The Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center, through the “Kalima” translation project, has published an Arabic translation of the novel “The Invisible War” by French author Jean-Marc Mora, completed by Lebanese translator and writer Marie Doug. Reviewed and presented by Kazem Jihad, an Iraqi poet and academic living in Paris.

According to the reviewer’s introduction, “The Invisible War” was published in 2018, two years before the corona pandemic, an interesting coincidence, and was a finalist for the Ronado Prize for Fiction. His story revolves around a girl named Lili, initially named Lilith, who grows up without parents in the early twentieth century, and between the neutral meaning of the name “Lilit” and the mythological meaning the name implies. “Lilit”, in the life and consciousness of this woman there is a fierce and constant conflict, the details of which the reader discovers.

After bitter experiences with some monks and nuns in a church institution practicing satanic rituals, Lily puts her scientific skills and deep intuition at the service of a Flemish scientist and reveals to him the animal source of the virus that causes the Spanish flu. She regrets it when she discovers the terrible contradiction of their goals in research: she seeks to discover the virus and find a bait that will save humanity from its harm, while he seeks to use it in bacteria or bacteriology for the benefit of France. Attacks on Germans trying to achieve the same goal, and all… An army is active in this endeavor through its scientists and laboratories attached to its forces. Lily tries in vain to stop it, and then the epidemic disappears as soon as it appears, after causing hundreds of thousands of casualties, the First World War ends, and Lily / Lilit moves into a bed, in the night of consciousness. Parisian Saint Anne Hospital for Neurological Diseases.

Thus, as the critic wrote, two worlds on opposite sides of the “invisible war” face each other: innocence, talent and faith in true science, and the world of witchcraft, religion and scientific fraud and the exploitation of talents and abilities for criminal purposes. And so the epidemic adds itself to human warfare as another cruel war, not only through its mysterious invisibility and its terrible spread and harm, but also because of the sinful greed of some.