Marshall’s view of the multipolar Atlantic world, her triangulation of a dynamic, fluid space, and her will to embrace all facets of her multicultural identity give rise to a liquid map of both routes and roots. The writer’s memories of her personal journeys across water interlaced with historical evocations of painful oceanic passages, from African captives to Caribbean migrants, shed light on the complicated construction of self “in the wake of slavery”, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s polysemic phrase that implies the long-standing consequencesof colonization and slavery, the mourning of the dead, and black consciousness in America today, all at once.Marshall’s multilayered textual remapping of liquid spaces lends itself to a hydrocritical approach. Building upon Hofmeyr’s concept of “hydrocolonialism” we will expose the writer’s representations of seas and waterways and their fundamental role in colonial expansion, the slave trade, and the rise of the plantation system in the New World – a brutal history and a legacy that shaped her own parents’ destiny and still has an impact on today’s Black diaspora. In her memoir, Marshall reimagines her transoceanic genealogy so as to grasp the full picture of herdiffracted diasporic identity. We will consider the author’s construction of her fragmented, hybrid work of nonfiction as a “tidalectic” narrative navigating across time and space back and forth, fluctuating between interconnected personal trajectory, family memory, and collective history.