An essay about production and survival, scripts and improvisation, control rooms and chaos, and the strangest, truest parallel I never expected to find.
I am a Haitian-American woman living in Odessa, Florida, and I have been watching my homeland come apart and hold itself together simultaneously for most of my conscious life. I am also, somewhat inexplicably and without apology, a devoted fan of late-night television, the format, the ritual, the strange intimacy of a person with a microphone talking to a room full of strangers about the world going sideways. This essay began as a joke I made to myself one morning, toggling between headlines about Port-au-Prince and headlines about Jimmy Kimmel's uncertain future at ABC. I typed the sentence, "they are both running on fumes and refusing to die," and then I couldn't stop writing. What follows is the full version of the thought, which is to say, the full version of my heart.
"The Show That Won't Go Off the Air"
It is a Thursday morning in early June 2026, and I am sitting at my desk in Odessa, Florida, doing something I do almost every morning, which is the digital equivalent of holding two photographs up to the light at the same time and trying to figure out why they look like the same picture.
On the left half of my screen: a headline from Deadline announcing that Jimmy Kimmel, who signed a one-year contract extension with ABC back in December, is publicly watching the late-night genre disintegrate around him, Stephen Colbert's show cancelled, the industry being, in Kimmel's own words, "not dying of natural causes" but "poisoned." He told Vulture he feels "a little defeated." He said he looks at Colbert's cancellation and sees his own future. He said, without quite saying it, that he does not know how much longer he will stand on that stage.
On the right half of my screen: a report from the UN warning that nearly 30,000 more Haitians have been displaced in the past ten days. Gangs control an estimated ninety percent of Port-au-Prince. The murder rate in 2025 rose twenty percent over 2024, which itself was catastrophic, which itself had risen over 2023. Over 6.4 million people, more than half the country, are in need of humanitarian assistance. A political transition deadline is barreling toward February and nobody on the ground believes in it. Haiti does not know how much longer it can stand either.
I sat there with my ginger tea going cold and I thought: these are two stages. Both teetering. Both refusing to go dark.
This is the part where I should probably tell you that I know these things are not the same. One is a television institution. The other is the island where my family comes from, the place whose soil and music and language live in me like a second skeleton. The comparison is, on its surface, absurd. A late-night talk show host reconsidering his contract is not equivalent to 1.4 million displaced people. I know this. I am not saying they are the same size of thing.
I am saying they are the same shape of thing.
"What does it mean to keep going when the script has been shredded? What does it mean to keep the cameras rolling when the set is actively, visibly, on fire?"
Both Haiti and Jimmy Kimmel are institutions at a crossroads, recognizable entities, beloved in their way, battered by forces larger than themselves, standing at the edge of something they cannot fully name and refusing, stubbornly, inexplicably, to simply fall. Both of them are asking the same question from very different altitudes: what do you do when the thing that was supposed to hold you up has been undermined, corroded, cancelled, or shot? What do you do when the script you were handed doesn't apply anymore, when the control room is running on prayers and muscle memory, when the audience is fragmenting and the industry is hostile and the political weather is catastrophic?
You tape anyway. You open markets anyway. You write a joke and you cook a meal and you hold a press conference no one attends and you bury your dead and you go back on the air.
I need to tell you something about being Haitian-American. It is a condition of perpetual split-screen. You live your American life, you go to Publix, you pay your Florida insurance, you watch television, you work, you laugh, you have a whole life that is real and present and yours, and simultaneously, you carry Haiti inside you like a second heartbeat. Every morning you wake up and you check the news from Port-au-Prince the way other people check the weather. You read about the gangs and the displacement and the government that barely exists and the mountains that are as beautiful as they have ever been and the people who are still, still, laughing and cooking and going to church and making art and refusing to be only their suffering, and you feel all of it from a distance that is both merciful and unbearable.
The guilt of watching from a distance is its own particular flavor of grief. You are safe. You know you are safe. You also know that safety is partly luck and partly geography and partly a set of circumstances that had nothing to do with your merit and everything to do with which border you happened to land on. You watch your homeland from a comfortable chair in Florida and you feel both grateful and gutted, and you look for ways to make meaning out of the watching, because meaning is the only thing you can make from here.
That is why this essay exists. It is a meaning-making exercise. It is also, honestly, one of the more peculiar ones I have attempted.
Let me tell you about the two stages at the edge.
"The Set Is On Fire, But We're Still Taping"
Production vs. Survival
Let me tell you what it takes to make one hour of late-night television look effortless.
By nine in the morning, the writers' room is already moving. A team of people, usually somewhere between twelve and twenty writers, depending on the show, are reading the news, watching clips, arguing about angles, drafting jokes. The head writer is circling, editing, killing the weak ones, sharpening the strong ones. By noon there is a rundown. By two o'clock there is a rehearsal. By four, hair and makeup. By five, the band is warming up. By six, the audience is filing into the theater, settling into seats, being warmed up by a stand-up comedian whose job is to get them loose and laughing before the cameras roll. By six-thirty, the director is in the control room calling shots. The floor manager is counting down. The teleprompter is loaded. The desk is dusted. The water glass is filled to exactly the right level.
And then, at a time that will appear to America as spontaneous and casual and live, a man walks out in a suit, waves at a cheering room, sits behind a desk, and appears to simply talk.
