspect, for along with the textual evidence there is a textual void: the missing, damaged, incomplete or lost manuscripts that expose the fragmentary nature of medieval records, and whose exploration delves into the spaces between the fragments, looking for the unknown, the unsaid, the silenced and the unspeakable. As Foucault and Lacan suggest, such silence may be calculating, or inviting; the unspeakable may be gruesome or awesome, and often, those acts described as ‘unspeakable’ in contemporary reports are also those described as ‘medieval’. In this book, I examine the idea of the unspeakable in the Middle Ages as an important concept with respect to medieval texts in general, and in constructions of medieval gender and sexuality in particular. Who gets to speak, and why, and how? And who doesn't, and why, and how?

The unspeakable and the unsayable have become prominent in contemporary theory, particularly in the work of Giorgio Agamben, who (in common with many medievalists) draws on Foucault for the philosophical basis of his best-known and most controversial work, Homo Sacer, and William Franke, who builds a philosophy of apophatic language that addresses negative theology through an encounter with Hegelian and Platonic debates. For Franke, the limit of language is the crucial philosophical question of the age; for Agamben, too, the question of humanness and the political condition of living, of being permitted to live, is intimately bound up with the question of language.

The elderly religious woman – wrinkled, white haired, huddled in a wrap she has borrowed for the occasion – smiles at the visitor whose questions she has been indulging. ‘My life at that time was a hard one. Food was so scarce I had to ration myself very severely and I saw no-one. But I was guided by Our Lady.’ She grows more candid. ‘The real problem was, I was simply filled with desire for fucking.’

The extended interview between St Mary of Egypt and the monk Zosimus does not generally take this form, of course. In making it understood that her former lifestyle was one of unbridled hedonism and licentious behaviour, Mary herself does not put too fine a point on it: she describes her vices and desires as unasecgendlic – unspeakable – and she is tormented by her thoughts of hamed – sex, or (to borrow a translation in Mary's own unvarnished style) fucking. Mary's desire is not contained in a sanitised or circumlocutory turn of phrase, though modern treatments of her vita sometimes find one. While Mary calls her sins unspeakable, the lesson of her life is that there are occasions when the only thing more important than constraining speech is not constraining it. It is confession that makes her admissions desirable, rather than unspeakable.

This chapter explores the uses of silence, speech and the unspeakable in the Old English version of the life of Mary of Egypt and the guide for anchoresses known as Ancrene Wisse. The first is a desert saint whose ascetic, isolated lifestyle is the inspiration and precursor to the second, the anchoritic subject who is figuratively cut off from the world. Speaking of oneself is central to both texts – how is the individual defined in relation to the outside world? How does one speak to and of God, of one's own religious experience? What must be expressed and what suppressed? Each text handles sin, confession and the best practice for holy life – ostensibly for a woman (or women) but also, by selective implication and extension, a man.

HAUS DER KINDHEIT WAS THE SIXTH NOVEL published by the Austrian writer Anna Mitgutsch. Mitgutsch who was born in 1948 in the Austrian city of Linz, is an academic and writer who divides her time between Linz and Boston in the United States. Her novels are largely concerned with issues of memory, identity, belonging, and Austria's Nazi past. Her work from the early 1990s onward is frequently concerned with journeys in search of roots, whether these are from the New World to Old Europe, or from Europe to the Middle East. The return to origins, which the protagonists anticipate in Mitgutsch's novels, are inevitably thwarted. In the novel Abschied von Jerusalem (Farewell to Jerusalem, 1995), the protagonist's search for roots in Jerusalem ends in tragedy, while in the novel In fremden Städten (In Foreign Cities, 1992), Mitgutsch presents the American-born Lillian leaving her Austrian family for the East Coast, yet failing to achieve the homecoming she anticipated.

