This article reflects on the complicated entanglements of belonging in encounters between asylum seekers or refugees with citizens of a shared country. Using the question ‘where are you from?’ as a key to discussing what is at stake in these meetings, the following takes seriously the idea that we come into being also through the meeting with one another, both as nations and individuals. These encounters operate within a larger production of media and political narratives of hostility, making belonging at the very least politically a contested idea in a refugee’s life. Drawing in the voices and experiences from two separate contexts and fieldworks of writing plays and poetry with groups of refugees and asylum seekers (a women’s group in Glasgow and a group living in a deportation centre near Copenhagen), my practice seeks to demonstrate the capacity of theatre to navigate these complex and entwined perceptions of belonging.