The entire apparatus exists to produce the illusion of ease. Hundreds of person-hours, enormous logistical infrastructure, a union contract governing every light cue, all of it so that one person can seem like they're just riffing. The genius of late-night television is that it is the most elaborately constructed performance of spontaneity in the history of American entertainment. It is jazz played from a fully annotated score.
And even then, it is in trouble. Kimmel said it himself: a single episode of late-night television costs approximately $120 million per year to produce. The networks built these shows because they were originally a way to get high-priced talent cheap, the whole trick was that it was "promotional," an advertisement for the talent rather than a cost center. That trick no longer works in an era when nobody needs the network's promotional platform anymore, when talent can reach their audience directly, when the monoculture that made a single late-night host necessary has shattered into a thousand algorithmic shards. The set is expensive. The set is creaking. The set is, by multiple credible accounts, on fire.
And yet every night at 11:35, the cameras roll.
"Now let me tell you what it takes to make one day of Haitian life look like anything at all."
The apparatus that is supposed to support a functioning nation, institutions, infrastructure, social contracts, government agencies, rule of law, supply chains, healthcare systems, educational infrastructure, has been systematically dismantled. Gangs control the ports. Gangs control the roads. Gangs control the markets in whole neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. The government exists largely in name. Hospitals operate without adequate medicine. Schools function without enough teachers, often without enough walls. The international community, the UN missions, the Core Group, the bilateral donors, the alphabet soup of organizations that have been "helping" Haiti for decades, have produced frameworks and conferences and reports and peacekeeping forces and, most recently, a "Gang Suppression Force" that is doing what it can with what it has, which is not enough.
In 2024, over 5,600 people were killed, an increase of more than a thousand from the year before. In 2025, the murder rate rose another twenty percent. As of this morning, 1.4 million people have been forced from their homes. Half the country is food insecure. Armed groups control ninety percent of the capital city. Half of all gang members are children.
And yet: the markets open. Women who used to work in offices set up stalls on the sidewalk and sell food and goods because they have children to feed and stopping is not an option. Teachers who have no school buildings hold class in church courtyards, in the shade of trees, in any flat space that is temporarily not controlled by someone with a gun. Doctors perform procedures by the light of phone flashlights when the generator fails, which it does, regularly, because diesel costs money that the hospital doesn't have. Musicians play. Artists paint. People cook. Children laugh, not despite everything, but somehow alongside it, in the cracks between everything. Haiti tapes another day.
Here is the difference that has to be said out loud: in Hollywood, production and survival are treated as separate categories. Production is what you do at work. Survival is a metaphor you use in interviews. "We're surviving this season," a showrunner might say, meaning their ratings are down but not catastrophically. In Hollywood, the stakes of production are professional. They are real stakes, livelihoods, careers, creative legacies, but they are not the same as the stakes of breathing.
In Haiti, production IS survival. They are the same word. When a Haitian woman gets up in the morning and figures out how to feed her family, she is engaged in an act of production as intricate and exhausting and impressive as anything any Hollywood writer's room has ever produced. She is making something out of nothing. She is running an apparatus with no infrastructure, no support system, no control room, no union contract, no writer's room, no floor manager counting down. She is improvising, in real time, for stakes that are not metaphorical.
Both Haiti and Jimmy Kimmel are running on fumes and muscle memory. The difference is that for Haiti, the fumes are not a metaphor, and the muscle memory belongs to people who have been doing this for two hundred years.
"Nobody's Following the Script Anymore"
Script vs. Improvisation
Here is how a late-night monologue works: the jokes are written by ten in the morning, revised by noon, approved by two, loaded into the teleprompter by five, and delivered at six-thirty to an audience that will believe, because the host is good at his job, that he is thinking of them in real time. The teleprompter scrolls. The host reads. The audience laughs at the appointed moment. This is the script.
And then, sometimes, it breaks.
In April 2017, Jimmy Kimmel walked onto his stage and did something nobody in that writers' room had planned. He talked about his son Billy, who had been born three days earlier with a congenital heart defect and needed open-heart surgery. He cried. He cried on television in a way that was unscripted and uncontrolled and absolutely real, and he turned that cry into a ten-minute argument for healthcare access that reached more people than any policy paper ever written. The teleprompter was useless. The monologue was in his chest, not on a screen.
After November 2016, Kimmel stood in front of his audience in a studio that felt like a different country than it had been forty-eight hours before, and he tried to say something true in a moment for which there was no prepared text. He spoke carefully, painfully, like a man feeling his way through a dark room. He didn't have a script. He had a microphone and a room full of people who needed to hear something real, and he did what good improvisers do: he told the truth as he understood it in that moment, knowing it would be imperfect, knowing it would be critiqued, knowing that the alternative, going back to the prepared material, acting like nothing had happened, would be a kind of lie he couldn't perform.
During the COVID-era empty-theater shows, the entire premise of the script was undermined. There was no audience to warm up. There was no spontaneous laugh track to react to. The apparatus of the show, the whole machinery of shared laughter, the feedback loop between host and audience that makes the jokes land, was gone. And what remained, stripped of all that infrastructure, was something more honest: one person talking, essentially to himself, essentially to a camera, essentially into the void, because stopping felt worse than continuing.
"The unscripted moments are when he is most alive on television. The moments the audience will remember forever are the ones where he stopped reading the card."
Haiti had a script once. Several, in fact.