Mitgutsch's novel Haus der Kindheit is no different in this respect. The first of Mitgutsch's novels to center on a male protagonist, Haus der Kindheit offers a powerful exploration of place, home, and belonging through the protagonist's quest to regain the house in the Austrian town of H. that his Jewish family left in 1928 when they moved to the United States, when Max was aged five. Max's aunt, uncle, and grandfather remained in the house, but the house was subsequently expropriated by the Nazis, and all three family members perished in the Holocaust. Despite growing up in New York, Max Berman is infected with his mother's melancholy for the Old World and for the home they left behind, and following her death, sets about reclaiming the “Haus seiner Kindheit” (HdK, 227; house of his childhood, HoC, 209). By the time that Max is ultimately successful in his quest he is nearly seventy, yet the projected return to origins rapidly turns to disillusionment through his experience of contemporary Austria.

The Eritrean National Service (ENS) is both compulsory and universal, with all citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty required to take part without exception, except for the veterans of the liberation struggle and those who are physically disabled and mentally infirm. The former are only exempted from the military training component of the service, and are still required to perform national service commensurate with their physical and mental capabilities. The aim of this chapter is therefore to examine the extent to which the national service is equally enforced, notwithstanding class, religion, sex, ethnicity, wealth, power, region and family connections. The chapter also examines the prevalence of corruption and the extent to which it is possible to buy oneself out from the service and/or to influence the decision regarding the place of assignment subsequent to the six­month military training at Sawa.

In light of the compulsory and universal nature of the ENS, every Eritrean citizen is supposed to be treated equally, regardless of class, gender, religion, region and ethnicity, based on the principle of forced equality. The principle of forced equality or equal sacrifice in bearing the burden of serving in the national service is in theory absolute. Although the ENS, as stipulated in Proclamation No 82/1995, is marked by the principle of absolute equality, there are a few exceptions and exemptions, as well as deferments. For example, Eritrean citizens who performed national service before the promulgation of Proc. No. 82/1995 and all the fighters and armed peasants who ‘spent all their time in the liberation struggle’ are exempted from performing national service.

As described in chapters 2 and 3, the traditions of Ede have it that the introduction of Islam to Ede is due to Tìmì Bamigbaye's patronage of Islam, even though he was a powerful Ṣàngó worshipper. The Muslim Buremo Owon-laa- rogo, or Owonlarogo, came to Ede in order to help Tìmì Bamigbaye to defeat his enemies, and he succeeded. After this event, Tìmì Bamigbaye allowed him to settle in Ede permanently so that he might continue to support Ede's military might. But even though the collaboration between the Tìmì and the Muslim ‘prayer warrior’ had achieved a shared victory for the town, both maintained their distance from each other.

While Tìmì Bamigbaye allowed his subjects to adopt the new faith, he did not embrace the new religion brought by Alfa Buremo. Equally, Alfa Buremo wanted to maintain distance from the town's non-Muslims even as he joined them. He settled in a separate compound near the Ọba's palace, where those he converted several indigenes lived with him and his following increased. By creating a compound, on the basis of religion, Buremo and his followers – and later other Muslims – adapted local forms of organisation normally based on kinship to produce the kernel of the town's Islamic community. The ability of Islam to engender an alternative form of kinship illustrates the ability of Muslims to create Islamic communities that existed independently within a non-Muslim environment. The implications of this practice on the existing debate on Yoruba kinship cannot be explored in this chapter, but as it illustrates the ability of Muslims to separate themselves from non-Muslims, it certainly suggests that the perception of Yoruba Islam as culturally compromised may be misleading (chapter 1).

Irrespective of the determination of the early Muslims, the path of the new religion was not smooth. After the death of Tìmì Bamigbaye and the emergence of his younger brother Ojo Arohanran as the new Tìmì in the 1840s,4 the relationship between the Tìmì and the Muslim community soured. Although Buremo had been his erstwhile friend, the new Tìmì became antagonistic towards the growing Muslim community and began to persecute them.

