PRI's The World Visits Ali Cobby Eckermann

Jasmine Garsd introduces Aboriginal poet Ali Cobby Eckermann to listeners (and readers) of The World. After running away from her adoptive parents' home to the central Australian desert as a teen, Eckermann rose to become "one of Australia's most celebrated poets" Garsd explains. From there: 

Earlier this year, she became the first aboriginal Australian to get the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize, which Yale University bestows annually for excellence in writing. Eckermann writes about her childhood and adolescence and being part of Australia’s Stolen Generations, which refers to the 100,000 aboriginal children who were removed from their biological families by the government and sent to boarding schools and church-run missions.

In her poem, “Ngingali,” she describes the anxiety of growing up without her biological mother. “My mother is a granite boulder/I can no longer climb nor walk/around/her weight is a constant reminder/of myself/I sit in her shadow/gulls nestle in her eyes/their shadows her epitaph/I carry/a pebble of her in my pocket.”

After being taken from her mother, as a baby, Eckermann was adopted into a family of white farmers in southern Australia. She says they were kind to her, but there were larger, looming issues they could not shield her from. She was sexually assaulted by a family friend when she was young. And as an aboriginal child growing up in a white community, she was bullied. By the time she was a teen, the alienation was unbearable. She’d spiraled into alcoholism and drug addiction. At 18, she gave birth to a boy. A single mom, Eckermann felt judged by the people in her community.

She put the baby up for adoption and left for central Australia to find her birth family. There, she says, she learned to honor her own grief and the pain of everything that had happened to her and to the women who came before her. She began talking through things and writing about it. “You have to honor it and you have to feel it, and it hurts. And people will stop at a level of pain, and that’s where they become stuck. And you have to feel every iota of it to get to the other side. My poetry came out of honoring my grief.”

Read more (and listen) at PRI's The World.