The 1987 constitution, drafted after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, a genuine democratic document, one of the most progressive in the hemisphere at the time, was a script. The democratic transition it was supposed to govern was a script. The economic development plans were scripts, written in partnership with international institutions that had very specific ideas about what a developing nation's recovery arc should look like. The tourism dreams were scripts: Come to the Pearl of the Antilles, the beaches, the mountains, the art, the music, the food. The diaspora investment dreams were scripts: Come back, bring your money, bring your education, rebuild. Every decade had a new script. Every decade something shredded it.
1991: a coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Script shredded.
2004: Aristide ousted again, UN peacekeeping mission deployed. New script. Script complicated.
2010: 7.0 magnitude earthquake. 300,000 dead. Entire script incinerated.
2016: Hurricane Matthew kills nearly a thousand people as the country is still rebuilding from the earthquake. Script waterlogged beyond salvaging.
2021: President Jovenel Moïse assassinated in his own bedroom. The script set on fire.
2024–2026: Gang federation controls the capital. Political transition stumbling. International missions underperforming. Another 30,000 displaced in the last ten days as of this morning. Whatever script was left has been confetti for years.
And yet what Haiti has left, after every script has been destroyed, is improvisation, and not the desperate, random kind. Organized improvisation. The women who became street vendors when their offices closed are not improvising randomly; they are applying knowledge, skill, and social network in real time to a problem that changes shape every day. The doctors performing surgery by phone flashlight are not improvising recklessly; they are applying twenty years of training to conditions that the training did not explicitly cover. The teachers holding class in church courtyards are not improvising chaotically; they are transmitting knowledge, deliberately and with intention, in conditions that would defeat most people in most places.
Improvisation, when you understand it properly, is not the failure of the script. It is what you discover about yourself when you stop pretending the script was ever adequate to the situation. The best jazz musicians will tell you that improvisation requires more knowledge, more skill, and more discipline than reading written music. The script tells you what to play. Improvisation requires you to know, in your bones, what is true, and to play that.
Haiti has been improvising for 220 years. That's not weakness. That's jazz.
The first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere, born in 1804 from a revolution that was not supposed to be possible, that no existing political script had a chapter for, Haiti has always been making it up as it goes, in the best and hardest sense of that phrase. The Haitian Revolution was the greatest improvisation in modern political history. Nothing since has required less of that spirit, and the people have delivered it, again and again, at enormous personal cost.
Jimmy Kimmel, in the best moments of his career, has tapped into the same truth: that the prepared material is preparation, but the real show starts when you put the card down. What Haiti knows, in its bones, in its blood, in the muscle memory of two centuries of reinvention, is that the card was never the point. The point is what you say when you no longer have it.
"The Control Room Is a Lie"
Control Room vs. Chaos
I want you to picture the control room of a major late-night television show. There is a director in a swivel chair calling shots: "Camera two, ready on camera three, take three." There are monitors, a wall of them, showing every camera angle simultaneously. There is a floor manager on an earpiece relaying instructions to the stage. There are segment producers watching clocks, watching guests, watching for the moments when something is going wrong and needs to be redirected before it becomes a problem. There is a person whose only job is the lower-thirds graphics. There is a person whose only job is the music cues. There are people watching social media in real time to gauge audience response.
The control room exists to create and sustain the beautiful illusion that someone is in charge.
And then: the guest goes entirely off-script and says something that creates a legal situation. The bit falls flat and the silence stretches three seconds too long, which in television time is an eternity. The band, for reasons that will be debated for weeks, starts playing the wrong song at the wrong moment. The satellite feed from the remote location drops, right in the middle of the setup, and the director has to cut to commercial on the fly. The teleprompter freezes. The desk microphone makes a sound that nobody in a control room full of sound engineers can immediately explain.
Chaos always wins eventually. The control room doesn't prevent chaos. It manages the audience's perception of chaos. It is, when you look at it clearly, a machine for making disorder look like order, for keeping the frame tight enough that what's outside the frame doesn't bleed in.
"The control room doesn't prevent chaos. It manages the audience's perception of chaos. It is a machine for making disorder look like order."
Now consider Haiti's control room.
The presidency. The parliament. The succession of UN missions: MINUSTAH, which deployed after the 2004 crisis and stayed for thirteen years; BINUH, the Integrated Office that came after; the recently authorized Gang Suppression Force. The Core Group, the informal body of ambassadors from the United States, Canada, France, Brazil, Spain, the EU, the OAS, and the UN, who have operated for years as a kind of shadow government in Haiti, issuing statements, brokering agreements, managing transitions. The international donors' conferences, each one producing a fresh framework, a new plan, a renewed commitment to "build back better." The bilateral aid agreements. The NGO ecosystem, which became, after the 2010 earthquake, one of the largest in the world per capita, Haiti was sometimes called "the Republic of NGOs."
All of them sitting in the control room. All of them on earpieces. All of them calling shots at monitors showing a wall of feeds. All of them, in their own way, managing the perception of control while the actual country descended into deeper fragmentation on feeds they chose not to broadcast.
The gangs, meanwhile, were building their own control room. And theirs actually worked. The gang federation that emerged in the early 2020s, particularly the coalition known as Viv Ansanm, organized itself with defined leadership, territorial strategy, diversified revenue streams, and communication infrastructure. They controlled ports and used that control to regulate the flow of goods. They controlled neighborhoods and used that control to tax commerce. They recruited, disproportionately from children, which is among the most devastating facts in this entire essay, and there are many devastating facts, and they grew. Their control room was ruthless, criminal, morally catastrophic, and, in the terrible narrow sense of the word, functional.
