When the Irish speak of “the Troubles”, they say the words with a particular weight – a compression of grief, passed between generations like a wound that never fully closed. They have their literature, their public reckoning. Even their silences are named.

We Jamaicans have a silence, too. A deeper one – because we have not even named it. When people of a certain age speak of the 1970s, something happens in the room. A knowing pause. An unspoken compact: those who were there know, and those who weren't are not quite owed the full account.

We should say its name.