SOURCE: A review of La parole des femmes, in The Black Scholar, Vol. 17, No. 4, July/August, 1986, p. 57.

In the following review of La parole des femmes, Williams finds Condé's work a seminal and important contribution to the quest for "the development of a new tradition of feminine voices."

In the advent of the appearance of Maryse Condé's collection of essays about French Caribbean women novelists, La parole des femmes, black women writers witness the development of a new tradition of feminine voices.

This new tradition seeks to define itself not in terms of its relationship to the French feminists of the metropolis (i. e. Simone de Beauvoir) nor by its natural affiliation with the "male dominated" black French language or "negritude" writers of the '30s (i. e. Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire). Instead, it falls midway between the traditions of the francophone and anglophone Caribbean...