Good Definitions: Embodying Autism through Film Poetry
by NAOMI FOYLE
Good Definitions: Embodying Autism through Film Poetry
As a writer, I’ve sometimes wondered at the co-existence of my introspective nature and love of drama, but my late autism assessment in 2020 provoked the revelation that performance has paradoxically enabled me to ‘unmask’: to bodily express my hidden autistic self. While the embodiment of unspoken truths is most obvious in stage performances, my film/video poems also engage the eye and ear (and possibly a tapping toe) in ways fundamentally shaped by my autistic traits.
Far from the stereotypes of autistic people as anti-social, unempathetic and incapable of understanding metaphor, I find myself in places on the spectrum often associated with ‘female’ autism, including such traits as gender fluidity, frank sexuality, hyperempathy, hypersensitivity, and a strong sense of morality. While my recent work tends toward poetry of witness, my debut collection The Night Pavilion (Waterloo Press, 2008) takes a transgressive and sometimes playful approach to gender and sexuality. In my melodramatic live performances of ‘Natasha’, the tale of a lovelorn Russian Count, I wore an eye-liner moustache and hurled myself over the stage in paroxysms of longing. In relation to Russia, those were innocent days. For me personally at the time, struggling to understand and sustain romantic love, the exuberant performance was a vital emotional release. I can be quiet in person, and my theatrical flamboyance often surprised people: ‘Better out than in,’ a musician once muttered in the wings.
A flavour of that performance can be experienced in two video projects that arose from The Night Pavilion: Good Definition (2003) and Boas and Blindfolds (2025).
No small talk here! A vivid spot of Anglo-Saxon affrontery, in which my mouth literally overflows with insouciance, Good Definition still makes me laugh. Breaking taboos around ‘female modesty’ – and putting a traditional sex/gender binary under so much pressure it cracks – the video poem, however, was not to everyone’s taste. In a dismissive review in the Times Literary Supplement, Hugo Williams claimed that, thanks to the sexual imagery, the poem ‘went over my head’.[i] What also went unnoticed, disappointingly, was director Anneliese Holles’s witty visual allusion to Samuel Beckett’s Not I, given a manic cabaret spin by composer Richard Miles.
Although ‘Boas and Blindfolds’ is a music video, to me the song is always also a poem, a ballad influenced by the British broadsheet tradition, in which orality and written expression are deeply entangled. It was through the late Blakean poet Niall McDevitt that I met my collaborators in the creative collective The Vales. Singer/songwriter Nev Hawkins and Kirsten Morrison, a multi-instrumentalist opera singer, composed the music and helped revise the lyrics, then Kirsten made a music video interweaving silent film footage with red feather effects. Finally, Nev brought stylist Firak Di Bello on board to help us film a performance in which I would dance. Although hardly a trained dancer – I once won applause for my courage in a modern dance class for stumbling ineptly all the way across the studio – I leapt at the chance to reprise my vaudeville persona. Looking at the rushes, I was reminded of footage of Greta Thunberg dancing to her own drum, and another penny dropped. Like many autistic people I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder which gives my hypermobile limbs a somewhat wayward quality: my neurodivergence is here literally embodied in my art.[ii]
Another autistic trait I strongly identify with as I get older is a powerful sense of social justice. My fourth poetry collection Salt & Snow (Waterloo Press, 2025), expresses my commitment to human rights in a triptych of personal and collective elegies, including a poem in memory of John Berger, who gently mentored me in 2010 in the process of co-founding the group British Writers in Support of Palestine.[iii] The process of creating the film poem Ways of Seeing Trees has embodied my core value of inclusivity in various ways.
Through imagery both subtle and stunning, director Wendy Pye has evoked grief at Berger’s loss and gratitude for his example as an empathic, socially engaged writer unafraid to take an unpopular stand: qualities much needed in the face of fascism, war, genocide and climate crisis. In response to threats of annihilation and extinction, the film poem – like a forest – embodies diversity and interconnectedness. Captioned versions are available on YouTube and I have posted audio description notes online, to enhance the experience of the film for all audiences.[iv]
Musician/composer Razia Aziz was, in her own words, ‘inspired to offer a brief taste of the Hindustani raag bhairav’, a ‘majestic’ raag with ‘a balance of bright and mournful energies’ in this film. [v] Given Wendy’s use of colour and monochrome imagery, it was serendipitous to learn that the term ‘raag’ comes from the Sanskrit word rāga (राग) for ‘tint’ or ‘dye’. And as someone with Scottish family roots in the Raj, I am grateful for Razia’s generous vision of our collaboration. She intends her meditative soundtrack to ‘evoke a deep stream of syncretism in British culture … a different story than that of imperial conquest and cultural appropriation.’[vi] This eloquently expresses my own desire to transform my colonial legacy through creative conversations grounded in truth, reconciliation and shared eco-political goals. A fully involved member of our small collective, Razia has foregrounded issues of ‘race’ and inclusivity at live events with predominantly white audiences and has introduced Ways of Seeing Trees to her network of British Asian artists. Though Empire still shapes our world, culture, I believe, is a space to envision and enact far better ways of being.
Colonialism is an overt theme in ‘Salt, Snow, Earth’, another film poem Wendy, Razia and I are making. After this project, our funding runs out. But another key autistic trait I possess is perseverance. So, stay tuned!
[i] Williams, Hugo. ‘Freelance’. The Times Literary Supplement. Jan 20th 2006. p14.
[ii] Casanova EL, Baeza-Velasco C, Buchanan CB, Casanova MF. The Relationship between Autism and Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes/Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders. J Pers Med. 2020 Dec 1;10(4):260. doi: 10.3390/jpm10040260. PMID: 33271870; PMCID: PMC7711487. dis
[iii] https://bwisp.wordpress.com/tag/john-berger/ Accessed April 30th 2025.
[iv]https://www.naomifoyle.com/wost_ad/ Written with support from Audio Description Consultant Prof Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway University London). Accessed May 22nd 2025.
[v] Razia Aziz, email to the author (Feb 19th 2025) and in person at the University of Chichester screening of Ways of Seeing Trees (April 28th 2025).
[vi] Razia Aziz, email to the author (May 20th 2025).
Author Bio:
Naomi Foyle is an autistic British-Canadian writer. Her many poetry publications include The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Red Hot & Bothered, winner of the 2008 Apples & Snakes ‘The Book Bites Back’ competition. Her videopoem Good Definition (dir. Anneliese Holles) won the 2004 Hastings Literary Festival film poem competition. Naomi is currently collaborating with director Wendy Pye and composer/musician Razia Aziz on two film poems from her fourth collection, Salt & Snow (2025), a project funded by Arts Council England and the University of Chichester, where she is Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing.