About this item

Stolen from her family as an infant, a prize-winning poet recounts her arduous journey to reconnect with the Aboriginal culture of her birth. In Too Afraid to Cry, Ali Cobby Eckermann - who was recently awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world - describes with searing detail the devastating effects of racist policies that tore apart Indigenous Australian communities and created the Stolen Generations of "adoptees, " Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their birth families. Told at first through the frank eyes of a child whose life was irretrievably changed after being "adopted" into a German Lutheran family, Too Afraid to Cry braids piercingly lyrical verse with spare prose to tell an intensely personal story of abuse and trauma.