Page - 151 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Mobile Culture Studies.The Journal 2 2o16 Lisa Eidenhammer| Encounters with a Syrian 151 therefore also over me. The Multikultiball – a ball with international guests and artists that takes place every year – that was to have taken place that evening, and where our choir was to have sung was cancelled. Omar, who is a member of the choir, was the only one who did not know that the town hall had cancelled all events in town. He had come from Gratkorn, a sub- urb of Graz, especially for the occasion. So I invited him to our place for tea. It was an absurd moment when we spoke face-to-face. I was shocked by the van attack, in contrast to Omar, who was slightly astonished by my reaction. In Syria, violence and crime had been part of everyday life. Nonetheless, he understood that such events were a grave exception and respected my reaction. The encounter occupied me for a long time afterwards. I kept asking myself why the situa- tion had seemed so absurd. What do I know about Syria or the individual fates of the Syrian people? By then, I had known Omar for several months. Why had I not asked him about his past? Four months later, we were sitting again in our kitchen. Omar had received his decision on asylum a few days before. Omar smiles most of the time, but that day a very wide grin was on his face. He had arrived, finally. In one of his prose poems, Omar writes that he can live and love here. Through his girlfriend, he can visit Syria and see “sad Damascus smile through her eyes”. That is one of her special traits, Omar explains. On that day, I got the feeling that the time for just talking about Syrian food and customs was over. I wanted to seize the opportunity and talk to him seriously about the strange meeting we had had on the day of the van attack. I wanted to find out why we had differing degrees of emotionality and sense of the importance of the event. In our first topical interview, on 4 November 2015, he told me that he had seen so many people being killed – friends, children, older people and women – that the events of Graz did not shock him that much (Khir Alanam 2015a). Omar adds that before the war, it was a disturbing event when a young person died. Although he always despised the cruel incidents, the many deaths which the war had brought had in some way made it easier to bear the pain. The Syrian author Fawwaz Haddad (2014, 34f) explains this daily confrontation with death in a similar fashion. He claims that death has become a steady companion of the people and can strike at any moment. However, even though Omar was used to the daily news of people dying in his home country, he is far from accepting this or calling it “normal”. He told me that people who went out on the street to sing for free- dom had been killed by the state police and the militia. According to him, 30 people die every day. Of course that fact that was not “normal” to him (Khir Alanam 2015a). Haddad states that the Syrian people are currently living under the reign of a militia and do not have a democratically voted government. He illustrates this irregular political and social situation in Syria and points out that this is not the real Syria (2014, 31). Omar also told me how he had been arrested by the militia. Alongside with his cousin and his two uncles, he had been tortured in the most degrading way. They had been blindfolded, beaten and humiliated severely. For hours, they had been forced to kneel with their arms crossed behind their backs. Again and again, Omar recounts memories of this mistreatment. Omar was released within a day. His cousin and one uncle were released a month later. However, one of his uncles is still imprisoned. No cruelty seems unimaginable for the militia. It was hard for me to grasp the immensity of the difference of our two pasts. Nonetheless, our different experiences constitute