Let's Discuss "Undiscovered" by Gabriela Wiener

Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.

In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father’s infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eye-patched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles’s book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race.

It is an unflinching and revelatory story of colonial violence in Latin America and its enduring scars on generations to come.

Blending personal, historical and fictional writing, Undiscovered tells of a search for identity beyond the old stories of patriarchs and plunder. Subversive, intimate and fiercely irreverent, it builds to a powerful call for decolonization.