The New Yorker Radio Hour - Marlon James Builds His Own Damn Universe

Episode Date: February 5, 2019

When the cast of the film “The Hobbit” was first announced, Marlon James was dismayed—though hardly surprised—by how white it was. A long-standing complaint of black fans of fantasy is that authors can imagine dwarves and elves and orcs, but not black characters. “I got so tired of this whole question of inclusion, and the backlash against asking to be included,” James tells the staff writer Jia Tolentino, “that I said, ‘I’m going to make my own damn universe.’ ” That was one origin point of James’s “Dark Star” trilogy, which he describes as “an African ‘Game of Thrones.’ ” The first book, which is about to be published, is called “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” and it centers on the search for a missing boy by a disparate cast of characters. Another origin point for him was the TV show “The Affair”; James borrowed the structural device of a story related by multiple characters whose perspectives don’t quite add up. James talks about writing fantasy from a Caribbean perspective, where “magical realism” may not seem so magical. Plus, a successful C.E.O. says that activist investors’ quest for one quick stock bump after another is wrecking companies and eroding American competitiveness. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A brief history of seven killings is a work of fiction. But it also follows the contours of history. It includes an assassination attempt against Bob Marley in the 70s. It includes the CIA in Jamaican politics and South American drug cartels, the crack epidemic in the 80s, and a lot more. It's a sprawling, ambitious, eventful book. And in 2015, it won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for its author, Marlon James. That was the first time that a Jamaican writer had ever won the award. And shortly after he won the prize, James told an interviewer that his next project was going to be epic.

Literally, he was going to write a three-volume fantasy epic that he described as an African Game of Thrones. Over the last few years, he's delved into African folk tales in history. He's revisited the canonical fantasy novels of Tolkien. And as always, he's been absorbed in pop culture and music of all kinds. Marlon James calls his series The Dark Star Trilogy. The first book has just been published, and it's called Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Leopard got to me before I got to the river. Still on four paws, a dead antelope in his mouth.

That night, he watched in disgust. as I cooked my portion. He had changed back into a man and was on two legs, but eating the antelope leg raw, ripping away the skin with his teeth, sinking into flesh and licking the blood off his lips. I wanted to enjoy flesh the way he enjoyed flesh. My burned and black leg disgusted me as well. He gave me a look that said he could never understand why any animal in these lands would eat prey by burning it first. A profile of Marlon James just ran in the New Yorker, and it was written by Gia Tolentino. Here's Gia with Marlon James. This entry into fantasy and the book that resulted, it originated in a lot of places. You know, you were telling me you researched 14th century,

Molly in History, and you are a lifetime lover of genre of all sorts, but especially fantasy. But one of the places it came from is you got into an argument about the Hobbit movie in 2012. Can you describe that argument? It wasn't even the movie. It was when he announced the cast. Thirteen dwarves and a half-fling. Strange traveling companions, these are the descendants of the House of Dury.

And I'm like, you know, this is one really white cast. And the friends I was with, one of the friends mentioned, well, you know, it's British, it's based on British mythology and Celtic mythology and so on. I think he was trying to find a way of just telling me that Lord of the Rings is white. And I said, you know, if we went to the Shire and saw an Asian habit, nobody would have cared. Right, it's this thing where people can imagine a whole imaginary world, but not imagine black people in it.

Which is not a reflection of the novel, of course, which I adore and take from. But I just got tired of that debate. I'm tired of the question about inclusion and then the backlash against asking for inclusion. And I was like, you know what? I'll just build my own damn universe. Right. Well, so the genre that you're writing in

has often been defined by this perspective that is kind of explicitly colonialist. And like sci-fi is like, it's sort of a proto-Western with people striding, you know, to find, you know, new worlds and conquer them, right? And then fantasy is like pale heroes on horseback, protecting the countryside from the orcs, right? Yeah.

But then at the same time, there's this counter tradition of black sci-fi or black fantasy and lately fantasy that is like your book rooted in African diasporic traditions. In some ways, it's a wider list when you're thinking about African literature, large because those distinctions wouldn't have happened. Right, like supernatural works completely different

in African folk tradition. Precisely. Yeah. I was thinking it's like arguably you love, I know you love Tony Morrison, arguably Beloved even, it has a foot in almost like horror fantasy. Yeah, it is.

