This paper compares two novels by Iraqi refugees in Sweden by analyzing how their narrators' search for new subjectivities procedes from the erosion of Marxist ideologies in their new European post-Cold War contexts. The two novels, Raqs 'ala al-Ma': Ahlam Wa'ira (Dancing on Water: Difficult Dreams) (2006) by Mahmud al-Bayati and Hawa' Qalil (Little Air) (2009) by Janan Jasim al-Hallawwi, feature narrators who seek to come to grips with their new environment - both societal and natural - in Sweden, in search of new subjectivities which are initially based on their loss of a homeland and loss of political place. Al-Bayati's Raqs 'ala al-Ma' is structured around the narrator's search for the owner of a lost wallet, a search that parallels a similar event that occurred years earlier when he was living in Prague under the auspices of the Iraqi Communist Party. The narrator's search for the wallet becomes analogous to his emergent subject position as a refugee in Sweden and implicates intertwined Middle Eastern and European histories and poetics. The narrator confronts structures of exclusion while creating an inclusive space based on his readings of Arab, European, and Scandinavian historical and literary sources. On the other hand, the narrator of Hawa' Qalhl arrives in Sweden in the early 1990s, in his 11th year of exile previously lived in the Middle East, and declares his distance from the Marxist politics that his former self embraced. However, in his new environment and facing a society in which anti-immigrant sentiment is taking hold, he progressively loses a sense of himself and his place in the world. Deep in a depression textured by nightly asphyxiations (hence the title) he takes refuge in experiencing the beauty of wintry Swedish landscapes in solitude and in imagining poetical and aesthetic languages speak through them. Whereas the literary I of al-Bayati's novel achieves a new ethical and political sense of place through his search , the narrator of Hawa' Qalil resorts to returning to post-2003 Iraq, a decision that aggravates his sense of alienation from his former political self. This paper argues that though divergent in their resolutions (or lack thereof) cultural products and aesthetics are central to attempts at claiming new subjectivities in these two novels, and more broadly, in the emergent genre of Iraqi refugee literature.