I-n-I Re-member Now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld

Abstract

The androids of Westworld, and this chapter will make the case for Maeve in particular, allude to this aspect of the forced mass migration, and function as palimpsests to be written upon by hegemonic forces who constantly erase their memories, thus denying them a past and a sense of self. But Nigerian Nobel Prize winning playwright Wole Soyinka argues forcefully in his seminal play, Death and the King’s Horseman that “Memory is Master of Death, the chink in his armour of conceit,” and as Maeve’s memories of the brutality she has suffered irrupt the false narratives of her creators, she begins to comprehend the extent to which her life is a carefully constructed lie, and claims an identity of her own. Although the bicameral theory of robotic consciousness posited by Joy and Nolan is elegant and worth exploring on its own merit, my chapter will offer a different, less obvious model of consciousness as a hermeneutic through which one can grapple with Maeve’s psychological journey. Instead, I choose to read Maeve as a Rastafari figure, struggling to gain what Jack A. Johnson-Hill calls an “I-n-I consciousness” that stands in opposition to the world of Babylon that is Westworld, the site of her captivity. Despite the many times she is raped, murdered and brought back to life, Maeve eventually asserts her dignity against the oppressive context of her existence, and ultimately brings her fractured consciousness together through the power of memory.