Pink Floyd co-founder and bassist Roger Waters has teamed up with Palestinian-American singer Mona Miari to reimagine his old band’s song ‘Comfortably Numb’ in honour of the people of Palestine and their struggle for freedom.
The music video for the song, which released on Wednesday, is shot entirely in black and white and moves between visuals of Gaza and the singers themselves in a studio.
The video highlights the destruction and desolation in Gaza, showing somber shots of massive piles of rubble that once used to be city blocks. Survivors of the war are also shown in the video — people who continue rebuilding, who are committed to living and finding moments of lightness and joy where they are. The visuals seem to tell a story of resistance through existence, of a people who cannot become ‘comfortably numb’ to the war and must keep living through it.
An older, more grief-stricken Waters sings the opening verse from the original, to which Miari responds in Arabic, “After what happened, no one was left. No words were left — what use is asking? All that is lost… Home, oh beloved home. The night fell silent and collapsed. Oh, beloved home, tell him.”
In his next verse, Waters says the cries of the people of Palestine reach him in New York, travelling across oceans. Miari sings of her own dreams of freedom. “Our light will break the darkness. We are the promise of a new dawn,” she says of the Palestinian people.
