This paper engages with literary representations of material and human dispossession following the post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis, focusing specifically on the 2007 book La Shay La A?ad (Nothing and Nobody). Written by poet and art critic F?r?q Y?suf, an Iraqi refugee who has been living in Sweden since the beginning of the war, La Shay La A?ad won the Ibn Batt?ta Prize for modern travel writing under the category “diary” in 2006. The “chronicling” that takes place in La Shay La A?ad blurs the lines between poetry and narrative, fiction and autobiography, and deals intensively with some of the psychological aspects of traumatic survival and the precarious nature of asylum in Europe. The narrator, who deems cities and states as sites of expulsion, not hospitality, searches for a sense of complete refuge in the natural spaces that he encounters in his new locale. Indeed, he creates a fantasy around the idea of an original state, various manifestations of which are conjured up through re-readings of Genesis, Hayy Ibn Yaqz?n, Robinson Crusoe, and the local Scandinavian literature. Such a search for an original state in which one is safe from expulsion relates to the trauma of a refugee who has already been expelled at least once. The reference to Genesis, for example, is read with the knowledge that this story of an original state always does end in expulsion. The search for an original, it seems, reflects an anxiety about that very state, suggesting strongly the increasingly precarious state of asylum in “Fortress Europe.” The systematic deportation of asylum seekers in Sweden and elsewhere, including the more recent pressure for “voluntary returns” stands in stark contrast to the forest (forest vs. fortress?) that is imagined in La Shay La A?ad, which does not exile or expel those who take refuge in it. La Shay La A?ad reads as an attempt to confront the kind of alienation that transnational migration can engender. In the wake of survival, the place of refuge carries within it the threat and possibility of a second expulsion.