1. Explain the Blind Censor. How does Nafisi use the Blind Censor to help express what she and her girls hope to do when they meet at her house every week?
The book informs the reader that the Blind censor was "the chief film censor in Iran up until 1994" and before that, " he was the censor for a theater and he would sit in the theater wearing thick glasses that seemed to hide more than they revealed." We were also told that he had an assistant who sat by him who would explain the action onstage, and he would dictate the parts that needed to be cut. In 1994, this censor became head of a new television channel where he perfected his methods and demanded that the scriptwriters give him their scripts on audiotape; they were forbidden to make them attractive or dramatize them in any way. He then made his judgments about the scripts based on the tapes. The censor comes from the word censorship which means the deletion of material that may be harmful which is determined by the censor. The blind censor believed literary works were symbols of Western decadence and …show more content…
It was used in his book Invitation to a Beheading. In the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi asked her students what the word meant to them. Nafisi said that she associated the word with impossible joy of a suspended leap. Yassi, who had an obsession with playing with words, thought that it should be a dance. Manna said that the word summoned the image of small silver fish leaping in and out of a moonlit lake. For Azin, it was a sound, and for Mahshid it was an image of three girls jumping rope shouting "UPSILAMBA!" with each leap. When Mitra heard the word, it made her think of the paradox of a blissful sigh and to Nassrin it was a magic code. Upsilamba became part of the girls lives as they gradually created a language of their