The fact that my parents had produced two children so quickly may have been misconstrued as them having some affection for each other, but they didn’t. Their marriage was one long war punctuated by regular skirmishes, and the only battle Ma ever won was naming Ruth.

My father had wanted to name her Donalda, after his own mother, but my mother had insisted on naming her for a biblical character, someone the child could aspire to. It was probably the sight of that thatch of red hair on Ruth’s newborn head that scared her and made her refuse to back down. My mother knew that a daughter who took after her father in both looks and temperament would be too much for her to handle. She probably hoped that naming Ruth after an obedient woman might bestow a sobering effect.

It didn’t.

Da got his revenge against Ma on the day I was born when he was sent to the registry office with instructions to write “Naomi” on my birth certificate. Because she’d won the battle of naming Ruth, my mother thought she’d win again.

She was wrong.

“Yeh wan’ a bloody biblical name, woman? I’ll give yeh a biblical name!”

And that’s how I came to be named Delilah.

It was our father’s idea of a joke, especially since I’d been born on Christmas Day, our Lord’s birthday. And how ironic it was too: the Ruth of the family being wild and agnostic, and the Delilah being pliant and religious. I like to think that was my own way of rebelling against him and getting revenge on behalf of our mother, turning it around so that the laugh was on him.

Every day of my parents’ union that I can remember bearing witness to was bloody, and growing up on a battlefield took its toll. “God help you, Delilah, but you’ll understand when you’re older,” my mother told me one day when I sat glowering as she made my father’s breakfast. She had a fresh bruise on her cheek that sickened me. “This is what marital relations between a man and woman are like.” She shrugged as though there was nothing to be done but to accept it.

The more Da drank, the more belligerent he became, listing Ma’s many shortcomings and the myriad ways in which she’d failed him. The community wryly twisted the farm’s name, Verdriet, changing it to Dronkverdriet, which was the Afrikaans word for depression brought on by drunkenness. Da’s lack of success with the farm was Ma’s fault because she’d taken a shipbuilder and a man of the sea and forced him to become someone who labored in the dirt. His failings as a husband were her fault too because she emasculated him. How was a man supposed to be a man when his wife didn’t respect him?