This essay offers a reading of Glissant’s work on memory and history, arguing that traumatic experience is central to that work and consequent conceptions of identity. I explore the function of traumatic memory in relation to Glissant’s notions of the past and also futurity, both of which work with a sense of the painful past that simultaneously bequeaths melancholy and fecundity. This mixture grounds Glissant’s thought in the specificity of the Caribbean.