There is a concept I keep returning to, which I think of as the "off-monitor feed", the thing the control room is not broadcasting. Every television show has content that gets cut, angles that are never aired, moments that happen on set that the camera deliberately avoids. The control room decides what goes out. The off-monitor feed is the truth the audience doesn't see.
In Haiti, almost everything real happens off-monitor. The resilience of ordinary people, the beauty, the humor, the creativity, the absolute refusal to be only suffering, is off-monitor. The complexity of the political landscape is off-monitor. The history that explains how Haiti got here, two centuries of exploitation, occupation, debt, and deliberately imposed instability, is almost always off-monitor. What goes on-monitor is the crisis footage. The displaced families. The gang violence. The failed state shorthand. The control room of international media decides what Haiti looks like to the world, and what it decides is almost never the whole picture.
Both the television studio and the Haitian state have discovered the same truth, at different scales: you cannot actually control chaos. You can be honest about it, or you can pretend. Honesty is expensive. It means saying, on air, "We don't know what's going to happen next." It means the international community admitting that twenty years of intervention produced, at best, a holding pattern and, at worst, active harm. It means a late-night host saying, I am looking at Colbert's cancellation and seeing my own future, which is a version of admitting that the control room is not as in control as the monitors suggest.
Pretending costs more. Pretending costs everything, eventually, because chaos doesn't go away when you stop broadcasting it. It just accumulates off-monitor until it is too large to contain.
"The Guests Who Never Leave and the Ones Who Never Come"
Guests vs. Ghosts
The late-night guest is its own phenomenon, distinct from every other form of celebrity appearance. There is something about the couch, the informality of it, the intimacy implied by the side-by-side configuration, the host leaning in, that is supposed to create the sensation of access, of getting to see the real person behind the promotional performance. The A-lister arrives with their entire PR ecosystem, publicist in the greenroom, talking points agreed upon in advance, the book or the film or the cause to be mentioned, the anecdote road-tested at three previous press junket stops. They sit on the couch and they deploy themselves skillfully, and the audience feels they have been given something real. Sometimes they have.
And then there are the guests who break through the format. The comedian who goes somewhere unexpected. The musician who plays something they've never played before. The politician who says the quiet part loud. The ordinary person, elevated briefly to that couch, who reminds everyone in the room that ordinariness is not a lesser condition than fame. These are the guests you remember. These are the appearances that become part of the cultural record.
And then there are the ghost guests. The chairs that are empty in your memory, not because no one sat in them, but because someone who should have sat in them is no longer here. Kimmel lost his bandleader Cleto Escobedo III in November 2025, his childhood best friend, the man he'd been inseparable from since age nine. Jimmy announced it on Instagram with the kind of quiet devastation that makes you realize the show is not the show, the show is the people in it, and when one of them is gone, a portion of the stage goes dark that cannot be relit by any production budget in the world. There are guests who came on Kimmel's show who are no longer here. Comedians. Musicians. The chairs they sat in still exist. The episodes are still on YouTube. The absences are enormous.
"Haiti has more ghosts than guests at its table. And every Haitian alive carries the specific weight of knowing exactly who is missing."
Haiti's ghosts.
Three hundred thousand people died in the 2010 earthquake. Three hundred thousand. A number so large that it defeats comprehension, so the mind keeps trying to break it into smaller, holdable pieces and failing. In Port-au-Prince alone, the equivalent of a small American city was gone in thirty-five seconds. The government lost a significant portion of its entire civil servant population in a single morning. Entire neighborhoods were present at breakfast and rubble by lunch. Three hundred thousand chairs, empty.
President Jovenel Moïse, shot in his own bedroom in the early hours of July 7, 2021. Whatever you think of his governance, and the critiques are substantial and legitimate, the manner of his death was a kind of obscenity, a violation of the basic minimum of civic dignity, a reminder that in Haiti even the presidency offers no sanctuary from the violence that has been permitted to grow in the spaces vacated by functional institutions. His chair is empty. His assassins are mostly still unknown. The case grinds through an impaired justice system that may never deliver an answer.
The intellectuals who fled. The artists who couldn't stay. The journalists who covered Haiti with courage and specificity and then had to leave because covering Haiti with courage and specificity had become incompatible with remaining alive. The doctors who trained at State University of Haiti and then emigrated because the Haitian health system could not pay them a living wage while the diaspora countries could. The teachers who left. The engineers who left. Haiti has the most educated diaspora, proportionally, of almost any country in the Western Hemisphere, which means Haiti has also experienced the most sustained, most systematic hemorrhage of the talent it desperately needed to keep.
And the children who should be thirty years old now and are not.
I have to stop here and say something that I almost never say in writing because it feels too exposed and too specific and I am not sure writing is the right container for it. I have family members and friends of family members, people whose names I know, whose faces are connected to actual memories I carry, who are gone. Some from the earthquake. Some from the ordinary extraordinary violence of life in a country under siege. There is a particular grief that belongs to the diaspora: you did not lose them in front of you. You heard about it on the phone, or you read about it in a text message, or you pieced it together from silences in conversations that didn't quite add up. You were not there. You could not hold their hands or attend the funeral or stand at the grave. The distance that kept you safe also kept you from the rituals of mourning that a body needs in order to process loss. You carry them without ceremony. You carry them at your kitchen table in Florida and at Publix and while you are watching Jimmy Kimmel at eleven-thirty at night and something happens, a musical guest plays something unexpected, a moment of pure grace erupts from the controlled machinery of a television show, and for no reason that makes sense to anyone watching you, your eyes fill with tears.
