'Raw to the bone and unfailingly uplifting': How to Lose Everything is a field guide to grief

We asked the playwright, director and actor Monique Mojica to write an artist's response to the films in How to Lose Everything, a five-part series spanning nations, languages, and perspectives on heartache. Stream How to Lose Everything on CBC Gem in English, Cree, Anishinaabemowin, Ktunaxa, and Inuktitut. The first two episodes are now available on YouTube.

"First your heart will break."

These words begin the instructions of the field guide. If you have a heart, this owner's manual is essential. At once stark and exquisite, raw to the bone and unfailingly uplifting, these five short animated films gently guide us to move through and live with irreconcilable loss. And in these times when "reconciliation" is brandished like a virtue-signalling sword, it is important to recognize that there are indeed irreconcilable losses on multiple levels that exist in irreconcilable spaces.

Loss. Profound loss is harshly familiar to the experience of Indigenous peoples globally. In How to Lose Everything, these shared multi-generational traumatic losses, these collective woundings we carry are filtered through five animated treatments that remind us of our responsibility to survive. Each is specific to the individual personal story, yet collectively shared. 

This series pushes beyond "trauma porn" — a popular phenomenon where outsiders may look on as voyeurs to Indigenous pain and consume it as a commodity. Instead, there is a deep knowing born from having survived the rough terrain of loss. Instead, these stories transform. Instead, these stories release the pain of loss into realms of possibilities.

They do this by holding us, the witnesses, in a caring embrace, body/mind/spirit/heart. Never letting go of the rope as they lead us through difficult knowledges without plunging us into despair. Only a unique storytelling gift is able to pull that off and each one of these stories is rooted in nation-specific storytelling gifts.

"I could list so many other things lost to English." Another nation-specific gift of this short series is that each animated segment is meticulously translated and produced in the Indigenous language of the storyteller. The four languages are: Nêhiyawêwin(twice), Anishnaabemowin, Ktunaxa and Inuktitut. This is significant not only because it expands the possibilities of these films being activated in language revitalization but also because it allows communities to access stories as a resource for grieving, healing and renewal in their own language. Nothing like this collection of films has existed until now. It is as courageous as it is unique. 

Birth/life/death/rebirth. Once we lose everything and survive, what remains is the story; the story of becoming present to and living with the sorrow. It is through the vehicle of animation that the creative transformation of these stories takes place.

The different styles of animation in this series serve not only to bring the stories to life but also as an emotional buffer so that we witnesses may stay fully engaged with the storytellers' narrations. It distances us a heartbeat or two from the site of breakage, like a shock absorber — a shield that protects us from the full-body impact of the howling loss we are called to witness.

We flow with the imagery as it is magically drawn across the screen or marvel in the details of the stop-action. Here is where the storytellers transform loss into personal mythologies of epic proportions that cast the tellers as their own new cultural heroes. "A skirt made of stars."

The original musical scores composed for each piece neither distract nor overwhelm but are an integral and dynamic layer of the storytelling. Sometimes this is done with strings or piano, sometimes with a refrain that suggests singers seated at the drum. Each one supports, punctuates, sets the tone and mood while they transport us through time and space elevating each story.

Throughout the visual imagery of the stories is the thematic presence of the sun, the stars, the waters, throbbing hearts and the other-than-human world. These elements thread the stories together body/mind/spirit/heart like beads on sinew. The presence of the stars in these stories directly reflects that in many Indigenous cultures, the stars are our ancestors; in others it is where we come from, our origins and when we leave this life, it is where we return. "Bone out of stars." 

Each storyteller in How to Lose Everything reveals a personal look into the ways our stories scar us and then at the ways we may regain the power to blaze a trail toward constructing possible futures. "I know that the only truth is the sun will rise and fall and rise again." Wherever we may find ourselves on grief's journey, this compassionate field guide, glued together from tears and stardust is an indispensable tool. 

Watch episodes of How to Lose Everything as they roll out on YouTube throughout the month of November.