It has a foot in Gothic. It has a foot in the darker side of magical realism. You know, Beloved and Song of Solomon both recognize that if we're going to tell stories about black and brown people and so on, and then our conventions of reality are different. You know, at the end of Song of Solomon,

you are supposed to believe that we can fly. And you've also talked about Marquez, the first time you read Marquez, you were like, like, this is magical realism, but it's also Caribbean reality. It wasn't magical to me. Right. It wasn't magical to me.

In fact, it legitimized the crazy thoughts in my head. Yeah. And Marquez also said it. If you live in the Caribbean, and I always love that he called himself a Caribbean writer. You know, if you live in the Caribbean, you know that reality is, wilder than the craziest fiction.

So I was reading quite a bit of contemporary and not so contemporary African fiction and sci-fi and fantasy. But what I ended up reading was a lot of the ancient African epics. So the epic of Sundiata, the Lion of Mali, the epic of Askiah Mohamed,

which has the floating city go. There's an epic about a cannibal witch, who is outsmarted only by her own daughter. And then she dies of old age, which I thought was just badass. This sort of absence of the surreal and the supernatural being a mark of realism, whatever that might mean, is all seemed ludicrous to me. To me, the most realistic novel I wrote was brief history of seven killings. And it still opens me with a narration from a ghost. Right. So when people say, what's your new book about? What do you say? You know, I just say it's me trying to write

the kind of African epic story I always wanted to read. Right. And so the book is, you know, mostly it's through the narrator is this guy tracker, basically sort of a career bounty hunter with this magically gifted nose

for sniffing people out. But he, you know, he joins this motley crew of people that are hunting for the boy. My personal favorite among them is the wise buffalo who joins halfway. The crew is very motley though.

The buffalo, I think one of the reason that I liked him is that he was consistently, he's not predictable, but you do trust him and you know he's good. It's not quite the same for all of the other seekers. And I was wondering, who was your favorite character to write? And if you could talk a little, like of the search party. And you can't pick the narrator. Okay.

I wouldn't have picked him anyway. It would be a toss-up between the Ogo, the giant. Again, the giant is such a stereotype of fantasy. And they're always sort of monosyllabic. Either the gentle giant or the violent grunting giant And he's just a motor mouth Who just won't show up And he was so much fun to write

And Sogland was also interesting To write Because it's Can you describe her a little bit? Yeah, you know Some people have called her the moon witch She's 315 years old And she's the only one in the quest

Who has a specific agenda For finding this boy And because of that She makes some really, really, really drastic decisions. I like writing characters who I have to have a very complicated relationship with.

And hers was certainly the most complicated. She also is telling the next book. So she's a narrating the next book, so it's going to be interesting. Yeah, I can't wait. I love your female characters. They're all so, they're all so tricky. And so yeah, right. So the next book will be narrated

by Sagan and then the next one by an undisclosed third narrator. And so the structure of this trilogy is notably different. It's sort of Rashomon-esque. It's three people telling different versions of the same quest.

And it's also like the Showtime series, The Affair. And that was, in a way, your inspiration. When I look back up, I can't tell you what happened. Miss Bailey, why don't you tell me how it began? It was so long ago, who remembers.

It was a discussion about it. You know, I was talking to Melina Matsukas, at the time director of Insecure. And at the time, I'd been researching this novel for two years, and I still configured how to tell the story. And she was talking about the affair and how it's different perspectives on the same story, and the stories don't add up. And she was saying, you know, this is a great idea for a TV show. And I'm like, forget the TV show. This is a great idea for a novel. my novel.

Okay, best affair in literature. Best affair in literature is very easy for me, actually. It's the affair in the end of the affair, Graham Green novel, which I also think is the best novel about an affair. And the film is actually pretty good. I've never seen it. Julianne Moore, who should have won the best actress to Oscar Freight.

It's one of those, how did the Oscars miss it kind of films? The end of the affair, highly recommend it. So I was on Edith Wharton kick, while we were hanging out. And it was funny. We ended up talking about a lot of, you know, novels in the canon of literary fiction.

