To leave your kindred and your father's house: contemporary Dutch Christian Border Narratives

To be human means to be in transit and narrative can in many ways be seen as the form of communication that is most suitably geared to deal with transition. Through the emplotment implied in narrative, people give shape and meaning to trajectories of migration and transgression. Transition brings with it processes of remembering, forgetting and the readjustment of identity and narrative offers generic models to work through such processes. We analysed fifteen life writing accounts bundled in the book Vrij Gemaakt? (2014), in which thirty-somethings, born and raised in the Reformed Liberated tradition, reflect on their youth in and affiliation with this tradition. Four questions guide the interpretation of the accounts: (a) what types of border experiences can be distinguished in the accounts? (b) what life events lead up to dominant or minor border experiences? (c) what strategies do authors employ in order to deal with these border experiences, and finally, (d) how are border experiences embedded in the various life accounts? We conclude with the hypothesis that writing about border experiences can only be done post hoc. That is to say, border experiences can only be recognised and evaluated as such from a clearly defined position outside the border experience itself.