Maria Eugénia Pereira is Assistant Professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro (Portugal). She holds a PhD in French Literature from the University of Lisbon. Since obtaining her degree, she has carried out research in French and Portuguese Literature, Comparative Literature and Cinema; and has numerous publications on topics related to each of these fields. She is also the co-author and coordinator of MOOC ApPT-UA, Aprender Português, at Universidade de Aveiro. Besides teaching and doing research, Maria Eugénia Pereira currently holds the following posts: Director of the BA programme in Languages and Business Relations; member of the Executive Commission of UINFOC (Integrated Extended Learning Unit); and member of the Executive Committee of UNAVE (Association for Profissional Training and Research of the University of Aveiro).

Abstract: In his very first book of poems, , O País dos Outros, [The Country of the Others] (1959), Rui Knopfli writes “ European, they say I am”, “but African, I feel’ (Knopfli, 2003:59). By this he is expressing the conflicting quest for his own identity; its split between the two spaces of its self-representation: Europe and Mozambique. Rui Knopfli’s soul, always on the alert, nourishes itself intellectually in Europe and emotionally in Mozambique. It is in this double belonging, that he indulges in poetry, in a movement that is at the same time one of construction and deconstruction, of encounter and loss. His homeland is, therefore, an island made up of verses in Portuguese, where everything happens inside and outside the territorial space, inside and outside the temporal space, a homeland made up of a strange and hybrid reality, with water and wind being the infinity of its possibilities.