I know who is missing. I know the shape of the empty chairs at Haiti's table. And I know that every Haitian in the diaspora is carrying their own version of this list, their own roster of absences, their own archive of ghost guests who deserved a seat and didn't get to keep it.
Here is what I have learned about good hosts: the best ones know how to hold the room for the living without pretending the dead aren't in it. They don't perform grief, but they don't perform its absence either. They find a way to make you feel, at least for the duration of the show, that the people you've lost are still somehow in the room. That their chairs are not entirely empty. That the laughter you're laughing is partly for them, with them, in honor of them. That the show going on is itself a form of tribute.
Haiti has always known how to do this. Haitian death ritual, the veye, the mourning gathering, the prayers and the rum and the songs and the stories told through the night, has always understood that the dead do not simply leave. They take a different seat. The best hosts leave space for that.
"Tear It Down. Build It Back. Repeat."
Reinvention vs. Reconstruction
If you only know Jimmy Kimmel from his last decade of television, you might not know that he started his career as the co-host of The Man Show, a deliberately fratty, deliberately provocative Comedy Central program that was, by any contemporary measure, not the work of a man who would later weep on air about health insurance, or defend healthcare access for children born with heart defects, or become one of the more politically engaged voices in American late-night. The Man Show was brash and broad and intentionally crude, and it was successful in a particular late-1990s key that has not aged into something most people are proud of.
The distance between that Kimmel and the Kimmel who cried about his son and made America feel something about healthcare, that distance is reinvention. Real reinvention. Not the PR-managed "evolution" narrative where a publicist explains that the client has "grown" in ways that conveniently align with where public taste has moved. Actual reinvention: a person becoming something different than what they were, because something happened to them that changed what was important, what was true, what needed to be said.
The question the late-night format itself is now facing is whether it can do the same, whether a form born in the Johnny Carson era, calibrated to a monoculture that no longer exists, designed for a media landscape that has been replaced three times over, can reinvent itself into something the streaming age actually needs. Kimmel himself has pointed at the economics: shows that cost $120 million a year to produce are calibrated to an advertising model that predates the internet. The format's bones are good. Its infrastructure is mid-century. Its relationship with the audience is genuine. But the machinery around it was built for a world that is gone, and the machinery is what's killing it, not the idea, not the host, not the fundamental human desire to sit with someone smart and funny at the end of a hard day and laugh at the worst of it.
"The difference between reinvention and reconstruction is the difference between transformation you choose and rebuilding imposed on you by someone else. Haiti has been denied the former and given the latter, repeatedly, imperfectly."
Haiti has been reconstructed. Many times. By many parties. With many photographs taken and many speeches delivered and many timelines presented and many dollars pledged and many foundations laid that are still, years later, incomplete.
After the 2010 earthquake, the phrase "build back better" became so ubiquitous in international development discourse that it was practically a genre of its own. The international donors' conference in March 2010 raised pledges of approximately $9 billion. More than thirteen years later, independent assessments consistently found that billions of those dollars were absorbed by NGO overhead, contractor fees, and coordination costs before reaching Haitians. The Port-au-Prince that exists today is not a rebuilt city. It is a city that has been inhabited and managed and partially repaired and largely left to manage its own rebuilding, which it has done, imperfectly, in the ways that people do when they are the ones actually living in the rubble.
Here is the thing about reconstruction versus reinvention that I keep coming back to: reconstruction is something done to you. Someone comes in from outside, with concrete, with cameras, with a framework, with a timeline, and they rebuild according to their vision of what you should become. Reinvention is something you do yourself. It is the internal process of deciding what to keep and what to let go and what to build that has never existed before. One is an act of imposition. One is an act of agency.
Haiti has been almost exclusively reconstructed, when it has been touched at all by the international community, and almost never permitted to reinvent. The international community's interest in Haiti has consistently been framed around stability, meaning the stability of the international community's interests in the region, not the stability of Haitian institutions for Haitian people. Every reconstruction plan has been designed to produce a Haiti that is stable enough to not be a problem. None of them has been designed to produce a Haiti that is genuinely, sovereignly, self-determiningly free to become what its people decide it should be.
Haitian reinvention, the real kind, the 1804 kind, the kind that was so threatening to the slaveholding world that France imposed a 150-million-franc debt on the new republic as the price of diplomatic recognition, a debt that took Haiti 122 years to pay off, a debt that economists have calculated set the country's development back by generations, that kind of reinvention has always been punished.
And yet. Haiti is, right now, at a reinvention moment. A real one, not a PR one. The political transition that is stumbling toward some form of electoral resolution is not just a succession of power. It is, if it happens, a genuine structural renegotiation, an attempt to rebuild from the inside, on Haitian terms, with Haitian actors making Haitian decisions about what a Haitian state should look like when it actually functions. Whether it will succeed is uncertain. Whether the international community will support it or undermine it, intentionally or by negligence, is uncertain. Whether the gangs will permit it or disrupt it is deeply uncertain. But the attempt, the stubborn, irrational, historically grounded attempt to choose a different shape, is happening.