This chapter analyses the impact of the Eritrean National Service (ENS) on the livelihoods of families, and conscripts’ careers, survival and wellbeing. Further, the dissenting opinions of a few respondents who see the ENS as the ultimate good and worth sacrificing one's own and one's family's present and future interests are considered briefly. Eritrean society is predominantly agrarian. The large majority of households and individuals derive their livelihoods from subsistence agriculture and other related or unrelated off-farm income-generating activities. Agriculture and allied activities, such as crop production, livestock herding, forestry, and traditional fishing constitute the basis of livelihood for about 80 per cent of the population (World Bank 2015a). Given the rudimentary nature of the technology in use, agricultural production in the country is labour intensive. Due to a shortage of capital, a lack of credit facilities and small farm sizes, the overwhelming majority of subsistence farmers depend on family, rather than hired, labour. Given the arid and semi­arid nature of the environment within which nearly 80 per cent of the population eke out their meagre existence, rain-fed farming is a highly risky enterprise and, as a result, food security remains one of the major pre­occupations in the country (Kibreab 2009a, 2009c; World Bank 2015a).

Riddles 53 and 73 depict flourishing trees being cut down and shaped into objects by ‘enemies’. Most of the scholarly attention given to these two riddles has been invested in finding their solutions – a task that has proved particularly difficult for the ambiguous Riddle 53. This focus means that the pathos of the riddles’ narratives, which involve the trees being wounded and changed from their natural states, tends to be overlooked. Recent scholarship, however, suggests there is much to be learned about depictions of and attitudes towards trees in early medieval poetry. In a recent publication, Michael Bintley discusses the depiction of trees in the Poetic Edda and argues that ‘literatures both ancient and modern indicate human knowledge and understanding of plants as being comparable with humans, with a similar capacity to endure pain, suffering, and loss, in both metaphorical and literal terms’. The ‘realm of poetry and the imagination’, writes Bintley, allows readers to ‘participate in the sensory and emotional experience of non-humans’.

In this chapter, I wish to draw attention to the literal narratives of Riddles 53 and 73 and emphasise their importance for what they reveal about early medieval attitudes towards the natural world and humanity's use of its materials. These attitudes resonate with the concerns of modern ecotheologians and ecocritics regarding the intrinsic value of nature. The tree riddles, in particular Riddle 53, not only depict their subjects within a post-lapsarian dystopia but draw connections between the integrity of the tree in its natural environment and its role as an object in the hands of humans. The emphasis on the trees’ early life and initial wholeness, I suggest, produces a conflict in the riddles between the trees’ natural integrity and their potential value as objects.

The riddles’ emphasis on a natural object's wholeness is strikingly at odds with the importance placed on the ‘end product’ in early Christian thought. A metaphor from Augustine's In epistolam Iohannis, for example, imagining God's love of sinners to be like the carpenter's love for the potentiality of his material, suggests trees are valued for their future use as objects, just as humans must be considered for their spiritual potential.

The examination of transgenerational homoeroticism in the Royal Navy over most of the eighteenth century and into the early decades of the nineteenth is a difficult business. There is little before the reign of Queen Anne to provide context for such a study. Although the first secular laws against sodomy were passed under Henry VIII, no naval regulation prohibiting anal intercourse appeared until the Restoration, when it was mandated a capital crime. Even then, there is no indication that any prosecutions occurred under the regulation for almost fifty years following its enactment. The earliest record in Admiralty archives of mariners tried for homoerotic indecency dates from 1704. It was not until two years later that the navy convened a court martial for sodomy.1 Transcripts, trial summaries and occasional related documents from over one-third of these courts martial, from the first trials in the early eighteenth century until such prosecutions ended in the 1820s, deal with officers accused of sexual engagements with boys. As is often the case with judicial records of sexual transgressions, the rich trove of information they provide is not without limits. Prosecutions for sodomy or indecency, with their understandable concentration on fondling, penetration and emission, offer few if any substantial clues to the extent or frequency of such practices, nor do they offer much insight into more positive and affective manifestations of human interaction: friendship, love or the avuncular devotion of men to boys. Sexual contacts between officers and youngsters that did not devolve into anger or feelings of exploitation and betrayal rarely came to the attention of the command structure. Men in positions of authority haled before courts of inquiry or courts martial for sodomy or indecency with lads most often faced trial because their youthful partners were bent on revenge for the perceived or actual wrongs they sustained.

In the Georgian navy, officers were classified under three separate headings, commissioned officers, warrant officers and petty officers. The manner of life at sea led by members of these groups varied widely, particularly in the matter of shipboard accommodations.