I first picked up Gabriela Wiener’s Undiscovered under the impression that it was a memoir. Following the author as she deals with her father’s death, the book is both a remembrance of that loss, as well as a personal look at the legacy of colonialism in Peru. As her last name suggests, the author is a descendant of Charles Wiener, the white man who almost rediscovered Machu Picchu (an important failure). Wiener seamlessly weaves a recounting of her personal journey with grief and recovery with a partly-factual-partly-imagined story of what actually happened while Charles was in Peru, the effects of his cultural disregard and theft, and how someone who shared both the legacy of the land he plundered as well as his name reconciles her history and present.
All this to say, I have no idea to explain what exactly this book is. Though nominated for the International Booker Prize, classifying this book remains near impossible. You can’t call it fiction, with the raw, intense portrayal of Wiener’s life in Madrid and the one she left behind in Peru so many years ago colliding with her father’s death. Neither is it a memoir, containing many instances in which Wiener conjures imaginary realities of the past; Charles meeting the woman who would become the author’s progenitor (allegedly. There is a lot of debate about this within and without the family, as Wiener highlights) as well as the life of an Indigenous boy who Wiener may or may not have stolen away to Paris.
Haroon Khalid’s From Waris to Heer similarly resists classification. At once a retelling of Waris Shah’s Heer-Ranjha and the story of the famed poet’s life, Khalid’s book blurs the lines between genre, drawing threads to connect Waris Shah to his iconic retelling of the ages old story of ill-fated lovers. In this relationship, Waris’s story itself becomes mythical, a mixture of fact and conjecture that humanises the poet, ponders on his life in a politically turbulent Punjab, and revels in a life of traditions long abandoned, be it because of time or the Partition.
For both of these books, a rejection of tradition genre classification and conventions is a part of the exploration of a post-colonial identity. Wiener’s book deals with this more directly, not just through her white ancestor, but also through her queerness. What does it mean to be an indigenous queer person, without the expectations of western/white traditions of queerness? Khalid’s book, set in a time before the stronghold of the British Raj, ruminates in a nostalgic, undivided Punjab. His recounting of an oral narrative holds the same cadence as it would had a grandmother been reciting it to a child. What shapes do stories take when removed from a western perspective? Why indeed, are there genres?