With his hero, a runaway chattel from some unidentified part of the universe who has crash-landed his spaceship on Ellis Island, Sayles draws our attention to the two key aspects of America’s past – immigration and African slavery.
As an immigrant, the mute Brother embodies the bewilderment, amusement, enchantment, shock, horror and fear immigrants feel towards their new homeland, the constant battle between a sense of alienation and the desire to belong, feelings of superiority that might in fact be an inferiority complex, dealing with the contempt of the opposition by developing your own contempt for them, the contempt might be mutual and felt in equal measure but it has huge ramifications for you and none for them, being defined by your foreignness, an object of curiosity at best, of loathing at worst, seeking out those who are subjected to the same experiences as you, wanting the safety and comfort of the club but also detesting it for taking you away from what you really want, which is to be invisible, an invisible part of society, constantly, at a personal and institutional level, made to feel you do not belong here, that your real place is elsewhere, a place you’ve never been to, have scant knowledge of or abandoned, somewhere even at the back of your own mind you yearn for and may even wish to return to, the splitting of your personality, the cunning you need to navigate your way through the hostility and contradictions, never giving yourself away, revealing who you are and what you think, keeping your distance, striving to maintain your dignity and sense of self and self-worth as the opposition tries at every turn to take it from you, suspicion, mistrust, always being foreign no matter what, there can only be one winner and it isn’t going to be you.
And then there is Sayle’s determination to capture early 1980s Harlem – black Harlem – on film, no-go Harlem, where white America is too scared to tread, the embodiment of all white America fears and desires, but for the indomitable locals just a place where you live and work to the best of your ability, sharing the same goals and dreams as everyone else, to extol the joyfulness, creativity and resistance of black American culture and acknowledge the other side of the coin – the violence and drugs, though Sayles says these are not inherent to the community but enter from outside, from those looking to exploit and make a buck out of alienation and despair, the system of white men in plush offices in haughty skyscrapers.