And you had some unexpected affinities, which I... So tell me who your favorite Pride and Prejudice character is and why. Favorite Pride and Prejudice character. Damn. I, you know what, of course I love the hero. I love Elizabeth. And I love Darcy, even before Darcy became likable. I really like the people everybody don't like.

Everybody else don't like. I really love Mrs. Bennett. The thing I like about Austin is that even her unsavory characters can sometimes be the only people who know what time it is. And Mrs. Bennett is one of the few people in that novel who knows what time it is. I mean, fine, she's shrill. So sexist. And so on. Now, people got to eat, you know?

Yeah. But she's the only person who realized I need to get these women married because. these women are running out of time. Right, right. And I love her. Is there, you don't have to answer this. Yeah. Okay, what is, what's your least favorite, like, canon novel?

Oh, God, Wuthering Heights. I hate Wethering Heights, too. I keep trying. I keep trying. I tried last year's summer. It was the third time I tried. I just don't think it's this sort of deeply psychological novel that people think. For one thing, I just don't think Emily Bronte had the psychology.

It's like if you read Salman Rush's novel, shame, the sisters, Choney Money and Bonny. who grew up in isolation and think they understand the world. If one of those three girls wrote a novel, it would be weathering acts. Let me, let's go back to your childhood, your childhood influences.

You told me that you spent your childhood in a middle-class suburban of Kingston, watching Charlie's Angels, reading comic books, etc. What was your earliest comic book? Earlyest comic book, fascination would have been Batman. But then later, X-Men became. your thing, right? Yeah, huge, huge touchstone.

The whole sort of identifying. I mean, I was a nerd, I was an outcast, they were outcasts. It really struck a card with me. Was there any X-Men in particular that you... I really love Storm. Yeah. Storm because she was black and African.

But I actually liked when she went suddenly punk rock in the 80s because I always wanted a Mohawk. and I always envied somebody so really radically defining herself. I like some of the villains too. I mean, like Mystique. Mystique had secrets. Mystique was complicated.

It was very different from the type of villains who just say curses, found out again or something. Or people talking about these meddling kids. X-Men sometimes would win the battle, but Mystique won the ideological war. It's like, don't kill yourself. You went against our kind to defend people who will kill you tomorrow. She's right.

You know, she and a lot of the villains left have really, really sort of complicated aftertaste in my mouth. So you like me have music on constantly and you always have it on really loud. And you have talked about when you're writing, you will note on your manuscript pages what you were listening to as you wrote. And I was wondering, what was the album you listened to most? while writing the new book? Most while writing the new book. Probably Males Davis' Bitches Brew. Cans, Tagomago,

stereo labs, dots and loops. It gets me in a rhythm, and I think I write to rhythm, and I think I write to beat. Well, another question. So, Tracker, your narrator, is this sullen, slippery, kind of tough guy who has kind of lost faith in this enchanted world around him. If he were a person alive right now,

what do you think he would listen to? You know he'd be listening to Vince Staples. Because Vince Staples is rye and sarcastic. Vince Staples is a guy who did that whole GoFund me. Say, okay, you want to get me out of the world? Pay me to leave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You would totally, hell, you would be Vince Staples.

Thank you for having my gun. No change. Go come like a bomb. But they're shooting every day around my mom in the way. So he put an A. Thank you for coming in and talking to me. You need me to say something too? Like, thanks for having me.

Marlon James talking with the New Yorker's Gia Tolentina. And James also appears on WNYC's podcast, 10 Things That Scare Me, which is almost exactly what it sounds like. Number four, turbulence. It's always hilarious. when you're on planes with Jamaicans. Because usually when we go through turbulence,

somebody screams for a moment of prayer. Like, dare Jesus, please intervene in our situation. This is the thing. I like to say I'm not religious anymore, but I can't listen to heavy metal on flights. I remember the last time the flight was fine. I put on white zombie and the flight turned into chaos. I'm like, you know what?

