Paranoid Designs: Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child

Bambara's experimental novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), examines the African American community's response to the Atlanta child murders of the 1970s and 1980s. With the abductions and pointedly in-adequate institutional responses combining to provoke a powerful paranoia in the African American community, the issue of perception-under-siege itself becomes a crucial point of focus for community members in Bambara's representation of the events. Bambara explores the ways that the community negotiates its experiences of paranoia, focusing on how community members respond to a crisis of interpretation as institutions that are charged to assist instead blame the victims and their parents for the murders. In this regard, the novel highlights, and adds to, an archive of cultural works that model the experience of paranoia and the steps necessary to gain a critical interpretation of paranoia when it is used as a means of racially-motivated social control. Engaging complex ethical issues, Bambara uses the style and content of her work to evoke a muted sense of paranoia in the reader at the same time that she provides models of homeopathic exposure to paranoia in the narrative. While Bambara takes an ethical risk when re-staging traumatic experiences of paranoia in characters and readers alike, these risks are balanced by the community's ethical norms that justify an ongoing preparation for racist actions like those embodied in the as yet unsolved Atlanta murders. Bambara's effort, in turn, has significant implications for current research on the literature of paranoia.