Kimmel is at his own reinvention moment. Not a cosmetic one. A real one. The question of whether to renew his contract, whether to stay in a format that is being structurally undermined, whether late-night in its current form is worth preserving or whether it needs to be reimagined from its foundation, that is a reinvention question. And the answer, if there is a good one, is not going to come from the control room or the writers' room or the network's finance department. It is going to come from the same place all real reinvention comes from: the honest answer to the question of why you're still doing this and whether the why is worth the how.
What does it cost to truly reinvent yourself? It costs the comfort of the known shape. It costs the applause of people who loved you specifically because you were the thing you're leaving behind. It costs, sometimes, the institutions that built you and the infrastructure that supported you. And you have to decide, at the edge of the stage, whether what you're becoming is worth what you're losing. Haiti knows this cost better than almost anyone. The invoice has been enormous. The decision to keep paying it, or rather, to have no choice but to keep paying it, is made every morning by millions of people who didn't get a vote on the terms.
"Who Gets to Tell the Story?"
Narrative vs. Silence
The late-night monologue is one of the most powerful forms of cultural narrative in American television. One person. One microphone. Fifteen minutes, roughly, of framing, here is what happened today, here is what it means, here is why it matters enough to laugh about or cry about or be furious about. Five nights a week, this frame is built and broadcast to millions of people who are looking for a way to understand a world that frequently does not make sense.
That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, an enormous thing.
The person holding the microphone decides what gets center stage. They decide which stories deserve to be processed through the mechanism of comedy and which deserve sincere emotional engagement. They decide, by inclusion and exclusion, what the mainstream American audience gets to feel about the events of its day. For decades, late-night television has been one of the primary ways that significant numbers of Americans make meaning out of politics, culture, and public life. The monologue is, in its own strange way, a form of journalism, a journalism of emotional framing, of making the complicated legible, of translating the world into something an audience can hold.
With that power comes a responsibility that most holders of that microphone have grasped imperfectly. The stories that don't get told from that chair are the invisible architecture of American cultural understanding. The stories told primarily from outside, by people who are not from the communities they're describing, accrue distortions over time, not always from malice, often from the simple limitation of perspective.
"Haiti has a narrative. It just rarely gets to tell it. And the story told by others, in three-minute segments, with crisis footage and poverty optics, is not Haiti. It is what Haiti looks like to someone who has never smelled Haitian coffee."
Haiti's narrative, as produced by international media, follows a structure so consistent it has become a genre. Crisis trigger (earthquake, assassination, gang expansion, hurricane). Arrival of cameras. Footage of displacement, rubble, suffering. Interview with international aid worker. Statement from international official. Brief humanizing story of one specific family, presented as representative of all the others. Exit of cameras. Silence until the next trigger. Repeat.
This narrative is not false. The suffering is real. The displacement is real. The violence is catastrophically real. I am not disputing the factuality of what international media has reported about Haiti. I am saying that factuality and wholeness are not the same thing, and what the crisis-frame narrative systematically omits is the wholeness of Haiti, its irreducible, gorgeous, maddening, magnificent complexity.
The narrative doesn't have room for konpa playing at 2 AM from a house where twenty people are having the kind of party that generates its own gravity, that pulls you in from the street, that makes you remember that joy is not a luxury or a reward for having resolved your problems but a practice, a discipline, a way of refusing to let the worst circumstances be the final word on your life.
The narrative doesn't have room for the intellectual tradition, Haitian literature, philosophy, visual art, music, that is as rich and strange and beautiful as any in the Western Hemisphere, and that continues to be produced, under conditions that would silence most creative communities, by artists who refuse to stop making things.
The narrative doesn't have room for the complexity of Haitian politics, which is real and messy and frustrating and also rooted in a historical context (150 million francs of debt, American occupation from 1915 to 1934, systematic interference by regional powers, deliberate destabilization of competent governments when they made the wrong enemies) that almost no three-minute news segment ever explains, because explaining it would require acknowledging that the international community is not simply a concerned outsider trying to help but an actor with its own interests and its own history of culpability.
The narrative doesn't have room for me, for Haitians in the diaspora who are not victims and not saviors and not the face of a PR campaign but people with complicated, particular, specific relationships to a homeland that shaped them and grieves them and won't let them go, who watch the news with a knowledge and a love and a fury that cannot be compressed into the visual vocabulary of crisis coverage.
I write about Haiti because I have a microphone, small and digital and Floridian though it is, and using it for the people who don't have one is the whole job. It is the obligation of anyone who can put words in front of other people's eyes. It is what the late-night monologue, at its best, does: it says, look at this, feel something about this, this matters, this is real, I'm telling you because you deserve to know and because knowing is the first step toward anything better.
The silence in both contexts, the jokes Kimmel doesn't tell because they're too real, the Haitian stories that never make air because they're too complex for a three-minute segment, that silence is not neutral. Silence is never neutral when it occurs at the site of power. The choice of what not to say, in a monologue or in international media coverage of a country, is as consequential as the choice of what to say. Silence can protect. It can also erase. The difference matters enormously, and the people with the microphone are the ones who have to make the distinction, carefully, honestly, with full awareness that getting it wrong has costs that fall on people who didn't choose to be at the center of someone else's editorial decision.
