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How does writing that emphasizes its own subjectivity—whether poetry, fiction, or memoir—add to our archives of individual or collective trauma? This talk addresses the role of memory and forgetfulness in subject-centered writing on the 1988 prison massacre in Iran. While the massacre has been documented and condemned in more outwardly objective genres like historiography, journalism, and legal activist writing, little critical attention has gone to subjective or imaginative literature (broadly conceived) that memorializes the same event. Introducing a corpus of such writings and proposing theoretical and methodological considerations for their study, Alavi argues that subjectivity in literature invokes not only acts of remembering but also modes of forgetting that are integral to living through and beyond the trauma. Attention to this dialect of memory and forgetting suggests how literature can both articulate the singular nature of each loss suffered in an event like the 1988 massacre and, at the same time, invite a reading of the event as universal, in this case as one episode in what is increasingly and more openly invoked as a collective national trauma that spans multiple decades and neither begins nor ends with the prison massacre.