WTN: beguine
James Harbeck
beguine
Look out: That wiley big guy’ll beguile you. He may seem like a colporteur for the jubilee, but begone, you, or you’ll get a bee in your bonnet it for him; it may seem a mere crush, but it won’t be so benign… I’m begging you, don’t put the begonia in your hair in the warm Antillean air, and don’t let them begin the beguine.
Oh, dear, I’ve shaken the tree of longing and lexis, and the words have fallen out like so many needles from a memory evergreen. Let’s see if we can draw the connections.
You know the song “Begin the Beguine,” I trust. It’s by Cole Porter (whose words were full of spirit, but he was no colporteur, i.e., seller of religious publications). It first appeared in his silly regal musical Jubilee. It’s been recorded in ever so many versions; I won’t link one, just search for videos of it and choose your fancy. But do you know what a beguine is?
Let’s make a beginning by saying it’s nothing to do, etymologically, with begin. Or with begging. Or, for that matter, with benign, though you probably weren’t wondering. And not with beguile, either, though the song is about some level of guile – which is to say, wiliness (wile and guile are two versions of the same word, historically). Yes, the song is about longing and memory and what the Brazilians call saudade, but there is a turning, a denial and then surrender, or prelapse and relapse, to say nothing of paralipsis – or a pair of lips. And anyway, its heart is not in Brazil.
In fact, Cole Porter composed the song on an ocean cruise somewhere between Indonesia and Fiji. But that is not where the heart of the beguine lies either; this emotional anthill is Antillean.
The Antilles are a pearl-string of islands, greater and lesser, half-ringing the Caribbean sea. The Greater Antilles include Hispaniola, the west side of which holds Haiti, once the French colony of Saint-Domingue, which in the late 1600s had a governor named Michel Bégon who was also an avid naturalist, and for whom Charles Plumier, a patron of botany, named a plant with pretty red flowers the Begonia.
But, ah, begone, ya! That big isle and its blooming bloke are not whence comes beguine. No, it is something both more and less French than that, something both intrinsic to the Antilles and imported by colonists. If you look up béguine, you will find that it is the feminine form of béguin, which names a kind of semi-monastic layperson living in communities, apparently eponymous from Lambert le Bègue, “Lambert the Stutterer.” But there is no tongue-tying involved here. We should sooner look to the bonnets worn by the women of the order, bonnets that were also called béguines. For some reason, these bonnets became a byword for infatuation – the verb embéguiner (‘wear a bonnet’) means ‘have a crush on someone’. So, you might say, beginning the beguine is initiating the infatuation.
Except no. Well, maybe that too, but this beguine is less mooning and more boogeying: it is a dance, a sort of slow rhumba, from the lands of rhum, specifically the French Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. It mixes Latin dance and French ballroom dance, with a hip-roll from the rhumba. It is both local and imported. And in the local creole language, begue means ‘white man’ and its feminine form is beguine.
So there it is. A dance that transports that was transported, a dance that brings to mind infatuation and flowers, in a song by a fabulous wordmonger and musicmaker from Indiana who moved to Paris and later to New York, Cole Porter, who has embiggened this tropical splendor, this music so tender, that puts the ember in remember. The beguine is always already begun, and we are beguiled.
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