Creative Nonfiction by Sarah Menkedick

Negara Brunei Darussalam 2008

Los Posatigres is a short story by Argentine author Julio Cortázar about a family who learns to pose tigers for photos. The story details the family’s initial fears about the complications involved in posing tigers, their plan to attempt posing one tiger, and finally, their successful segueway into full time tiger-posing.  

With the calm exactitude of Cortázar’s protagonists, the narrator discusses the various factors that go into successful tiger-posing and touches upon the potential for grave disaster the profession possesses. He concludes, however, with a justification for why his family continues posing tigers despite the complexity and danger involved:*

En los instantes que uno sentiría la tentación de llamar cruciales – quizá por los dos tablones, quizá por mero lugar común-, la familia se siente poseída de una exaltación extraordinaria; mi madre no disimula las lágrimas y mis primas carnales tejen y destejen convulsivamente los dedos.  Posar el tigre tiene algo de total encuentro, de alineación frente a un absoluto; el equilibrio depende de tan poco y lo pagamos a un precio tan alto, que los breves instantes que siguen al posado y que deciden de su perfección nos arrebatan como de nosotros mismos, arrasan con la tigredad yla humanidad en un solo moviemiento inmóvil que es vértigo, pausa y arribo.  No hay tigre, no hay familia, no hay posado.  Imposible sabe lo que hay: un temblor que no es de esta carne, un tiempo central, una columna de contacto. Y después salimos todos al patio cubierto, y nuestras tías traen la sopa como si algo cantara, como si fuéramos a un bautismo.

In the seconds that one has the temptation to call crucial – maybe because of the two boards, maybe because of mere cliché – our family is possessed of an extraordinary exaltation; my mother does not conceal her tears and my cousins weave and unweave their fingers.  Posing the tiger is something like a total encounter, like alignment with the absolute; balance is so fragile and we pay such a high price for it that the brief moments that follow the posing and determine its perfection pull us out of ourselves, do away with tigerness and humanness in one immobile movement that is at once vertigo, pause, and arrival.  There is no tiger, no family, no posing. It’s impossible to know what there is: a tremor not of this flesh, a central time, a column of contact. And afterwards we all go out to the covered patio, and our aunts bring soup as if something were singing, as if we were going to a baptism.

*Excerpt in Spanish from Cortázar: Cuentos Completos; English excerpt Sarah’s translation

Writing, photography and travel are all types of tiger-posing.  There is the possibility of grave disaster and also the potential for an “immobile movement that is at once vertigo, pause and arrival.”  With this site, we’re polishing our posing skills, trying to get ourselves and you inside that transcendent, ephemeral moment when the tiger is posed, the picture taken.

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Sarah Menkedick is a writer, editor and MFA student in creative nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is the editor in chief of Glimpse.org and the director of the Glimpse Correspondents Program. She has lived and taught in France, China, Japan and Mexico, and traveled to more than fifteen countries. Somehow, she’s always found a place to go running. She speaks fluent French and Spanish and once sweet-talked her way into an independence day blowout at the Mexican embassy in Beijing with her expert Mexican slang. Highlights from her travels include witnessing a goat slaughter in Mexico, hiking across Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in Patagonia, and drinking coffee to the point of delirium in the Bornean rainy season.  She is currently interning at Harper’s Magazine.

Jorge Luis Santiago is a freelance photographer from Oaxaca, Mexico.  His photos have been published in Cuarto Oscuro, Luna Zeta, and a variety of other local, national and international publications.  He once braved a sixty-hour train ride from Beijing to Hong Kong and back again on a wooden bench, surviving on duck eggs.  The things a man will do for love.