Speech by our former student Marcelle Hendrickx

On Thursday, April 21, 2016, the annual E. du Perron evening took place at the Brabant Knowledge Center for Art and Culture (bkkc) in Tilburg.
This year, the author Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer received the E. du Perron Prize from the hands of Tilburg’s alderman of culture, Marcelle Hendrickx.

Marcelle Hendrickx, a former student of the RLO, graduated in 1985. In her speech, Marcelle also talked about the importance to her of her former Dutch teacher, Kees van Velzen, over 30 years ago!


Quoting from her speech:

“For each student, Kees van Velzen had compiled a personal list of books of Dutch masterpieces. “Especially for you”. Why? No idea. But we read ourselves silly. The whole class did, everyone. We read and we interacted. Discussion. Fire. Poison and antidote. And Van Velzen encouraged us to position ourselves. What did we think? Where did we stand? What were we feeling? What would we do differently? It was difficult, it didn’t always work out; I thought Du Perron’s ‘The Land of Origins’ was a difficult, complicated book, but my teacher challenged me to define my own position. To stand up for my own origins, my own future. “What did you think about it? What would you do differently?” he kept asking.”
If you would like to read Marcelle Hendrickx’s speech in its entirety, you can do so here.