He's Not Just Another Out-Of-Towner

“Brother From Another Planet” is a 1984 science fiction and Afrofuturist film directed by John Sayles that follows a mute protagonist alien being who crash lands in NY city, and follows him as he navigates Harlem and attempts to evade the men in black. The main narrative that the film works through, is the idea of an alien among humans, trying to figure out where he belongs and how to stay safe.

The opening scene shows The Brother crash landing near Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty in New York. Here, next to the ultimate symbol for the embodiment of the American dream and the hope of a new start of Immigrants, is where we first see this narrative begin to come crumbling down. As the Brother arrives on shore, he is confronted by a decayed state. The processing center is run down with trash everywhere, it is not the idyllic dream that it once was, if it ever truly existed in the first place. 

The Brother is shown in the opening of the film without his foot. It becomes clear later in the film that he was a slave on his planet, and most likely had to cut off his own foot in order to escape to freedom. The bodily sacrifice to me symbolizes the sacrifice that immigrants have to take to make it to the US in a more modern immigration system. It is also symbolic of the history of violence and mutilation that happened on slave ships on the passage to the US. 

The Brother finds himself in Harlem, around people who take him for a black man. In this setting, where his blackness is muted, and while he does possess unique powers and abilities, what really makes him stand out is his inability to talk. His muteness takes away his ability to have verbal expression, and essentially renders him socially disabled. His bodily difference is how he gets interpreted as alien, but at the same time it is how he is able to survive in Harlem. 

The role of language, or in the Brothers case, his inability to speak language, is what also allows him to exist outside of this system of control and find a new sense of liberation from the robotic men in black slave hunter characters.