About me
D.H. Haddad is a scholar and author, uniquely intertwining academic expertise with creative storytelling, as an Arab-American educator with extensive knowledge in Latin and Ancient History.
Through his works, he aims to engage and inspire, bridging the gap between ancient texts and modern relevance.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita… “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost…”
D.H. Haddad
Author. Scholar. Activist
So, begins one of the most famous opening lines in the history of literature.
As I myself stand on the threshold of my own middle age, I have come to appreciate Dante’s meaning and the historical context of his work.
When he arrived at the middle of his life, Dante found himself lost, anxious about the path ahead of him and where it might lead. He was exiled from his beloved city of Florence, and he ended up spending many years in exile composing The Divine Comedies. Reaching that midway point of one’s life has a Janus-like effect of inducing you to reflect back on your life and the many choices that led you to your current position – the good, the bad, the blessings and the scars – and it impels you to chart out a new path forward into unknown territory, be it physically through more travel to new places, or metaphysically by learning more about yourself, changing careers, or even trying small acts of kindnesses and better habits on a daily basis.
As our modern society has noted with greater evidence, a large number of young successful authors, journalists, musicians, and actors were fortunate to be born with greater privileges than most, such as having a wealthy and successful parent or relative in the industry (“nepo babies” as they are sometimes called). So, for those of us lacking such privileges and having faced numerous, exhausting barriers, even the ability to publish one article, book, song, or film project to a wide audience can take many years of gradual effort.
While I have taken various courses about the ancient Near East and Medieval Middle Eastern history, I never strayed far from Athens and Rome. My advisors in Ancient Mediterranean Studies never thought to encourage their young Arab American student to consider specializing in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies together. I mostly focused on studying the history and literature of ancient Rome and Athens, with occasional detours made to Egypt, North Africa, and Turkey. Of course, most schools are now inclined to hire faculty who can teach a broader, more global level of history and archaeology. There is a similar irony in the fact that I would be more academically successful today, if I had been raised to speak Arabic fluently in the 1980s. But Americans throughout the 20th c. repeatedly worked on compelling their “English only” philosophy onto Arab, Hispanic, Latin American, Caribbean, Asian, and other BIPOC immigrant communities – despite there being no official language in the United States and no law against speaking multiple languages. My grandparents didn’t teach any of their children how to speak Arabic. Then again, it was made abundantly clear across western media that Arabic speakers were typically viewed as cab drivers or terrorists in the United States.
It is, nevertheless, a bit disorienting when, in my travels, I have seen my family’s name and heritage on artifacts in the Louvre and NY Metropolitan Museum, white sterile spaces filled with items from around the globe. There are several reasons why I have spent the last 25 years engrossed in the ancient Mediterranean world – its diverse languages, literature, history, and material culture. But it started in high school with my brother convincing me to switch from Spanish to Latin, because the Latin teachers were eccentric and fun in a nerdy way.
By Senior year, I was taking Greek and Latin AP courses reading thousands of lines of Vergil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Odyssey in the original ancient Greek and Latin poetry. When we got to the scene where Odysseus arrives home and stays with Eumaeus the swine herd, my teacher turned to me and said, “Eumaeus was a Phoenician slave, taken captive as a child and sold to Odysseus’ family; he was born in the same region of the Levant where your family comes from, Mr. Haddad, what is now Lebanon and Syria.” Listening to Eumaeus tell his own story as an enslaved laborer on Ithaca was far more interesting to me than the mythical monsters and divinities Odysseus described encountering on his voyage.
Like many other Christians living in Damascus and Lebanon under the growing burdens and hostility of the Ottoman Empire, my great-grandparents sailed from the Levant to Boston in the 1890s at a young age. There used to be a rich history of Boston’s Little Syria community between Chinatown and the South End, where families like mine supported each other and celebrated their culture together. My great-grandfather helped found the Melkite Catholic Cathedral Our Lady of the Annunciation, which still resides in Boston. Out of the 3.7 million Arabs in the United States, approximately 30% come from Lebanon, and more than 50% are Christian.
Like the internationally celebrated poet Khalil Gibran, although I was raised Christian, I am a supporter of all faiths and philosophies. I could not confine myself to one of the monotheistic religions. There is a monument to the Lebanese author situated in Copley Square between the Boston Public Library and Trinity Church. I have visited it often and stopped to reflect.
My own parents settled in Cambridge, where my mother’s Irish Catholic family had been living. Sundays were the only day that my father wasn’t typically working, and he’d occasionally use that time to take us kids around Boston and explore the city. We’d always have breakfast at a Diner on Mass. Ave., and then walk along the Charles River watching the Harvard crew team row with fierce precision. The Boston Public Library seemed like a magical palace back then full of endless pages, intimidating marble, and inspiring artwork.
Even later on as a college student in Boston, my noctambulous habit of walking the city streets at night was a therapeutic form of reflection, especially since I attended college right after the 09/11 attack and during the launch of Bush and Cheney’s illegitimate and inhumane war of terror in the Middle East, which would destabilize the region and cause countless suffering, never mind the economic and human cost on Americans. Amidst this axis of systemic evils, I often found myself walking by the Boston Public Library and sitting with Khalil Gibran’s statue breathing in the night air, contemplating the past and future. After all, you cannot create a healthy, just and peaceful future, if you do not fully reckon with your past.