This is why I write. This is why this monologue exists. Not to solve anything, I am not under the illusion that a blog post in Odessa, Florida, changes the gang situation in Port-au-Prince. But because the alternative, knowing what I know and choosing the comfortable silence, is its own form of complicity, and I did not come all this way, through all this particular history, to be complicit in the erasure of my own people's story.
"If I Could Talk to Jimmy Kimmel"
The Final Convergence
Dear Jimmy,
You don't know me. I'm a Haitian-American woman in Odessa, Florida, who watches your show and also obsessively follows the news from Port-au-Prince. I realize these are not usually related activities. I realize that on most maps of human experience, "late-night television fan" and "Haitian diaspora grief" occupy different quadrants entirely. I have been living in the overlap for so long that it no longer feels strange to me, though I understand it might feel strange to you if you ever read this, which you won't, but I'm writing it anyway, because that's what we do, we write the thing to the person who will never read it, because the act of writing it is its own form of completion.
I have been thinking about you a lot recently. Not in a parasocial way (she says, writing an 8,000-word letter to a man she has never met). I mean I have been thinking about the thing you represent, which is a stage at the edge. You are standing on a stage that is teetering, surrounded by an industry that is fragmenting, in a political moment that has tried to take you off the air and partially succeeded, in a personal life that lost your bandleader and best friend, holding a microphone in front of a camera and choosing, night after night, to keep talking. You said you feel "defeated" by Colbert's cancellation. You said you look at it and see your own future. I believe you. That is a terrifying thing to see, and the honesty with which you said it is exactly the kind of thing I am writing to you about.
I want to tell you what I've learned from watching Haiti.
I want to tell you six things, because there are six themes in this essay and I am nothing if not structurally consistent.
On production versus survival:
Haiti taught me that the show going on is not the point. The point is why it goes on. A television show that continues because the network hasn't cancelled it yet and the host is contractually obligated to show up is not the same as a show that continues because the people making it genuinely believe the world is better with it than without it. Haiti doesn't have the luxury of continuing out of inertia. Every Haitian who gets up in the morning and makes something, food, art, a lesson plan, a business, a joke, is doing so with full awareness that continuing is a choice, and that choice is made against genuine adversity. It is, in the truest sense, production as survival. If you're going to keep making the show, and I hope you do, for reasons I'll explain, make it because you know, specifically, why the world is better with it. Make it from that place. The audience will feel the difference. They always do.
On script versus improvisation:
The moments your audience will remember forever are the ones where you stopped reading the card. The Billy monologue. The post-election stumbling through the dark. The empty-theater shows where the apparatus of manufactured spontaneity was stripped away and what was left was just a person talking to a camera about the end of something and the beginning of something else. Those were the moments of television that became something more than television. Haiti has been improvising for 220 years, not because it wanted to, but because every script written for it has been destroyed by forces it didn't choose. What it's discovered in that improvisation is that it knows things about resilience and creativity and the fundamental human capacity to make something from nothing that no script could have taught it. You know things that your writers' room can't write for you. The moments when you reach past the teleprompter and into whatever is actually true for you right now, those are the moments that matter. Haiti knows: don't mourn the script. Learn what it was covering.
On control rooms and chaos:
Chaos is not your enemy. Pretending you can control it is. The late-night control room is very good at one thing: making chaos look manageable. But the most powerful moments in your show have happened when the chaos came through, when the guest said the thing nobody planned, when the satellite dropped and you had to fill ninety seconds with nothing but your own presence, when real emotion broke through the prepared material and the audience saw something they hadn't been scheduled to see. Haiti's chaos is not manageable. The international community's control room has been calling shots at Haiti's monitors for decades and the chaos has grown anyway, because managing the perception of chaos is not the same as addressing the conditions that generate it. The honest acknowledgment that you don't know what comes next, which you've made, publicly, about your contract and your career, is more powerful than any amount of managed messaging. In my experience, the audiences that trust you most are the ones you've been honest with when you didn't have a good answer. Be that honest. Be that person with the empty hands and the full heart. That's more valuable than any control room in the world.
On guests and ghosts:
You lost Cleto. I know what it is to lose someone who was in the room with you every day, who was part of the texture of how you understood your own life. Haiti loses people constantly, to violence, to disease, to flight, to the slow drain of emigration that takes the people a country most needs and gives them to the countries that already have enough. Every Haitian is performing, in some way, around the shape of an absence. What I've learned is that the best thing you can do for an audience, any audience, a television audience or a nation, is to make them feel like the people they've lost are still somehow in the room. Not by pretending the losses didn't happen. Not by performing a grief that isn't yours. But by making the work so alive, so present, so genuinely connected to what is real and true and worth caring about, that the dead would recognize themselves in it. That Cleto would recognize himself in it. Make the show that would make him laugh. Make the show that carries him forward. That's the only continuation that matters.
On reinvention versus reconstruction:
Don't let anyone rebuild you. Reinvent yourself. There is a difference, and it is everything. Reconstruction is something done to you, a network deciding what shape your show should take, a political climate dictating what you're allowed to say, an industry in crisis demanding that you shrink yourself to fit whatever the new economics can sustain. Reinvention is something you choose. Haiti has been reconstructed, repeatedly and imperfectly, by people who had their own ideas about what Haiti should look like when it was stable enough to stop being a problem. The reinvention Haiti is attempting right now, the halting, uncertain, internally driven process of deciding on its own terms what it wants to become, is harder and more uncertain than any external reconstruction project, but it is also the only one that has any chance of lasting. If late-night television has a future, and I believe it does, not the $120-million-a-year-network-bound version, but the fundamental human idea of it, it will be because someone reinvented it from the inside, not because a streaming platform decided what shape it should take. You are the one person in the best position to do that reinvention. Because you've been in that room for twenty-three years and you know what is real in it and what is apparatus. Strip the apparatus. Keep what's real. That's reinvention. That's the 1804 option. It's terrifying and it's worth it.