God is telling me something. So no white zombie, no black stuff. No electric wizard, just in case God gets pissed. Ten Things That Scare Me is a new podcast from WNYC Studios. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

You know, you read these stories or maybe you've been in this situation yourself. Stories about a company that's laying off workers, even though it's successful, and the CEO gets a huge bonus. Where there's a factory that closes, while the product it makes seems to be profitable. And you read that, and it seems like something doesn't quite add up. Our explainer-in-chief on the corporate world is Sheila Kulhatkar, a staff writer who covers business for the New Yorker, and Sheila says that those stories about cost-cutting often have to do with what's called activist investors. When you talk to CEOs now and senior executives at

companies, everyone is worrying about activists. They are all worried about being targeted by an activist investor. Now, if this isn't your world, let's do a little clarification. When Sheila says activist investors, she's not talking about some kind of socially responsible do-gooder. An activist investor is something else entirely. They're usually investors at hedge funds who buy up shares in a publicly traded company and then go to that company and try and influence the people running the company to make changes so that the stock price goes up. By definition, activist Investing is a little bit adversarial and a little uncomfortable. And some activist investors who are very famous, you know, really terrify corporate America.

People are literally shaking when they get a call from that particular fund. But it's basically the talk of corporate America. So the activist investors often pit themselves against the CEOs, but this is more than just a squabble among the 1%. These fights over the management of public companies have consequences for all of American business, for our products and our jobs. Here's Sheila Colhatcar. One person who really helped me understand all of this from the perspective of a CEO is Ron Shake, the founder and former CEO of Panera Bread, the fast casual restaurant chain. He was really the visionary behind many of the big ideas that made Panera successful.

I had the best performance of any restaurant stock over the last 20 years of public company. 26% annual appreciation, 44 times the S&P 500. Best performance in the restaurant industry. Ron told me that twice during his time running Panera, activists investors came in and tried to get him to change the way he was running the company. So I wanted to start by asking you to take us back in time. It's 2007. And you had grown Panera over 20 to 30 years into one of the most successful restaurant companies in the country.

and an activist investment firm called Shamrock Activist Value Fund bought a stake in your company, and they wanted you to make some changes to the business. What did they want you to change? They wanted us to increase our prices more quickly. They thought we could drive more profitability, essentially, by putting more pressure on our customers. And what did you think about that idea? I thought the idea was short-sighted. I thought it's always easy in the short-term to squeeze, but the question is, what's its price, medium, and long-term, and what timeframes are you talking about?

And did Shamrock have any other ideas for things that you could do? Well, you know, I basically met with them. It's usually the way the game goes, and the lead partner of Shamrock put his arm around me. and said, listen, just take the advice of our young associate. We'll help you make more money more quickly. Wouldn't that be wonderful for all of us? And by the way, if you don't take my advice, we're going to make you. So the young associate thought that he or she had some good ideas about how to run your company

that maybe you hadn't thought about yourself. Well, straight up, it doesn't take all that much to raise prices. But if you want to understand the thesis of many of these activists, the prevailing mantra has been shareholder value creation. Years ago, the average shareholder held their share of a company on average for eight years. More recently, the average shareholder rents that stock for eight months. They're really renting it for its economic impact. And the result is we've changed the way in which our companies are operating.

You increasingly have our CEOs and our boards making short-term decisions trying to assuage their shareholders. And in a world in which what used to be the prevailing mantra, we had a responsibility to our communities and a responsibility to our guests as well as our shareholders. We've increasingly moved to a world that says the only thing that matters is whether I can pop that stock next week. And boy, I'll tell you, that's bad for our companies. That's bad for our economy. And it's ultimately bad for our country. So you spent your career building, Panera. You started out as the manager of one bakery in Boston.

Can you tell me a bit about the cookie jar? Sure. I always wanted to create the company I wanted to work in. I opened a single little store in 400 square feet in downtown Boston. and I then merged that in with a company called O Bon Pem, which was going through its own series of problems. I then ran that company over the course of 36 years, ultimately selling it as Panera. We had changed its name along the way, but I sold it in a $7.8 billion transaction, the largest U.S. restaurant deal ever done. Can you give me some examples of long-term decisions you made that allowed you to,

to build Panera into your vision for serving this market? Well, sure. In 1993, we, Obompanko Inc., bought a 19-store chain called St. Louis Bray Company. We then took two years, 1994 and 1995, studying the marketplace. And in the early to mid-90s in the food business, you could feel a significant niche of the marketplace that wanted to feel special in a world in which they weren't. And we began to imagine what kind of place would have, real food, would have environments that engaged you, would have people that cared.

