Christopher Hirschmann Brandt, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt is a New York City writer, translator, and political activist. Also an actor, theatre worker, carpenter, furniture designer. He teaches poetry workshops and Peace and Justice Studies at Fordham University. Poems and essays have been published abroad in, among others, Laterál (Barcelona); El signo del gorrión (Valladolid); Liqueur 44 (Paris); La Jornada (Mexico); and in the US in Poiesis, Syndic, …and Then, Phati'tude, Appearances; The Unbearables; Big City Lit, and in the anthologies Crimes of the Beats (Unbearables), Classics in the Classroom (Teachers and Writers) and Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police (Soft Skull, ed. Jackie Sheeler). His translations of Cuban fiction have been published in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press; his translations of Cuban poets are included in The Whole Island (Berkeley, ed. Mark Weiss), and he translated four collections of poetry by the late Puerto Rican poet and teacher Carmen Valle. In 2017 Medicine Show Theatre Ensemble in New York City commissioned and produced his new translation of Albert Camus’ Caligula. Seven Stories Press published his translation of Clara Nieto’s Masters of War, a history of U.S. interventions in Latin America since 1959.

TORTURERS R US — An Essay by Christopher Hirschmann Brandt

Christopher Hirschmann Brandt presents an extensive reflection-as-indictment on the practice of torture by nation states, and in particular the United States of America, which he calls home. Unlike many political leaders who use the first-person plural “we” to refer to their countries and their peoples in a patriotic tone, Hirschmann Brandt employs the collective “we” inversely to interrogate the repeated uses of torture to bring to light the urgent need for accountability. In doing so, the author provides a broader cultural and historical context required to understand the uses of torture by the United States along a far longer timeline with cited examples covering entire eras and centuries.