Meliha Varesanovic, 1994. Photograph by Tom Stoddart.

I love this photograph. I wonder if she knew, at the time, that it would be iconic. Can you imagine what it takes to get dressed in a war zone, and put on lipstick, and walk out the door with your chin up-tilted to carve a path in front of you? This photograph to me is the very essence of inat, at its best. This word translates into English simply as spite. It is this, and it is so much more.

It's a kind of bloody mindedness, but it isn't the weird North American triumphalism that insists that if you only try hard and never give up, you will be successful! You will overcome! This belief is almost touching in its naïveté, like, haven't you been paying attention? Do you have eyes? And how are we each of us to triumph? And if we do not, is it for lack of trying? It's a nonsense.

Inat is different. It doesn't promise success, or a just reward, because these don't exist. Whatever justice there is lies well beyond our capacity to effect it. Inat is instead the refusal to be completely demolished. Inat is the weed that pushes up through the cracks in the pavement, the graffiti that blossoms on the side of a decaying building, inat says I am still here. I am still here.

And what are you going to do about it?

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