Qene

Qene is a genre of improvised oral poetry from Ethiopia that originates in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which historically provided traditional religious education. Its defining technique, sem-ena-werq (wax and gold), embeds a hidden deeper meaning beneath an obvious surface meaning, working much like a double entendre through the multiple meanings of individual words or sentences; a related technique, wista weira (inside the olive), creates ambiguity at the level of overall interpretation rather than individual words. Tradition credits the invention of qene to a fourteenth-century figure named Tewanay of Gojjam, though the earliest documented examples date to the late fifteenth century, and it was historically taught in religious schools called qene bet, house of poetry. The form remains associated with Amhara culture, with modern Ethiopian poets such as Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin and Mengistu Lemma among its noted practitioners.