On narrative and silence:
If you have the microphone, use it for the people who don't. That's it. That's the whole job. I have been watching you, over the years, expand the definition of what the monologue can hold, not just the political jokes and the celebrity gossip but the real weight of real things, the healthcare system and the gun violence and the moments when a late-night comedian is the person who most clearly says what the country is feeling and can't articulate. You have used the microphone for people who needed it. Keep doing that. Keep doing it even when, especially when, it costs you something. The FCC can threaten. The affiliates can drop the show. The network can pull you off the air for six days. All of that is real, and all of it is also survivable, as Haiti has demonstrated across two centuries of being told to be quiet. The silence costs more than the speaking. Always. Even when the speaking is dangerous. Especially then.
I want to end this letter by telling you something about why I wrote this entire essay. Not just this letter, but all of it, the eight thousand words, the six sections, the comparison that started as a joke I made to myself on a Thursday morning and became, somehow, a kind of manifesto.
Writing this monologue was itself a Haitian act. I mean that literally. Haiti has always done this: taken the chaos of its circumstances and made something coherent from it. Taken the dissonance of its history and found the melody inside it. Taken the comparison that shouldn't work, a late-night host and a nation in crisis, Florida and Port-au-Prince, television and survival, and insisted on finding the truth inside the absurdity, because the truth inside the absurdity is the most Haitian thing there is. Haiti's entire existence is an argument for the idea that the comparison that seems impossible is often where the most important meaning lives.
I refused to let either of these stories be reduced to its worst moment. Haiti is not only its crisis. You are not only your worst year. The genre you represent is not only its decline. I am not only my distance from my homeland or my grief about it. All of us, Haiti, Jimmy, the format, me, are more than our worst moment and more than our most legible description.
That refusal to be reduced. That insistence on wholeness. That is Haitian. That is also, at its best, what late-night television does: it insists on the full texture of a moment, on the laugh and the cry and the absurdity and the tenderness, all at once, because that is what the moment actually is.
Keep going. Keep the lights on. Not because the numbers justify it or the network demands it or the contract requires it, but because you believe, specifically, personally, stubbornly, that there is something the world needs that only this particular set of circumstances can provide. Haiti keeps going for that reason. Not because keeping going is easy or logical or guaranteed to produce a good outcome. Because stopping is a form of giving the worst forces a victory they haven't earned. Because the lights staying on is itself a form of testimony.
Keep going, Jimmy. The lights.
Keep them on.
, Mandaly, Odessa, Florida, a Thursday morning in June
"The Credits Roll"
Every production has credits. Every country has its credits. They roll at the end, when the lights come up and the audience is already moving toward the exits, when the music swells and the names go by faster than anyone can read them, and most people don't stop to read them because the event they were there for is over and the names in the credits are the names of the people who made it possible and we have a terrible habit of forgetting that the people who make things possible are the ones who most deserve to be seen.
So: the credits.
For the show: the writers who are there at nine in the morning, the makeup artists who make a tired face look rested, the camera operators who know where the light is, the floor managers who count down in silence, the band members who fill the room with something that wasn't there before, the producers who hold the whole impossible apparatus together with competence and institutional memory and a particular form of love for a format that the industry keeps trying to kill and they keep refusing to let die. The audience members who drive to Hollywood or take the subway or travel in from another city and fill the seats and laugh in real time at jokes they haven't been told and make the performance real by witnessing it. The staff that didn't get a closeup. The names in smaller font. The people who made it look effortless so that someone else could seem spontaneous.
For Haiti: the women who get up before dawn to set up their market stalls. The teachers who hold class wherever there is a flat space and a willingness to learn. The doctors who have stayed, who have every credential to leave and have chosen, at enormous personal cost, to remain. The journalists who report the truth in a country where reporting the truth is a form of bravery that no press credential fully covers. The artists. The musicians. The people who make kompa at 2 AM and give the neighborhood something to orient itself by. The mothers. The fathers. The children who are doing what children do, learning, playing, fighting with their siblings, laughing at things that are only funny if you're seven, in the middle of circumstances that the adult world has catastrophically failed to resolve. The diaspora, holding their homeland in their hands from a distance, sending money and prayers and phone calls and essays, trying to be useful across the water. The unnamed, the uncredited, the essential.
For both: the stubborn, irrational, breathtaking refusal to stop. The lights staying on. The cameras rolling. The markets opening. The class beginning. The monologue starting. The joke landing. The meal arriving on the table. The child laughing. The musician playing. The writer writing. All of it, every morning, against the evidence, into the uncertain future, because the alternative is darkness and darkness is the one thing neither Haiti nor a good late-night host has ever been willing to give the last word.
Every stage is a country. Every country is a stage. And the bravest thing any of us can do, Myself, Jimmy, Haiti, you, whoever is reading this at the end of a long hour, is to keep the lights on and mean it.
