In her collection of essays A Stranger’s Letters (Risā’il al-Gharība), Hoda Barakat considers the role of forgetting in loss and exile, and she reimagines forgetting not simply as a void, but something that itself carries weight. Writing from Paris, where she sought refuge from the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s and never returned, she notes the gaps that appear in the memories of her fellow exiles. They find that they cannot or do not wish to recall the events they experienced in the Civil War, particularly at the request of well meaning friends who have never survived a war. She describes an urgent need to forget, but the Arabic term nisyān (forgetting, or the act of forgetting) is unable to capture the moments of forgetting, willful or otherwise, that well up within those who have left the home country. Instead, she coins the Arabic neologism nisyānāt, “forgettings,” a plural form of nisyān. While “forgetting” is an action, a process of removal or loss, “forgettings” acquire the status of objects, discreet items that, like memories, can acquire a weight in their own right. If, as Marc Augé argues in Oblivion, some amount of forgetting is necessary so that other memories may flourish, what implications does Barakat’s notion of forgettings as objects have for the construction of memory, particularly in exile? In this paper, I consider how Barakat’s concept of forgettings creates a form of memory particular to contexts of exile and loss. I argue that for Barakat, forgettings enable one to assert control over the process of remembering by channeling and limiting it. Her invocation of forgettings in response to the demands of others to remember is a means of claiming the power to narrate – or indeed not to narrate – for oneself. I also consider forgettings within the larger context of the Barakat’s articulation of the experience of exile. Namely, exile (ghurba) for Barakat is marked not by large events, grand narratives, or collective commemorations, but rather it accumulates slowly over time and appears in unexpected moments, as when a certain word triggers a recollection, or when one suddenly becomes aware of an event long since forgotten. It is an experience constituted by the ongoing negotiation of both memories and forgettings.