That became another niche called Fast Casual. And today that niche is a $50 billion niche of the fast food industry. It took us then three years, 96, 97 and 98, to make the changes that allowed us to rename the St. Louis Brite company. Panera. Quite frankly, our stock was flat for three years. And the truth is, if we were trying to do that in 2019, I doubt we ever could have gotten it done. What do you think would have happened if you tried today to make all of those big business transformations you just described? That's exactly why I sold my company. Because the truth in the matter is, Panera's greatest competitive advantage, its ability to make these long-term transformative bets. was at great risk. And I ultimately made the decision that we were far better, removing the company

from the public markets and returning it to the private market. And that by doing so, Panera would have the capability to protect its long-term competitive advantage. You may know, I was on the board of Whole Foods. Whole Foods was one of the most successful retailers of the last 25 years. I love Whole Foods. And yet, two to three years ago, the environment around Whole Foods was beginning to change. You had companies like Aldi and Little coming in from Europe, like Trader Joe's. Whole Food needed to evolve. But within two quarters, activists showed up. We were told, hey, you either fix it in three months or we're going to basically call for John Mackey, our CEO's retirement. And the reality is that Whole Foods was forced into a position where selling to Amazon was the best scenario.

What do you think Amazon is doing different with Whole Foods and Whole Food would have done on its own? Nothing. The only difference is the capital structure and the ability of Amazon to make long-term decisions. You want to know what creates a competitive advantage? It's the ability to make long-term decisions, which is why our public markets are under such huge pressure and so many companies are running from the public markets as opposed to to the public markets. So basically, Whole Foods wouldn't have been given the 10. by its shareholders to make these changes that it is now able to make because it's under the

safe umbrella of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. The point I'm trying to make is not simply that the activists are the problem. The activists are not the problem in and of themselves. The activists are the byproduct of a pervasive sense of short-termism that's informed our marketplaces. Why is that? It starts with our active money managers. are incentivized on short-term pressure. Add to that the liquidity in the market in the sense

that if I, there's no value in being in for the long term. And you have a situation in which there's increasing pressure for short-term results. Activism arises from that condition. So what are the stakes in this battle? It's not just about you and it wasn't just about Panera. What is sort of the larger fight that's taking place here? When we live in a world where you have very short-term thinking, the result of it is the own kind of initiatives CEOs and boards will consider is short-term initiatives. What does that mean? Cost cutting.

We're not getting the innovation. We're also, frankly, doing damage across the country, and there's an ultimate implication to that. If you're in Michigan, and you're in a factory, and that factory is owned by a company that was just taken over by activist investors, and that company makes a decision to cut jobs. Who do you think ends up being at the loss? Guys like me, gals like me, have done phenomenally well since the Great Recession. That hasn't really happened for Middle America. The benefits haven't been shared. And I think most people have a sense of the problem. They know this isn't fundamentally working for a better country. We want better decisions. We've got to fix this problem. And there are remedies to do it.

We can begin by looking at differential holding periods for shareholders. We want to reward those that have long-term holding periods or at least give them different influence in the decision-making. Secondly, we've got to look at compensation schemes. We want to reward long-term performance. The time to worry about a heart attack is not in the ambulance. on the way to the hospital. If you don't deal with these kinds of problems before they occur, you cannot fix it. And I don't care whether you're talking about our politics.

I don't care about whether you're talking about our economy. We have become pervasively more short-term. And unless we call that out, and unless we go to work to drive structural reforms to change that, this is not going to lead to a good place. We get it. We've got to solve it. Ron Shake. the former CEO of Panera Bread and a restaurant investor.

He spoke with the New Yorker's Sheila Colhattcar. I'm David Remnick, and that's our episode for today. Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.