Iraqi writer Muhsin al-Ramli’s personal experiences as an exile living in Spain inform the themes that he explores in both his long and short fiction. His 1998 collection "Awr?q Ba‘?dah ‘an Dijla" (Papers Far from the Tigris) and other short stories penned by him and published in various newspapers and magazines within the last two decades will be the focus of this paper. These texts repeatedly employ a first-person narrator residing someplace in Spain and writing about his homeland of Iraq. The geographical distance from which these narratives unfold infuses each text with nostalgia and also fragments it, highlighting the divided self. Physically living in Spain but dwelling psychologically in Iraq, the characters exist in a constant state of in-betweenness. They are neither fully here nor there, living instead a shadow existence in Spain defined by feelings of alienation and displacement. Most of al-Ramli’s characters, like the author himself, were forced to leave Iraq in the 1990s for economic or political reasons, or both. The homeland is reconstructed and remapped through the frantic rewriting of its lost geography. But the descriptions of cities, villages, neighborhoods, streets, and even individual shops, restaurants, and cafes pile up densely, resisting the narrators’ efforts to reclaim them. Their pull undermines any effort to live now and develop an identity rooted in the self that is defined by anything but exile. In this paper, I will argue that this divide produces a psychological crisis that alienates al-Ramli’s narrators and characters from both their surroundings and the texts themselves, which represent the lost Iraq. Alienation is manifested through highly experimental narratives that incorporate stream of consciousness, dreams, and nightmares, among other forms. The stories themselves resist linear narratives, as if contesting their telling. It is only in the constant shuttling between Iraq and Spain, between past and present, that al-Ramli and his narrators can imagine home.