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Roger Waters is an artist very deep into symbolism. You need only to examine some of his greatest works, like The Wall album, film and tour with Pink Floyd to get a sense for how he uses imagery to go deeper into themes than he could ever hope to achieve in a an audio format alone. In his latest video, “Wait For Her,” taken from his first solo album in well over a decade, Is This the Life We Really Want?, Waters again uses graceful symbolism to bring to life the horrors of the refugee crisis centered in the Middle East.
The video depicts a woman, a flamenco dancer getting ready to perform before a crowd. On her face is a scar, the origins of which are never outlined, but seem to suggest a past that she still carries with her. “That mark was important to the video, it is a symbol of the physical torment refugees endure,” Waters’ Film and Creative Director Sean Evans told Rolling Stone. Near video’s end, as she’s finally dressed, she fully breaks down and a flood of tears pour out.
The song itself was inspired by a poem written by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s “Lesson From the Kama Sutra (Wait for Her)” and the video is meant to reflect similar themes taken from that work. “When Roger wrote this song, his adaptation of the poem took on a sensual yet melancholy tone, and the video needed to represent that,” Evans said. “It needed to show femininity and sexuality but also needed to have an air of loss and pain, and longing for a time that was.”
You can watch the “Wait For Me” video above.
